Best Practices Are Often Just Pooled Ignorance: How to avoid this mistake by mapping your customer’s thought sequence

Share

How do we know that our sites are performing at their maximum ability for our given objectives?

• Is it because we used A/B testing to get a set of iterative performance bumps?
• Is it because we used a focus group to tell us how we can improve?
• Is it because we used a supposedly high performance template we saw someone else using?

None of these are truly great indicators of maximum performance, but that last one is particularly problematic.

As MECLABS Institute’s (MarketingExperiments parent company) Managing Director, Flint McGlaughlin has said in the past, and continues to reiterate, that “best practices on the internet are often just pooled ignorance.”

So how can we truly overcome that nagging feeling that our pages are underperforming? The answer is by taking the time to map your customer’s thought sequence and build a digital experience around that map.

Only then can we be sure that we’ve made every effort to ensure a page is performing at its maximum potential.

In this week’s Quick Win Clinic, Flint talks about seeing through the best practices and into the customer’s thought sequence on a page submitted by Paul from Rosetta Stone.