Accountable Marketing
3 Steps to Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing
Everyone’s using the “r” word. Just a month or two ago, online marketers were whispering the word for fear of contagion. Now it’s spoken out in the open. We all seem to sense that we’re in a recession or that one’s stalking us and tapping on our shoulder.
Some sites are experiencing slight sales declines; others are prepping for the recession by trimming marketing budgets and tightening their belts in other areas. Online marketers are being asked to do more with less. It seems it’s going to get worse.
It’s interesting to watch how different companies respond to tough times. Traditionally during a recession, most will cut their marketing spend and ask the sales staff to squeeze more from what marketing delivers. In the online world, most decrease ad budgets, but the first cuts are aimed at any sort of marketing optimization (like analytics or testing). This bunker-type approach often leads to stagnation. Optimization is the last line item you can afford to cut.
Others will pour more money into traffic acquisition and flashy advertising or gimmicks. This kitchen-sink approach is highly inefficient and risky.
Effective Optimization Is a Scientific Process
I prefer a more scientific approach.
The “r” word doesn’t mean failure or certain doom. While we don’t control the factors that cause a recession, we can optimize the factors we do have control over and do our best to build and continually improve a recession-proof Web site.
A site that converts better will decrease cost per acquisition and, in turn, will increase ad spend efficiency. A site being continually improved for conversion can withstand the storms of finicky economic times. Optimizing your site should be a scientific process that gives customer insight and is accountable, efficient, and measurable.
In the midst of the dot-com boom, we took on our very first conversion optimization client and helped the company build an internal process to continually optimize its conversion rate. Everyone else was talking about eyeballs and, to their detriment, got spanked by the mother of bursting bubbles. Site after site went into the trash heap, while our client’s continued to grow and thrive through the worst of it. During that time, the client enjoyed an aggregated 400 percent increase in conversion. Its advertising spend was potent, each dollar spent on advertising was worth four times more in top-line sales. Its competitors could spend the same and a lot more on advertising and couldn’t get similar traction. Some went under.
Building a recession-proof online marketing campaign is common sense, but you must work on it. It’s well worth it. It’s not about getting the occasional gain from a test or analytics but about having a continual process for doing so.
The Cost of Not Improving Your Conversion Rate
Let’s suppose your site draws 100,000 unique visitors per month and you have an average conversion rate of 2.5 percent. If you average sale is $50, then you gross about $125,000 a month. Let’s also say that after some optimization work and a couple tests, you increase your overall conversion rate by just 10 percent (a very achievable goal), and your conversion rate is now 2.75 percent. Your monthly gross is now $137,500. The annualized revenue realized by the move of the needle is $150,000. With a minor conversion increase, you’ve earned a baker’s dozen: 13 months of revenue in 12 months’ time.
If you continue to optimize better every month throughout the year, that 13th doughnut gets bigger and bigger. Assuming traffic costs remain static, ad spend becomes stronger and your cost of acquisition goes down. Even in the likely scenario that your traffic costs inch up, you’re riding the curve instead of falling below it.If you don’t become recession-proof, your competitors will. There are simply no more excuses. A decade ago, putting together the resources for optimization was a challenge. Today, analytics and optimization software are much more easily available and affordable when you look at them in this light. Google even offers them both for free.
Steps to Recession-Proof Online Marketing
Here are three steps you can take to make your online marketing recession proof:
1. Turn your analytics into customer insight. It’s not enough to get reports. Each click is an action taken by a real person. Learn why your customers do what they do on your site.
2. Turn your insight into action. If customers leave your site or landing pages, theorize as to why, then test variations to confirm or refute your insight based on step one.
3. Rinse and repeat.
Don’t become a victim of a recession; instead use it as an opportunity to take control of the things you can and jack up your conversion rate. The dot-com bust would have been a blip had many focused more on the fundamentals of increasing conversion online.I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live through another bust. So I leave you with the wise words of Blackie Sherrod: “The reason history must repeat itself is because we pay so little attention to it the first time.”
What are your plans to recession proof yourself? Let us know if you need help.
. .
Originally posted on ClickZ.
Related Posts:
Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing
Yes, it’s that time again!
Recessions are the economy’s little reminder that your marketing needs to be more efficient. Lots of our friends and clients are being asked to produce more sales with less resources. (And if you’re reading this post, that might sound familiar to you.)
