Sometimes looking Ugly is good for business
Disclaimer: By making this post, I am not saying that only Ugly stuff sells. All I m trying to do is give a few examples where Ugly looking websites / communications did better than beautifully worded / looking content.
I always shared the opinion that professional communication, professional look and professional talks are the key to success. However in my experience of running a web company for 4 years, I have realized that at times ugly sells more than beautiful. Here are a few examples:
> We were running some PPC for ringtones. Landing page was very beautiful highly graphic oriented page. We achieved 50% click through rate on those pages. However those pages were really not scoring very high on Google QS and PPC was typically higher than our high content very ugly looking pages. Those pages were real ugly looking; all they had were extreme garbage text and an image to save the page. Big G loved it, QS was higher and PPC was less. Consumers, when they come to that landing page, probably they were provoked to click on image, because page was so ugly. We achieved a Click through Rate of 75% – 80% in these ugly landing pages.
>In other case, one of our friends was engaged in bulk emailing. He was trying to sell a service and his email was full of CAPS, slang and type Os. He was getting tremendous response from his mailing. However later he realized that may be he should be more professional, so he started emailing a well crafted email. He tried this fancy email for a week or so and didn’t get even a single positive response. Later he moved back to ugly email and he was back in business.
What these experiences tell is in cases where repeat customers are really not the key, at times being ugly can be helpful. It provokes consumers to take an action. Once consumer takes action, if you can capitalize the response of consumer, it can be indeed an excellent strategy.