Can you be too easy?

The famous Staples 'Easy Button'

Can you be too easy? Well, your mother might disagree but the answer is an emphatic NO – you can never be too easy.

It’s all too easy to forget, but making things easy should be at the core of everything we do: easy for consumers to understand why they need our products; easy for customers/retailers to place orders and sell heaps of product; easy for consumers to buy what they want when they want it. All it takes is approaching every task you do by asking the bold yet simple question: “what can I do to make this easier”.

A great example is from author Jenny Blake and her recently launched book ‘Life After College’, introduced via the always interesting TheDominoProject. Jenny’s book is positioned as “an essential manual for every graduating student and young professional. It features practical, actionable advice that helps people focus on the BIG picture of their lives, not just the details”.

Getting great reviews and recommendations is key to a successful launch of any book (or product!) and it seems so often that brand custodians just cross their fingers that bloggers or other reviewers will take it upon themselves to spread the word. Jenny is doing it differently, by creating a resource on her website full of all the information that any blogger, reviewer or salesperson could need: check it out here.

She goes beyond the standard bio details, expanding to including sample tweets, emails and varying length synopses to promote the book, which can be easily copied and published in any medium. There are links to the book trailer on YouTube and links to the facebook page, as well as more formal and also quirky information about Jenny and links to previous interviews. Jenny is acknowledging that her supporters are busy and even with the best intentions getting time to create a mention promoting her book is tricky. Some will take up her suggestions verbatim, while others will edit a little to personalise: we all know that it is much quicker to edit an already prepared document than to start from scratch.

There are two key benefits here: firstly, the easier (and quicker) you can make it for people to spread the word, the more people will take up the opportunity. Secondly, through giving suggestions of how to word the comments, Jenny begins to create a consistent theme in how people talk about her book, resulting in a clearer, more focused message. Jenny’s approach recognises what we already know from our own lives: we are busy and the easier it is to get a job done the more likely we are to do it and do it well.

Making things easier can apply to absolutely everything we do, big or small:

• Is it easy to go through the checkout process on your site- do you force endless data entry and password setting up, or do you give shoppers the opportunity to buy quickly when they want to?
• When you submit your expenses to your boss do you write her name and the date in the approval box, so all she has to do is sign it?
• Is it easy to get into your shop? If the door is super heavy get it fixed, or if you cater to mums make sure a pram can navigate inside easily.
• When you get into work do you make sure the photocopier is stocked with paper so it doesn’t run out in the middle of a rush later in the day?

I love this statement from Eric Schmidt, EC of Google, (who interestingly Jenny Blake used to work for) describing their approach to employee benefits (note my bolding): “The goal is to strip away everything that gets in our employees’ way. We provide a standard package of fringe benefits, but on top of that are first-class dining facilities, gyms, laundry rooms, massage rooms, haircuts, carwashes, dry cleaning, commuting buses – just about anything a hardworking employee might want. Let’s face it: programmers want to program, they don’t want to do their laundry. So we make it easy for them to do both.”

Just taking those few seconds to ask the simple yet revolutionary question of “how can I make this easier” can change your world. So who do you know who’s making things easy? What have you done to make your world easier?

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Does your brand know how to say ‘Hello’?

Today let’s have a look at the amazing Etsy, and two things they are doing fabulously. Firstly, customising the consumers’ experience through serving a different home page specifically for new visitors, and secondly, how they are communicating that change to their current users.

Etsy have done some exceptional work in creating a highly engaged online community, and once again they are raising the bar. To quote Wikipedia, “Etsy is a social commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies.” Whilst certainly a commerce site, the focus is definitely on the social, with an emphasis on highlighting the uniquely individual nature of the products, and importantly, their sellers: shopping and selling on Etsy is a very personal experience. Esty does some great work in creating online and offline communities which in turn create amazing engagement with the site. If you haven’t come across Etsy before have a look here for an intro.

Our focus today is on a new initiative they are trialling for their homepage. The insight is that a new visitor to a site has different needs to a regular visitor: more focus on ‘what is it?’, ‘how does it work?’, and ‘give me a connection quickly’ (a reason to dig more deeply, or to come back) before I click onto my next search: sounds pretty basic really. Clearly many brand owners try to cater to this with varying degrees of success by incorporating elements which talk to the new and repeat consumer throughout the site, but how many brands really live this by presenting a customised experience to a new visitor?

Etsy are in the process of trialling a completely different homepage for a new visitor. The details of the change are discussed here. I love the ‘Taste Test’ tool they are featuring on it: reminds me of a more PC version of the “which girl is better looking” game from “The Social Network”. It’s worth a go and interesting how a spin of this revealed a whole new world of objects I wouldn’t even have thought to look for.

Etsy’s approach to executing this change is interesting too: in their announcement they are sharing the change, the reason why, and how they are going to trial it: letting seasoned (and highly engaged !) users be part of the process. It would have been so easy for the Etsy team to have just made the change and got on with it, but they recognise that if they take their community along with them they will ultimately get a better result: building higher engagement with current users and more effective conversion from new visitors.

So how do you customise your consumers’ experiences with your brand? Offline and on, show me who you think is doing a great job of this.

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