Traditionally, in the offline world during recessions, marketers had their advertising budgets cut, then pressure was placed on sales teams to close more sales. But in the online world, marketers are expected to deliver both traffic from advertising and sales from the customer experience.
The math is simple. More sales with the same or less advertising means higher conversion rates. If your conversion rate is higher, not only will you be more profitable but you should also gain market share from competitors.
You may not always be able to control the cost of your advertising — except for when you cut it — but you can control your conversion rate.
In the interactive marketing world, many companies seem confused about what to do in a recession. Companies need to improve their online conversion rates. It seems obvious to most of us, but not everyone.
We want to ask you, our readers, for feedback. Have conversion rate improvements become a higher priority for your organization? If not, is it because you aren’t feeling the effects of the recession yet, or does your organization simply not believe it can control conversion? Or is it something else?
. .
Read the follow-up post, “3 Steps to Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing“
Related Posts:
Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Website Optimization Starts With a Hypothesis
NINE OUT OF TEN PEOPLE WOULD RATHER NOT READ THIS SENTENCE IN ALL CAPS.
That may or may not be true. At the moment, this statement is merely a guess, an assumption — but it’s testable. It’s a hypothesis.
People love to insist that your website is made of magical ones and zeros. “It’s HTML,” they’ll say. “It lives on triple-redundant co-located servers,” they’ll argue. Yet the truth is much simpler, and scarier, than that.
Your website is a tower of assumptions. Everyone’s is. Perhaps yours was built according to a specific blueprint. Maybe it was built from a template. Either way, if it’s not properly maintained, the structure will collapse. But before you demolish the current structure and start over from the ground up, you should test the existing site.
If you want to improve your website, testing provides the scaffolding to fix it. And just as you wouldn’t hire a renovation crew that uses scaffolding made of toothpicks, your optimization tests require strong hypotheses. Of course, you can always test a bunch of random variables and see which configuration works best with your visitors, but that generally takes too long, adds noise to the data, and makes it difficult to gain any real insight.
The better thing to do is to start with a hypothesis.
Dropping Science
In my last post, I showed how testing allows you to optimize by letting visitors design your site for you. By giving them new versions of navigation and content elements and closely monitoring to see which ones work best, your visitors can vote with their clicks, and you can more easily adjust your site to fit their needs.
Be careful, though. If you don’t have a solid hypothesis, improvements can take longer — and be more incremental — than they should be. Recycling random variations of a page just to see what works often yields a much smaller return on investment than hiring a website optimization firm.
It’s the most common problem we see among companies that don’t outsource their testing: They don’t really know what to test.
Regardless of who tests your website, the scientific method [define] must drive the process. Your venture into testing must begin with curiosity. Curiosity is fundamental to humanity, and the basis for our achievements. To have success online, you must be curious as to why things happen and what is influencing them.
• Observation: “Why do so few people add an item to their cart from the product page?”
• Observation: “Why do my blog posts with short titles seem to get more comments?”
Curiosity is the initial spark to start a learning experience, but ideas and explanations must be conjured to satisfy that curiosity. This is where the hypothesis comes from.
Don’t Believe the Hypothesis
Again, a hypothesis is just an assumption. The ideas and explanations you base this assumption on can come from real world examples or basic intuition. To write a hypothesis, simply take the action you’re considering and state the result — a benefit, we hope — that you expect it to have.
• Hypothesis: “Making the ‘add to cart’ button larger will increase our conversion rate.”
• Hypothesis: “Using blog post titles with six words or less will increase the amount of comments.”
The one and only purpose of running a website optimization test is to prove (or disprove) your hypothesis by exposing it to real world conditions. As such, you’ll need to create variations of the elements you wish to test in a way that properly reflects your hypothesis, so you can test them against the original version to see which one works best.
Let’s start with “Making the add to cart buttons larger will increase our conversion rate.” To test this hypothesis, you’ll need to create a version of the page with a larger add to cart button. To be sure, you may also want to test more than one size. If a large button isn’t ideal, maybe a medium-sized one is.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat… TEST
Lets say the test proves our hypothesis to be valid and you decide to make the “add to cart” button larger. Wonderful, but you might want to hold off on the champagne.
