Throwing our clients' money away
Something that drives me crazy, and happens way too often, is this: I'll review creative work for a new digital piece — a website, an email, a banner ad campaign, etc — and I'll point out the little things that are not done according to digital best practice. Let's use font size as an example. The layouts for the email use a font size throughout that is smaller than the recommendation for accessibility and engagement. I explain this to the team.
They may say, "We prefer it this way."
Or: "The client prefers it this way."
Or: "We've always done it this way; we want to be consistent."
Here's what I hear: "We're okay with throwing some of our client's money away."
I'm going to make up an example, with some very made-up but very conservative numbers. Let's say a hundred users receive and open a marketing email that we made, the text of which has a relatively small font size. Let's say two of them — two percent — bounce out of the email immediately because it's not easy for them to read. Our client just lost two percent of their potential engagement.
What does it cost to increase the font size? Nothing.
What does it cost our client when we don't change the font size to bring it in line with best practices for engagement and accessibility? Perhaps two percent of the total engagement they would've gotten. And that equates to conversions; sales. That's money the client isn't making because of our font size choice.
Extend this idea to every other little detail in a marketing email where we know what best practice is: Optimal color contrast. Meaningful link text. Mobile-first design. Et cetera, et cetera. Each choice that we make that goes against best practice means sacrificing a couple more percent of potential engagement for our client. Our client is paying us for an email, and we're not giving them maximum value for their money — worse than that, we're intentionally making creative decisions that equate to throwing some of the client's money away.
I say this all the time as an extreme hypothetical example: if we could show our client that replacing their beautifully branded website with a black and white unbranded website would mean more sales for them, I guarantee you, they would want that black and white unbranded website. If we could show them that the smaller we make their logo, the more sales they get, they'd say, "Let's reduce the logo to 1x1 pixels."
Of course, a lot of the times when our team members don't follow best practices for engagement and accessibility, it's just because they're not aware. They just need some guidance, and hopefully they correct the work before it goes to the client and they correct their habits going forward.
But when we intentionally resist this guidance and choose not to follow digital best practices, what on earth could be the reason for that? I guess it's something like this:
- We care more about making a piece look the way we want than we do about enhancing our client's success.
- We would rather avoid a conversation with our client to explain best practices to them and get them on board with us. It's fine if they lose money for no reason; hopefully they'll never find out it's because of these decisions we made, and that we didn't respect them enough to talk to them about it.
- We just don't care.
Following digital best practices is free*, and it results in measurable success for our clients. There's simply no excuse for not doing it.
*That is, it's free if we're on board with best practices from the beginning of the proect and don't have to correct and re-do a ton of work after the fact. Which is all the more reason to make sure our team members are trained in these principles and held to these standards.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.