There’s a poisonous trait plaguing the marketing community, and the designers we, as real estate agents, engage to deliver marketing experiences to customers. It’s called Horror Vacui, and when it comes to conversion, it’s genuinely terrifying.
Horror Vacui is Latin for a fear of empty space.
This leads to an obsessive desire to fill every speck of nothing, with something. An example of Horror Vacui can be seen in this Insular Art
Very often on Real Estate Agent webstites HORROR VACIU is clearly present.
There is an inverse relationship between HORROR VACIU and value perception. Commerical designers favor minimalism in shop window displays and advertising to appeal to affluent and well educated consumers, on the premise that understatement and restraint apeals more to affluent and well educated audiences.
In our own experiences, the most iconic exhibition of value percepton is on the Goolge search page. There is only one purpose, and the minimalist design, makes that purpose clear.
The example to the left is a clear example of Horror Vaciu website.
Horror Vacui is a curse that impacts homepages everywhere. Because the homepage is such a high-traffic location, every aspect of your business wants a piece, which leads to a very noisy experience that waters down the impact of all involved.
And amidst the chaos of such poorly orchestrated marketing experiences, there is always an under-valued campaign goal, screaming for its share of attention, battling the bureaucracy of design-by-committee to have a voice at the proverbial table.
Combine this with people’s short attention spans online and you create a serious lack of focus.
ATTENTION IS A LIMITED MENTAL RESOURCE
Your reserves of mental energy are depleted every time you have to make a decision, no matter how small.
Every time you throw an extra link or banner on the page, you risk depleting this precious repository of decision-making potential – known as our cognitive load– which over time reduces our ability to make rational decisions.
COGNITIVE LOAD AND DECISION MAKING
It’s been shown through experimentation that people have a limited amount of mental energy to devote to the decision making process. The more decisions one MUST make in a day, the less likely they are to be able to make smart decisions later on. This is because they start to suffer from decision fatigue.
In a recent article in the TAMPABAY TIMES a story about President Obama and decision making was featured. President Obama knows about decision fatigue and has developed methods of reducing decision fatigue to free up his capacity to make the important calls he’s faced with every day. He only has two suit colors, making the first activity of the day – dressing – a simple one. When a proposal lands on his desk, there are three check boxes at the bottom: “Yes,” “no” and “let’s discuss.”
DECISION FATIGUE
Another example: Decision fatigue has been demonstrated to play a role in parole hearings. Researchers from Berkley then from Florida Central University, who analyzed more than 1,100 decisions made by a parole board over the course of a year discovered a pattern in the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the convicts’ ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing. Judges approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared in court early in the morning were paroled close to 70% of the time, while those who appeared later in the day received parole less than 10% of the time.
Decision fatigue applies to your website landing page.
If the headline is in any way vague or confusing, if the descriptions of the sevices you provide aren’t useful, or if it’s not apparent what your actual offer/promise is, if what you want to reader to is is not clear, you’re forcing your visitor to do extra work to validate the purpose of the page. This depletes their energy and can make them give up and leave. An incident on the stats report, an opporunity lost.
Based on the two examples above, only the Google example makes clear what they want the reader to do.
Does your website, your landing pages communicate a clear message to the reader conveying the 'promise' and EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO DO?
Best of success,
Annette Lawrence, Broker/Associate
Remax Realtec Group
Palm Harbor, FL
727.420.4041
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