Now it’s time to create another hypothesis about the best color for the “add to cart” button. For instance, “A green ‘add to cart’ button will yield a higher conversion rate than similar red or blue buttons.”
The point is to learn something — anything — about what is and isn’t working on your site. Approach testing in a systematic way and record what you learn to guide you through future tests. You may also want to revisit certain tests to see if they still hold true, especially if you’ve changed other elements on the page.
It’s very important not to get discouraged. Even if your hypothesis is disproved, you’ve learned something valuable; that what you have is working well enough for you to focus on another area of your site that needs attention.
On the other hand, if your hypothesis is strong — and the test results prove it — you’ve begun remodeling your “tower built on assumptions” into a high-rise casino, where the odds are stacked neatly in your favor.
. . .
[Editor’s Note: Blinded by science? Need a renovation? Future Now can help you test it.]
Related Posts:
Written by:Ronald Patiro
Screencast: How the Super Bowl Ads FUMBLED Online
This year’s Super Bowl ads once again found us scratching our heads. If you’re going to spend $2.7 million for 30 seconds of air time in order to send people to a website, why not sell them your product once they get there?
In this screencast, we’re going to show you how two brands — Tide to Go and Under Armour — continue to miss out on converting browsers into buyers, even after the post-game traffic surge is over. Depending on who you ask, these sponsors’ ads (”Interview” for Tide and “The New Prototype” for Under Armour) were pretty decent. The products don’t seem to be the problem, either.
Nope. What we have here is a failure to convert. So, much like the New England Patriots are doing right now, let’s see what we can learn from some video analysis:
Let’s take a look at some post-game stats from Reprise Media’s Search Marketing Scorecard:
- 6% of companies included a call to action, asking viewers to visit their websites–a decrease of nearly two thirds from last year
- 93% did not buy search placement for concepts relating to their ads, including spokesperson names, slogans and taglines. Among the brands that failed to buy featured stars’ names as keywords were Bridgestone Tires (Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons) and Sunsilk (Marilyn Monroe, Shakira and Madonna). Unfortunately, notes Reprise, given that the celebrities are often the only thing that viewers remember about an ad.
- 74% still neglected to include a call to action on their Web site landing pages, leaving users “directionless.”
These figures are important because they illustrate a common misconception among multi-channel marketing campaigns: While the TV ad’s success can be measured by the traffic it drives to the website, the traffic alone is meaningless. When visitors can’t convert, you lose.
Want help converting online? Download “10 Tips to Start Optimizing Your Site” for free!
Related Posts:
Written by:Anthony Garcia
Is Your Reputation Worth $15 Billion?
Before you answer that question, consider this: At Facebook’s current valuation of $15 Billion, a lot of folks think your network’s net worth is about $258.62 — give or take some pocket change.
Since the middle of last year, when they opened up the platform to third-party Web developers and Microsoft invested in the company, Facebook has been the marketer’s gold rush du jour. From books and hobbies to zombies and “hotties,” it seems everyone’s trying to get in on the action, regardless of whether they’ve actually stopped to consider whether a real business model is there. What’s even more troubling — or should be — are the ways some companies willingly exchange their brand’s reputation, and occasionally yours, to dive head-first into social media marketing.
In our debut op-ed for Forbes.com, Bryan & I ask, “Is Your Reputation Worth $15 Billion?”
Oh, and don’t forget to check out the slide show that goes with it.
Related Posts:
Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
How to Elf Yourself Out of Millions
One might think having the year’s biggest viral marketing hit would be any business’s dream come true. Unfortunately, though, not all Web traffic is equal, and popularity contests don’t pay the bills.
According to Advertising Age, 26.4 million people spent a total of 2,600 years at ElfYourself.com, turning themselves and unsuspecting family members and coworkers into virtual dancing elves. But chances are that unless you’re a marketer, blogger, or anyone else who might have bothered to notice in the first place, you’ve likely forgotten that OfficeMax was behind the “Elf Yourself” campaign.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask anyone who’s aware of Elf Yourself — and pronounce it carefully when you do — whether they can recall who sponsored the campaign.
Most of the answers I’ve gotten thus far (”Starbucks?”; “Barnes & Noble?”; “Wasn’t that Staples?”) have been guesses.
