We thought we’d share some insights so that if you’re thinking about an optimization program, you can avoid the pitfalls and reap the rewards.

There are many, nuances of course, but I’d boil it all down to 4 basic steps.

Step 1 – Get Help

Those who get a personal trainer are more likely to accomplish their fitness goals.  In the world of online marketing, those who get expert help are far more likely to achieve their business goals than those who try to “DIY.”  The help you need is cross-disciplinary: you need expert eyes looking at aesthetics, usability, copywriting, marketing strategy, split testing, personas, pay per click, search engine optimization, and more.  Of course, we’d like to be considered when you go looking for outside help.  But if you don’t hire us, do hire someone!  Even if we don’t get your business, we’ll take solace in knowing that the Web is getting better for customers, little by little.

Step 2 – Get Out of Project Mentality

There is a tendency to think about improving a website, or any marketing, as a one-time project with a beginning and end.  We believe this is the wrong approach to optimization.  You may think you can join a gym for 3 months, lose some weight, then cancel your gym membership and still maintain your improvements.  But only a true lifestyle change can help you accomplish fitness goals.  Same goes for Optimization, also known as Continuous Improvement.  The shift out of project mentality needs to be addressed within your organization (culture), with your vendors, and especially with those who are going to “own” the implementation of your continuous improvements.

Step 3 – Budget For It

Closely related to Step 2, Step 3 is to budget for a process of ongoing optimization.  Since it’s not a project that ever should “end,” it should always be in the budget, right?  We’ve written before about our opinion that in a recession, optimization is the last thing that should be cut from marketing budgets.  If you join a gym and see improvements (you drop a few pounds, keep them off, and feel better in general), why wouldn’t you budget that gym membership for at least the next couple years?  Also keep in mind that “budget” doesn’t just mean a line item in a spreadsheet.  Budgeting your internal resources time is important, too.  OnTarget clients budget 10, 20, or 40 implementation hours for their team per month, for example.

Step 4 – Celebrate the Wins, Learn From the Losses

I’ve already written about celebrating the wins, even if they’re small.  Part of the celebration process is stepping back from the day-to-day process of Optimization and acknowledging that the process as a whole is effective.  And publicizing wins is probably the most effective way to make sure Optimization costs stay in the budget no matter what! As far as losses go, we define a “loss” as a tested optimization change that decreased a KPI.  One of the great things about digital changes is that if they don’t work, un-doing them is pretty quick and painless.  But, too many clients back away from testing, changing, and optimizing because of a loss or two.  Again using the weight loss analogy, weight fluctuates, and just because you gain back a pound that you lost, doesn’t mean you quit exercising.  The key is to learn from the failed change, and inform your next round of optimization.  That way, it just feeds back into your cycle of continuous improvement.

Hope this is helpful, and would like to hear your thoughts in the comments on if you think there are other Steps to Optimization that deserve a future post.

In January, I was sitting with Jack Love publisher of Internet Retailer as he was being interviewed on WebMasterRadio. Jack told my friend Jim Hedger that it didn’t take much to look good over the last 6 or 7 years in the ecommerce space while industry growth was 25% or greater year after year. A rising tide lifted all boats. Most people could just be on auto-pilot and their business would grow.

Times have changed.

We are no longer experiencing that explosive growth, and in these turbulent times I still see many people hoping to pilot their business using auto-pilot. I have bad news for those people. If you want to avoid a crash and burn over the next few years you are going to have to roll up your sleeves, maintain control, and maneuver yourself to safety.

This week at the “New Rules for Engagement” breakfast Forrester analyst Patti Freeman Evans played the following humorous video (just wait till the commercial ends) from the Daily Show with John Stewart for the 50+ retailers in the room:

In every bit of humor there is underlying some truth. I am seeing so many businesses relying on “Emergency Christmas”, offering huge sales (20+% off) week after week. You probably can see many of those same offers in your inbox. This show of panic to move merchandise is not the way to a safe landing.

I urge you not to stay the course, the times for easy money are over. Sully could have crashed in the middle of NYC, but he stayed calm with effort, some close calls and real precision he could succeed. So can you.

]]> http://www.grokdotcom.com/2009/03/05/sully-sullenbergs-secret-to-online-success/feed/ 4 http://www.grokdotcom.com/2009/01/26/5-reasons-competitors-may-be-doing-better-than-you/ http://www.grokdotcom.com/2009/01/26/5-reasons-competitors-may-be-doing-better-than-you/#comments Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:57:41 +0000 Bryan Eisenberg http://www.grokdotcom.com/?p=2738 There are only so many ways to stand out and become a leader in any market. You can be lowest price driven, operationally excellent, channel dominant, or focused on customer intimacy. Many companies excel at two or three but it is nearly impossible to excel at all of them.

Here are…

There are only so many ways to stand out and become a leader in any market. You can be lowest price driven, operationally excellent, channel dominant, or focused on customer intimacy. Many companies excel at two or three but it is nearly impossible to excel at all of them.

