Five Second Testing Brand Recall with MailChimp
The website of a company is often the first point of contact a person will have with a brand. In an ever increasingly online world, your website speaks volumes to potential customers.
Brand recall is an important factor of website design. If customers don’t remember your brand once they click away from your website, you have missed what may have been the one opportunity you had to reach them. Homepages often have so many competing demands that it can be hard to know if they’re effectively communicating who you are and what you do.
The five second test is an important tool for allowing you to find out if your website is quickly communicating key information. The test itself allows you to upload a website/image, which is then shown to a tester for just five seconds. After the five second look is over, the participant answer a series of questions about what they saw.
So why five seconds? Well, studies have shown that 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a website. If you can’t communicate the most basic information about yourself in this time, there is a good chance you’ve lost them forever.
When trying to determine what brand recall is like for a website, questions such as “What is the name of the company?” and “What does this website sell/offer?” are often a fantastic starting point.
To showcase the value of a five second test we ran one with a service we use ourselves here at UsabilityHub, the email marketing platform MailChimp. While it is a well known brand, what made it truly attractive as a test case is the fact they do not clearly spell out their brand name in their website header. In fact, the top part of the website only features it in small text under a much larger heading. It is then shown again on its own at the bottom of the page.
So does this strategy work? Can people remember the details of the brand when only given five seconds to view the above image? We recruited 50 testers through from the UsabilityHub panel and asked them ourselves.
Question 1: What service does the website offer?
It may seem simple to think “MailChimp is an email marketing service”, but look at the website text. It mentions being yourself, growing your business, features and pricing, yet the word “email” only appears in small text at the bottom. While it’s easy to understand what the company does, it remains unclear how they actually do it.
This fact came through in our panelists’ responses.
Only half of the testers could articulate that the service on offer was related to email. The rest have been thrown off by the language used on the page, or are unsure about what the company does.
More interesting than this though are some of the individual answers and what we can learn from them.
E-mailing campaigns (I’m using MailChimp at work, so the question is easy…)
Responses like this one indicate that recognition and recall for existing MailChimp users is high.
It is a MailChimp website. I suppose it offers e-mail accounts.
Here is an example of a tester who got the idea of what they company does — something to do with emails — but doesn’t know exactly how it does it.
It looked like a fashion site but I also noticed the MailChimp logo in the top left corner at the last second.
This is interesting as it shows the design quality is high — people expect strong designs from fashion websites — yet it wasn’t until the logo was noticed that the tester realised it was in fact MailChimp.
It’s some sort of platform that you can use to grow your business.
There were a number of answers like this too. Business growth is the main text you see on the homepage and it seems to have captured people’s attention.
Question 2: What was the name of the company?
Here is where we see how many people can pick up on the company. With 25/50 correctly responding that it’s a mail service, and some mentioning MailChimp already in their first answer, we’d expect a strong result here.
Only 28/50 correctly identified the name of the company, and a large amount (16/50) were unsure. That’s 10 more than were unsure on the first test. This strongly suggests that while the company branding is recognizable, the actual name is not obvious enough for many people to pick up immediately. Once again some of the answers themselves provide insight.
I don’t remember, but there was something like a monkey for the logo.
The logo is memorable, but not enough for those who don’t know the brand already. Logos cannot be searched like a business name can. People don’t (usually) describe a business by their logo. So while having a memorable logo is always great, it does not necessarily translate to brand recognition.
I could not find it
With five seconds, some people simply did not notice what it was. They got caught up looking at other things on the website. This type of response is important in five second testing. The answer “I don’t know” represents your opportunity for improvement.
Final Thoughts
As always, context is key. When viewed in isolation it might look worrying that many respondents couldn’t immediately pick the brand name or identify what the company does from a brief look at the website.
However MailChimp themselves may prefer to be broader than just email. Perhaps they want to be seen as a “growth” tool rather than an “email” tool. Only they can truly decide the value and information they take from this study.
Running a five second test is a quick, easy way for you to evaluate a website or design and let you dig into the idea of “does this get across what I want it to”. This is of particular importance in a congested digital space, where a visitor will not stay on your website for long if they cannot easily identify what you’re offering.
You can view the full MailChimp test results for yourself here.