As OfficeMax VP of Marketing and Advertising, Bob Thacker, sold it to AdAge,
“We were looking to build the brand, warm up our image. We weren’t looking for sales. We are third-place players in our industry, so we are trying to differentiate ourselves through humor and humanization.”
Really? Not even looking for sales? Wow. If that’s the case, why even bother linking the campaign’s site to OfficeMax.com?
The article goes on to suggest that since many of those who searched for Elf Yourself around the time used the phrase “OfficeMax,” that must somehow mean their branding effort paid off. And that makes sense — so long as you ignore that it seems most people discovered the dancing elves via email and instant messenger, not search.
Get Elastic’s Linda Bustos sparked some debate about all of this, asserting that,
“Brand awareness is extremely valuable and important, especially in OfficeMax’ competitive industry. It might not result in immediate sales, but it should impact long term market position. Social media marketing (including blogging, podcasting and interactive viral campaigns) is a long-term strategy. It’s not a newspaper circular, it’s not PPC advertising, it’s not email marketing. Like celebrity endorsement or a Super Bowl ad, it won’t necessarily drive sales during a specific time period.”
Absolutely. But should the successful use of cute gimmickry — so long as it attracts a large, albeit random, audience of people who aren’t in buying mode, to a site that links to homepage, for a business that sells office supplies — be considered an automatic win?
So, millions of people go to a site that has little (no offense, elves) to do with the brand. No attempt is even made to engage would-be customers in a buying scenario (”Elf Yourself and save 10% on last-minute holiday treats when at OfficeMax.com”). No… nothing? That’s branding!?
One of the folks who commented on Linda’s post makes a telling point about the SEO logistics at play:
[…] this is search engine dynamite! The domain elfyourself.com (which is linked to by nearly 30,000 other websites) links directly (and only) to the officemax.com homepage. Conventional internet marketing dictates that this will have a huge impact on officemax.com’s ability to rank in Google on competitive terms. I’d love to see their stats - I bet it’s a big win.
Rank well on “competitive terms” — for whom? Elves? In a lot of other circumstances, this would be a great point, but in this case, it’s yet another example of why “conventional internet marketing” wisdom is misleading. Getting the extra traffic feels nice — and often impresses the boss — but there’s one thing that always feels better: Money.
Still, let’s see how much traffic Elf Yourself is driving to OfficeMax.com:
Not much of a traffic boost, is it?
But, hey, this wasn’t about traffic or revenue — it was about fun, right? Not for Toy New York, the agency that developed Elf Yourself. Nope. As Linda pointed out to me in the comments on her post, they’re the ones who are probably benefiting the most from this.
Looks like she’s got a pretty good point…
How about shareholder value? Kevin Horne points out that this is the second year in a row that the elves stuffed coal in the OMX stock price:
[…] in 2006, the company actually reported a decline of some $7 million in retail sales in its fourth quarter, 11 million “elf visitors” notwithstanding. Or notwithclicking either, apparently. Talk about squandering an opportunity. Two years in a row.
Oh well, at least OfficeMax got some national press coverage out of this. Let’s see what happens in this clip from Good Morning America:
Don’t get me wrong. I like the elves. It just seems that, since they’re already such hard workers, why not put them to work? (Even Santa’s got that figured out.)
Before you elf yourself out of millions in missed revenue from a viral marketing campaign, ask yourself: What good are millions of visitors if they don’t buy millions in goods?
Sometimes it takes better planning.
Related Posts:
Written by:Robert Gorell
Finding Signal in the “Microhoo” Echo Chamber
I guess last Friday was a slow news day; GrokDotCom and 155 of our closest blogging and media friends “broke” the big news. Yawn. (I’m guessing Google execs wished they’d released earnings then, rather than the day before 
)
Look on the bright side: For followers of the online space, if you didn’t like the coverage you read, you certainly had other rehashes and “me-toos” to keep you occupied. In fact, the hardest thing about actually reading all this coverage would be keeping up with the onslaught every time Techmeme refreshed.
Yet there was a beacon of shining light above and beyond the rest of the noise, but since the blogosphere was so cluttered, many of you probably missed it: The Compete blog. Once again, they found a fresh perspective and unique angle of approach to the same old story.