Here are 5 strategies companies use to become market leaders.

They have great operations -

Operations that let them be more efficient than you at getting order picked, packed and delivered so that customers’ expectations are exceeded. These efficiencies in operations also allow them to keep their costs down.  At the same time those interested in capturing additional market share invest those efficiencies back into improving the customers’ experience. Walmart.com online exemplifies this quality.

They do a better job at generating word of mouth -

Everything they do is focused in on delighting customers. They are driven by service. They understand that success is a long term strategy and can afford to do what they need to in order to please their customers. They go to every extreme to delight their customers and offer lagniappe in many ways.

They live on “life-time value” metrics. They are driven by a passion to serve and a philosophy that it is easier to keep a customer for life than to try and keep acquiring new ones. These some times over the top efforts that lead to so many of their customers sharing the amazing experiences they have had with the brand. Zappos.com exemplifies this quality..

They deliver as good of a product/service in a more customer friendly way -

I’ve seen this one happen so many times. One day you, the market leader, the first person to market with the product, with significant marketing budgets, and with the hugest market share become aware of some smallish competitor and ignore them because their product isn’t up to snuff.

They slowly start winning customers, that just need the basic features they offer. All the while they keep building up their product/service. However,  from the get go they eliminated many of the hassles of getting started with their business. Instead of a complicated sale processes, or in-the-way sales people they made their pricing transparent and made it easy to sign up online to get started right away. GotoMeeting employed this strategy when competing with Webex.

They do a better job at being found when people need them -

Location, location, location. Budweiser is not the world’s finest beer. However, they sell a lot of beer. Bud dominates so many channels that they are always available. We know Bud and so we order it because often good enough is good enough. Amazon applies this principle online.

Wherever or whatever you search for comes up on their site or on Google as being sold by them. I am not just talking about having a first place ranking for the most competitive single word key phrase, but they have invested in having content (a large portion customer generated) that spans the long tail, from early in the buying process to later in the buying process. Their pages tend to keep showing up time and time again. They thrive on generating content that is relevant and are thrilled to live off the 3 or 4 searches a month for a particular piece of content or obscure product as long as they have thousands of them that people are finding. Amazon has utilized this to keep adding product categories to their vast catalog.

They developed a culture that continuously optimizes the customer experience -

This is different than being customer intimate, it is more incremental, it is about being metrics driven. The key is to focus on key performance indicators that drive success for your business and being relentless and innovative in way to drive up those numbers. They may not often start off as the category leader but through relentless testing and optimizing they gain market share. These companies tend to be less risk averse preferring gradual and continuous change. This is a very powerful strategy for companies to leverage in a down economy, because while your competitors are trying to maintain status quo you focus on constantly improving. Many of Intuit’s brands exemplify this strategy.

How can you leverage these strategies to drive your own growth?

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I received an email today from Staples.com. The subject line read “Will Office Depot closings affect you?” In the body of the email they lead off that “you can always count on Staples” and show what looks like the beginning of a press release. You can see the full email below:

In these rough economic times, do you think this type of message is smart? Are they building confidence with this kind of messaging or is the painful message an overall turn-off? Your thoughts?

]]> http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/12/17/sign-of-the-times-marketing/feed/ 31 http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/12/12/mini-case-study-how-testing-trumped-the-holiday-slowdown/ http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/12/12/mini-case-study-how-testing-trumped-the-holiday-slowdown/#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:07:53 +0000 Brendan Regan http://www.grokdotcom.com/?p=2406 The experience gifting website, Cloud9Living.com, started their pre-Holiday optimization with a very simple A/B test on the Billing page of their shopping cart.  Changing a single layout element on the page was responsible for a 20.48% increase in their Funnel Conversion Rate (ratio of those who started at View Cart…

The experience gifting website, Cloud9Living.com, started their pre-Holiday optimization with a very simple A/B test on the Billing page of their shopping cart.  Changing a single layout element on the page was responsible for a 20.48% increase in their Funnel Conversion Rate (ratio of those who started at View Cart and made it through checkout).

While this type of increase is common with our clients, the interesting part of the story comes from a different metric.  During the duration of the test, the client’s Average Order Value dropped 28.05%.  A frightening metric, but no surprise given all the reports we’ve been seeing about lower budgets for online Holiday shopping.

The silver lining, directly attributed to the client’s optimization efforts, was that their increase in funnel conversion rate more than offset the drop in their Average Order Value.  So despite people spending less, the website is getting more people to successfully checkout and spend.  And this was just their first test!

The moral: Optimization is a highly effective way to make the best of the bad economic situation we’re in.  You can’t control how much less people are going to spend for the Holidays this year, but you can control improving your site to be more efficient–to squeeze more out of your opportunities.

