Measure Your Brand Effectiveness Online

On websites, actionability is a crucial sub-component of your overall Heardable Score. Actionable sites tend to be ones that are  easier for visitors to respond, communicate, and transact with.

What it means to be Actionable

The total number of points a brand can earn for their Actionable Sub-Score is 200.

A high Actionable Sub-Score means your brand provides easy access to email addresses, phone numbers, forms, trust seals abnd live chat. It also means that your page copy speaks uses visitor-focused words such as 'you' and 'your' to better connect with users, rather than speaking in a chest-pounding, brand-centric  voice.

Several factors can influence actionability, such as:

1. The ease of which visitors can contact you.
2. How personal the site content is. Example: A high customer focus ratio means you speak about your visitors more often than you speak about your brand. Studies have shown that customers respond well to website’s that speak to their needs in a more personal tone. A low customer focus ratio means your site may be speaking about your company more often than the visitor.
3. How well you direct visitors down the right transactive paths. Navigation and onsite search are critical, but direct response marketing elements can also help draw attention to desired actions such as drawing attention to a phone number or to an email sign up box.
4. Trusted tone of the site’s content. This would include such things as security trust marks that instill confidence or live chat that can help address a users immediate needs.
5. How usable your site is. Can search engine bots, humans, as well as people with disabilities access the information they need without encountering major obstacles?

Tips for improving your Actionable Sub-Score

As a brand marketer, there are several strategic and tactical steps you can take to improve your Actionable Sub-Score:

• Make sure that all site content is clear, concise and economic with the way it reads
• Calls-to-action should be among the first things users can see
• They should also be non-intrusive — you should only have to sell a product one time on a single page
• Email addresses, phone numbers, forms, trust seals and live chat modules should be readily accessible
  
• Customer focus copy should provide real value-adds such as industry or product insights, expert opinion and testimonials
• Always be personable; your best bet is to have your CEO or other staff lend directly to the brand voice

Resources

• TRUSTe
• VeriSign
• Trust Guard
• McAfee Secure
• SafeCentral
• Usability.gov
• W. Craig Tomlin
• Human Factors International
• Creative-Spark