Check out their “Microhoo” analysis. They have some perrrty charts too!
P.S. There’s also a marketing lesson here. As our editor, Robert, pointed out to me last Friday, the Compete blog is great at demonstrating the power of their analytics tool, in terms of the benefits received from using it, to derive insights about one’s audience.
P.P.S. Since we’re on the topic of visual inspiration found on blogs, it’s worth giving a hat tip to our friend and analytics blogger extraordinaire, Avinash Kaushik. In a blogosphere without the visual stylings of Kathy Sierra, Avinash has really stepped it up of late. If more “stats geeks” were as personable and kind-hearted as he, and genuinely focused on helping people learn how analytics don’t need to be uber-complicated (nor must they even look like actual data!) to be valuable, this Marketing Optimization space would attract a lot more executive eyeballs.
Related Posts:
Written by:Howard Kaplan
Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: An Analysis
[Erratum: The following report on the top-converting sites for January 2007 has been corrected, as it mistakenly references a previous year’s data. It seems a fellow blogger cited outdated numbers and we overlooked the error during fact check. Bryan stands by his analysis, however, as it was not intended to be time sensitive per se.]
Here it is, the list of January’s top 10 converting retail sites:
1. Proflowers.com - 14.1%
2. Coldwater Creek - 13.3%
3. FTD.com - 13.0%
4. QVC - 12.8%
5. Office Depot - 12.4%
6. eBay - 11.5%
7. Lands’ End - 11.5%
8. Tickets.com - 11.2%
9. 1800flowers.com - 10.0%
10. Amazon - 9.6%
[Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts]
Only four of these companies were on December’s list:
(4) Amazon - 17.60%
(6) Lands End - 17.20%
(7) QVC - 17.10%
(8) Coldwater Creek - 17.10%
A big retail SIGH! If only people’s buying habits stayed consistent all year long, to be like they are in December.
My friend Craig provides an interesting analysis of this month’s numbers. He’s right on the money when he says:
There are many things most sites can do to dramatically improve conversion rates. There are also much smarter ways to measure and consider conversion rates than the overall site average. While that may be an interesting for conference-room conversation, it’s a lot more important to break down conversion rates by method-of-contact (email vs organic vs display vs PPC), based on the place in their buying cycle where visitors engage with you, or based on user intent as evidenced in their actions/expressions.
But then he tries to explain, then excuse, why small retailers supposedly can’t have a 10% conversion rate:
The message it seems is that if you need to deliver an overall conversion rate of 10% or greater, you need 30M registered users who buy from you 3-5 times per year, a 24-hour television channel, a pattern of inflicting back pain on innocent mailmen 3-4 times each year, or to sell products which are purchased as a result of some ages-old game of emotional blackmail.
Craig’s as smart as they come, but while offering an insightful analysis, he doesn’t nail the primary reasons. Then again, he hasn’t been focused exclusively on conversion for almost a decade, so allow me to shed some light: The number one reason the “average” small retailer hasn’t achieved a conversion over 10% is because they haven’t worked hard enough to deserve it.
Have you?
Oops! Have I tossed a turd in the punch bowl? (Don’t be offended, please continue reading.)
Several of the websites on this month’s list have been clients of ours and most of the others have staffs that I’ve known professionally for many years. What most of them have in common is they work harder consistently, year after year, at continuously improving their websites for customers than you (the average) do. Their results demonstrate it.
Let’s examine more carefully at some of the points Craig makes since, in one form or another, they are often repeated excuses that pass for the conventional wisdom about conversion rate optimization.
Catalogs Alone Are Responsible For High Converting Websites
It isn’t just having a catalog that gives you a high converting website. If it did, L.L. Bean that was on the list in December with a healthy 23.60% would show up the rest of the year. Lands End, however, has been on it in December, November, and September. Where are all the other thousands of catalogers? Why aren’t they making the list? A strong catalog brand can be a factor, but it isn’t always the primary driver of website conversion.
Television Home Shoppers Aren’t Auto Converting
I love it when Craig says, “QVC. What’s their conversion rate for TV viewers? Their website is functionally a cart, so it could be argued that they’ve got 86.2% cart abandonment.” Absolutely.