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According to Comscore Black Friday sales were flat:

For the holiday season-to-date, $10.41 billion has been spent online, marking a 4-percent decline versus the corresponding days last year, while Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1 percent. For the combination of Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, online sales were up 2 percent relative to last year.

We told several of our retail clients that third party payment options could be an important deciding factor this holiday season because consumers were going to be extra cautious with their credit cards. PayPal saw sales rise 26 percent on Black Friday. PayPal said its sales numbers reflected 12 percent of all U.S. e-commerce.

According to CoreMetrics:

The online retail sector in general registered drops in ecommerce activities… The number of page and product views across the online retail sector in general was down 8.55 and 8.29 percent respectively compared to Black Friday 2007, suggesting that online retailers are doing a poor job of directing people to browse through their selection of products. The 18 percent drop in average session length also demonstrates that retailers are struggling to keep customers on their sites. Retailers are having difficulty in converting visitors to buyers, as evidenced by weakness in shopping cart and order sessions percentages.

How was your Black Friday?

• As a consumer, did you spend a lot and get great deals?
• As a merchant were your sales encouraging or depressing?

Today is CyberMonday, there is still some time to make changes to your site so that you get the most sales this holiday season. Will you wait and see how the rest of the holiday season treats you or will you take action today?

Well sports fans, here we go.  Black Friday.  Soon, Cyber Monday.  (Forgive me for the brief digression, but did you know neither Black Friday nor Cyber Monday typically deliver results, in the form of conversions, er, sales, mainly just delivering traffic   Unsurprisingly, retail numbers thus far have been bleak, to say the least.

Retailers are hopeful however, and doing everything they can to jumpstart the economy and try to turn a profit this holiday season.  Amazon got my attention with their personalized email, touting deals exclusively for me, but really failed to deliver on the promise.  Uber-disappointing when you consider how much insight they have into my buying process, not to mention my personal as well as holiday gift time purchase history.  Yes, even the market leaders sometimes miss opportunities. Perhaps they need some help harvesting the insight from their customers’ past purchase behavior?  [*Update* CNBC documents Amazon's strategy.]

Naturally, many retailers are using price cuts to try and attract attention.  Even brands who rarely do so, like Apple for instance, give kickbacks to customers this weekend.  Who says Politicians should be the only ones to prosper?!  [Don't say we're not in the giving back mood either- deal hunters should stop by Gizmodo for a rundown of all the best deals this weekend.  *Update* NY Times has a good rundown too.]

Not every retailer is up to the same old tricks though.  Sears, through a partnership with Yahoo is trying to capture the holiday spirit, and capitalize on the web sense of community to spur sales.  Of course, they promise exclusive deals as part of the promotion .

If history is any indicator, each of these efforts will result in traffic spikes (not only on websites but highways and mall parking lots as well!) of highly motivated would-be customers. These potential prospects certainly have a list of products in mind, or if they’re earlier on in the buying process, an idea of what type of product they’re shopping for.  Everyone hates to be sold, but loves to buy. Buying is about the experience, above and beyond the “right price”.  What will you do to convert those could-be customers into delighted customers?

Plato said, “necessity is the mother of invention.”  If Plato were faced with a marketing budget coming under fire to pare costs and brace for a long dark winter, I respectfully suggest he’d get focused on “inventing” some ideas around Optimization.  Your traffic is coming to your website for a reason, and if your conversion rate is in the single digits, perhaps it’s time to consider what your audience is telling you, and do something about it.  After all, you won’t have the same luxuries to keep spending $$ on driving an overabundance of traffic.  Perhaps now is the time to capitalize on opportunity: the web is your home to listen not to what they say, but rather to what they do! We’re always here to help you listen, and turn your audience feedback into actionable (and continuous) website improvements. 

Tomorrow we’ll start to see a harbinger of things to come.  Will Santa’s little elves be out in full force?  Most definitely.  But the larger question we want answered is, will the experience be enough to overcome the last stage of the buying process- reevaluation. So, in the name of research, go out and enjoy the deals… but let us know about the experience.

Do you see more sites this weekend who deliver on their promises, or are your expectations continuing to outdistance the experience they provide?  We want to know!  Our audience does too, so please sound off in the comments.

25 Web Form Optimization Tips – Covers most of the basics, a good reminder.

Usability of Toilet Paper – who could resist this analysis, especially as my friend David Dalka reminded me – P&G said at a search conference, no one would ever blog about toilet paper. Should it be bottom up or top down?

If you are so inclined you can read the review on the new book “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.”

Does your blogging move people? My buddy Mitch Joel explores the BuzzLogic/JupiterResearch study finds blogs influence purchase behavior. I had the pleasure of meeting Sandra Ponce de León, Senior Director of Marketing of BuzzLogic, right before she presented this at the recent eMetrics Summit.

Google Notes – a new plugin to add business data to Google Analytics data. I did add it to The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks & Tricks Collection.

Happy Halloween! Feel free to share some very interesting posts below in the comments (but please be considerate of our readers).