In an effort to be everything to everyone and to profit we can sometimes do things that can harm our companies. This is especially true on the web because it’s a newer medium. Your bottom line is positively affected when you create good user experiences.

Your company’s identity is deeply entwined in how, why and what type of customers you’ll attract. For some reason we understand these things suck when we experience them, but we sometimes inflict them on our customers anyway.

5 ways you waste customers' time & money

1.The haphazard sales pitch: I just want a customer which means I have to appeal to everyone.

The alternative: Instead of trying to reach just anybody, aim to reach somebody.

I used to have a client that had about a 55%-75% click-through rate on email campaigns. When I’d open Campaign Monitor and look at his stats I’d always be interested in how this guy had honed in on running a pretty tight campaign even before he met me.

I loved this client because because he wasn't afraid to scale down. He avoided that problem, where companies entirely miss any audience, because they desire cast their nets so wide.

Solution:
We created segmented lists of users he hadn’t heard from in over 6 years, 5 years, etc. We also had a segmented list of the most commonly interested users. We removed every user that he hadn’t heard from or that expressed little to no interest in his product in over 24 months.

This action resulted in fewer sent emails, less money spent, targeted click-throughs of interested customers and fewer users who unsubscribed. A happy and culled customer list is a productive and profitable customer list.

I'm a business woman. You can trust me.

2. The blank website filled with nothing useful except for possibly the physical address of the business and very cliché stock photography.

Someone told you that you just needed to get on the web. They forgot to tell you the other part about websites serving specific purposes.

These pages tell us (your customers) about your company. They tell us how your company operates, what its track record is, the hours of operation, etc. It is a narrative for your company. This is one of the few chances you get to show your business as it is and even translate for the user what they should be thinking of your business.

The 'About' page should actually have something about you or the humans in your company. It should not be another page of sales pitches. If I’m looking for any information on you, chances are I want to find valuable information on you.

If I Google you and I can’t find a narrative or even a counter-narrative for what your customers have undoubtedly put out about you (and believe me you will have at least one unhappy customer), your webpage serves no purpose.

No one knows more about your business than you do.
3. The ‘Everyone is me’ approach:

The ‘Everyone is me’ approach relies on one thing: You don’t need to tell anyone about your company because everyone already knows what it is you do.

When everyone is you, you leave out key components that can help potential customers make decisions about your company. It’s an extension of the blank website. It stems from the idea that because someone found your company, they were obviously looking for your company.

Every piece of information you put out about your company should be a carefully crafted letter. I want to read an introduction, body and conclusion. There should never be an assumption on your part that customers ever know all the benefits, products, or features of any products you carry.

Think about the last time you visited the website for a company or read the brochure thought to yourself, “So it does what again?”, “What time do they open?” or “I wonder if it does this..” The company left out some of the dots that could have helped you connect the product to its benefits.

Why mislead? Keep marketing as honest as possible.
4 and 5 are so closely tied together: actively misleading customers to turn a profit and forsaking a good user experience because you’ve misunderstood the usefulness of a certain technology.

We usually get these problems because of the incorrect assumption that more traffic correlates to more sales.

You've likely read about the power of good SEO to build more web traffic, been curious about how to get ranked first on Google, or just wanted to be seen.

Forget what you think you know about SEO and the importance of page rank. Sometimes people make the leap that more traffic equaled more potential customers.
The question we should be asking is, 'What does it matter if 1 million customers visit Bob’s Widgets? And 1,000 customers buy it, if 810 customers return the product because it’s not exactly what they thought it was.'

5. Ruining good user experience:

The newest techniques can't hide a weak product.

Real life example:

A few years ago, a friend of mine had a client that he’d called me in to do user interface design. The client had a business that helped people with disabilities connect with health care providers. SEO had just become a sexy buzzword. The client decided to replace all the things that we’d done to make it 508 compliant (easily usable for people with screen readers) with his own brand of “keyword content”.

They figured that because blind people wouldn’t be able to see the graphics, the company should make this area useful by keyword stuffing to increase their page rank. This happened to me with one other project and I tried to stop it there as well.

The reason this was a bad idea: A person using a screen reader would see only a jumble of keywords that made absolutely no sense in place of images. You know, like when you click one of those links on Google that turns out to be only keywords and interlinking pages with no real or useful information. They alienated the audience they hoped to reach by placing bad SEO in front of good solid user experience.

The client’s logic: Those people didn’t have to be catered to because they are a minority.

Smart business sense: The 'minority' in question spends money, too. That could have been a really useful service for people who were visually impaired.
What do you think this message sends to customers?

Tip:

By the way clients focused on SEO, here’s something you probably didn’t think about. Word of mouth via social networking or internet chatter is a lot more effective than your specially picked keywords.

Why?

Clients do not search for products nearly as linearly as you think. Rarely have I ever searched for “number 1 insurance company in Florida” or “great insurance, Oregon”. Very rarely have I ever bought from any sites that were returned in the first page of search results, unless you happened to be a trusted/respected name. Nope, Bob’s Big Light Emporium in Peoria has never gotten my business just because he showed up on the first page of Google.

You're in business to make a profit, but you wont profit if no one trusts you.

It’s in your best interest to serve your customer’s best interest. That means providing more, better, and useful information about your company or product. You’ll cut down on unwanted complaints, unnecessary misunderstandings, accusations of being fraudulent (this happens often, because people misunderstand the purpose/intent of sites) and expensive useless marketing.