However, why doesn’t HSN (Home Shopping Network) or the other large DRTV advertisers show up consistently on the top converting list? While it’s true that many of these shoppers come pre-sold from watching the show hosts sell them the product, they aren’t arriving to the website in a hypnotic trance with credit cards in hand ready to click on that final order confirmation button.
Just Because People Replenish Staples Frequently, Doesn’t Mean…
Craig refers to OfficeDepot.com as having “many no-point-in-comparing products and I assume lots of business orders from people who have accounts and replenish online frequently.” So do Staples, OfficeMax, Quill, FreshDirect and many others. Why don’t they show up on the list? Again, while this might contribute to conversions it doesn’t guarantee a top converting website.
But You’re No Amazon
Craig’s right. Comparing eBay and Amazon to almost anyone today isn’t fair. Part of what helped these companies to become who they are is their commitment to the customer experience. They each had significant competitors but Amazon and eBay just kept pushing the bar higher. In the offline world, there are very few companies that could touch the retail influence of WalMart. Why doesn’t WalMart.com make the the top converting website list regularly?
Wal-Mart’s absence is simple enough to explain. Until recently, Wal-Mart hasn’t worked as hard online as they should have. Wal-Mart has been successful but, like other online retailers, sales volume online often covers up for all those customers that would have converted but didn’t.
Eliminate The Excuses
Do you have a road map to improve your conversion rate from where you are at today, then one to exceed that tomorrow, and then again after that?
FutureNow can help. I invite you to email or call us: 877-643-7244.
Related Posts:
Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Seven Years of Change, Seven Years of Staying the Same
Time flies in the Internet world. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I wrote my first ClickZ column.
Over the past seven years as a columnist and marketing practitioner, I’ve continued to be impressed by how dramatically the Internet has changed our lives and our world. Blogs have become a major voice in society. Social media and online video have become giants. Google’s revenue is growing like a major leaguer’s biceps on steroids. New technologies continue to barrel at us like a hailstorm, and the industry is bright-eyed and bushytailed about the promise of Web 2.0.
But the more things change, the more they remain the same. Companies still struggle to monetize their traffic. Organizations still look to technology to bring them dollars on silver platters. Overall site conversion rates haven’t increased as hoped.
What stays the same is why people do what they do. How they buy. Principles of marketing, business, and sales.
During my time here, I’ve done my best to shout, beg, and plead that we not lose our focus on these basis principles. So as I looked back at some of my 273 columns, I wanted to again share some of the columns that have caused the most stir, been popular or helpful to readers, as well as a personal fave or two.
Bloodletting and Why Testing Can Be Unscientific
This column explained how testing marketing and persuasion is not a linear, scientific process:
Persuading is influencing opinions or affecting attitudes by means of communication. It means not only informing but also providing new information to the readers so they can make decisions. It also requires motivating people. It means affecting the hearts as well as the minds of people (a message has to have emotional appeal while possessing rational elements).
It continues:
There is a human need for rules, especially in the Web’s technology-worshiping culture. Just look at the demand for successful books and articles out there with titles incorporating things like seven habits, nine rules, and 12 mistakes (we do it, too, because people want it). The left brain demands control while the right brain insists on freedom. Left- and right-brain concepts collide in your cranium every day. We constantly struggle with choices between cold logic and heartfelt intuition, control or liberty, exactness or beauty.The process for persuading human beings to take action is indeed a system, but it’s not a hard science based on predictable rules that could produce perfectly replicable results in a laboratory.
Do You Want to Inform or Persuade?
The process we use to plan persuasive elements of a Web site is called persuasive architecture. It is the organization of the buying and selling processes married to the information flow. The focus is persuading visitors to take action. It’s similar to information architecture, which involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully. Whereas the goal of information architecture is to inform and educate, a commercial Web site should inform and persuade your customer. [Read the entire column.]
There is No Egg in Eggplant
I’ve found that the fascinating similarity between all the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sites I’ve been analyzing is the weakness of the copywriting. Each site fails to precisely and fully describe what the writer wants from the visitor. After all, the word “egg” may superficially resemble the word “eggplant,” but, if you mean “eggplant,” you should say it. [Read more.]
