How would you like to get business advice from Seth Godin? I did. But then again so did you. Let me explain:

On Independence Day, July 4th, 2008, Seth Godin wrote a post titled “Two Simple Web Businesses” where he declared the world’s need for “fixed-price web podiatrists.”

Podiatrist? Hmmm…OK, well I don’t have a foot fetish, but I do have a fetish for helping businesses make more money from their website by improving their conversion rate.

Seth explained:

“So, a pretty smart web-savvy person could have a checklist of fifty items and work her way through a corporate website. She could come back with a simple, easy to execute list of things worth changing…

…Low hanging fruit, stuff that doesn’t need approval from the CEO to fix. Maddening idiosyncrasies, worth the few minutes it takes to fix them.

Second gig: Web analytics pro. Someone who can, for a generous hourly fee, set up analytics for a website and do weekly reports (by email) that are actually useful and actionable.”

Seth saw these businesses as “Neither will make you rich. Either might open doors for your next step in life.” I felt a rush of adrenaline that day, knowing with even greater certainty that FutureNow was already on to something big. We had seen a huge opportunity to scale our services to the the thousands of small-to-medium size businesses that felt like they couldn’t afford our services before and were already deep into molding that concept onto a software platform.

The OnTarget™ service-as-software program was meant to liberate businesses who couldn’t make sense of their web analytics. Businesses who didn’t know the next step they needed to do to improve their marketing campaigns and what to change on their website or campaign to increase their conversion rate.

In March 2008, FutureNow completed our acquisition of Elemental Business. In their software and wonderful team we envisioned how we could deliver not only highly impactful recommendations but actionable recommendations with precise directions. The recommendations needed to be good enough that anybody regardless of experience could make the needed changes and get results. By July 31st we completed our transitions to the software environment and announced the Alpha version, code-named “Dr Phil,” and moved into Beta in October.  By January 15th of this year OnTarget™ was out of Beta and ready to offer it to the world.

OnTarget™ clients have been thrilled with the program. The results come faster and more often than when we were just consulting. Here’s a just few samples from both ecommerce and lead generation sites, though there are dozens more:

1. A retailer increased their conversion rate by 59.3% resulting in a financial impact of more than $70,000 per month
2. A brick and mortar store increased their website referred sales by 31% while overall website traffic was down by 10%
3. A travel destination site increased online booking by 10.13% year-over-year in this recession
4. A retailer optimized their checkout page to increase conversion rate by 6.25%, leading to $150,000 additional revenue annually
5. As a by-product of our conversion recommendations a retailer increased organic search traffic by 19.91%
6. A subscription service increased their visitor registrations by 12.5% by optimizing landing pages and the sign-up form
7. A retailer increased their overall website sales conversion rate from 3% to 7% (a lift of 133%) during his first quarter with us

OnTarget™ client Brian Schmitt explains it this way:

“I’d been staring at Analytics for months wondering what I was missing. I had to be missing some mysterious key that would explain it all and allow me to take action based on the data. After all, everyone else is doing it.

I finally found the key. It’s even got a classic “O” for a handle and a dangling tooth. OnTarget™ is Fischer Price simple and works like a master key.”

Brian Schmitt is keeping his goals “On Target” and we hope you do, too.

I want to thank Seth, the Alpha and Beta testing customers, and our own hard-working people at FutureNow for everything they did in helping OnTarget™ become a reality.