The Difference Between ROI and Marketing Accountability
A bit of wisdom from my brother Jeffrey:
Measuring the ROI of lead generation isn’t the same thing as full accountability. If marketing is a profitable activity, it still doesn’t mean that what it is communicating to the universe of buyers is building the business. I’ve seen lots of marketers sacrifice early and middle stage buyers because they had to show an immediate ROI on each campaign they ran. Who is accountable for all the potential business they lose by saying the wrong the thing to the right people at the wrong time?
How to Decrease Sales by 90 Percent
How can it be that two case studies contradict each other so blatantly? The answer is no business is linear. There are many facets, or topological elements, to consider in designing an effective online strategy to maximize your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is only a reflection of the marketing and sales effectiveness and your customers’ satisfaction. It depends! It always depends! If you’re looking for one canned, simple solution, you’re bound to be either bankrupt or very disappointed. [Read the entire column and the follow-up.]
The Land Beyond Usability
Make your Web site easy for your visitors to use, and they’ll become more proficient users. But if you want them to become customers, you have to think beyond usability. Think of it like taking a road trip. Usability gets rid of the obstacles to driving: the potholes, bad signage, dead ends. It makes it easy for your customers to go places comfortably and smoothly, with minimal interruption.But it can’t intrinsically tell them where they ought to be going, much less how to get there the quickest, easiest way.
Usability testing usually measures the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goals in a particular environment. Wouldn’t you want your goal in e-commerce to be a sale and, eventually, a delighted customer? Just because users can complete a purchase does not mean you delighted them or that they will ever buy from you again. [Read more.]
The Power of the About Us Page
Your “About Us” page should:
- Let customers see a more human side of your company. E-Trade’s advertising makes it seem like a fun company, but the “About Us” page displays none of that human personality.
- Tell your company’s story. McDonalds’s does a nice job with this, as does Dave and Busters. A company history timeline is a great way to highlight achievements without braggadocio.
- Reflect your company’s passion. Check out Nike.com’s “About Us” page.
- Reflect your company’s personality. If you’re a fun company, your “About Us” page should be fun.
- Let the customer inside your company. Bungie, makers of Halo, go so far as to have Webcams online.
- Reiterate your company’s competence to serve the customers by using all the above tools.
The Next Seven Years
Here’s to the next seven years. Thank you for paying attention, commenting, and inspiring me in so many ways. May you have great success. May your conversion rate soar.
Any topic suggestions for one of my next 273 columns? Let me know.
[Editor’s Note: Originally seen on ClickZ.]
Related Posts:
Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Google Analytics Updates — Next Stop, “Event Tracking”
The Google Analytics team just announced some nice updates. Yes, the interface has been translated into Thai, Filipino, Indonesian, Czech, Hungarian, and Portuguese, but there’s another story happening between the lines about the switch from “urchin.js” javascript to the new “ga.js” standard, which doesn’t require tagging an entire Web page just to measure a single action. The big news is how the switch to ga.js javascript will change how Google Analytics users plan and optimize their online marketing.
The change in script reflects the fact that “page views” are dead (although some have replaced them with zombie metrics). Additionally, this round of GA updates makes it easier to track ecommerce transactions and see how metrics relate to each other. But you can’t see how visitor actions relate to each other — yet.
Now that visitor action can be called “events” and tracked with ga.js tags, it’s going to be much easier for GA users to see how a series of actions tie together. Fortunately, Google has built an “event tracking” interface to help you take advantage of the more robust ga.js script. For now, it’s in closed beta, but when it launches, the reports will look something like this:
The challenge for marketers, analytics specialists, and anyone who’s a little of both — either by training or necessity — is to realize that standardized metrics aren’t enough. Event Tracking isn’t about measuring how many times visitors complete one-off actions. (If you do only that, the feature will be, in most cases, meaningless — or “cool,” which can be even more misleading.) Nope. Event Tracking is about measuring scenarios.
Since it’s designed to help you measure the relationships between actions and content, the to-be-launched Event Tracking interface should encourage GA users to do a better job of planing the visitor experience and to not be content with the same old generic data.
Looks like 2008 will be good year to be in the scenario planning and optimization business!
[Image credit: Marketing Pilgrim. If you’d like to learn more about how to use the latest version of Google Analytics, these updates aside, Avinash has you covered. To read more about the use the most recent updates, see WebProNews and ProBlogger.]
Related Posts:
Written by:Robert Gorell
