I can think of many people who I would enjoy spending the day with, but the person I would choose may be a bit obscure for most people. I would like to spend the day with Scott Cook. For those of you who don’t know who he is, Cook is the founder of Intuit, the billion dollar+ company behind Quicken and QuickBooks. A gifted entrepreneur, who took listening to his customers to the next level with Intuit’s “Follow Me Home” program. Intuit is a wonderful organization built on customer centricity, continuous improvement and enjoys a rich data driven culture.

An Inc magazine article writes about Cook:

“…Cook knew that if he and his company could just be alert and creative and open-minded enough, then making it so was possible, because would-be customers could tell them how.

He was right. So right, in fact, that during Intuit’s second decade, Cook says, customers “invented our mid-market business before we even saw the possibility.” Entrepreneurs had begun using Quicken to run the finances of their companies, modifying the program to suit their needs. When Intuit finally caught on, it listened again and created Quickbooks, a business finance program that now accounts for 15% of the company’s sales. (Small-business products and services as a whole account for 45%.)

And here’s where it can be argued that the impact of Cook’s work has been exponentially greater than merely what’s reflected in the billion-dollar business he’s built–that by pioneering the tools that made financial management possible for so many individuals and company builders, he and Intuit taught an entire country important things about business, and for many people made entrepreneurship itself possible, too.”

Avinash Kaushik (it would be great if he could join us too on this day, but that’s cheating) always speaks so highly of his former boss, Scott Cook. I think Scott could help me learn in a day what it takes to grow a software business. That’s especially important now with  FutureNow’s new business model that features OnTarget software-as-a-service. The goal of OnTarget is to make website optimization simple for every business the way QuickBooks did for bookkeeping.

Who would you choose to spend the day with?

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.

No doubt, these are exciting times if you love Web tools. For the many folks who are dizzy trying to sort out conversion optimization tool choices, it might be a little frustrating.

In “The Interactive Marketer 2.0,” I made the case for improved optimization in interactive marketing and to think outside the campaign. I listed several steps to get started, including the first step: Get good at free tools, then pay for them. Tools aren’t the indicator of success, but having a process and the people in place to take action are.

The good news in this barrage of 2.0 goodies is that many believe we’ve finally reached tool parity in the Web analytics space. JupiterResearch states the following:

“Despite some small skirmishes over capabilities like video and audio measurement, the Web analytics feature race is largely over,” explained John Lovett, Senior Analyst and lead author of the report for JupiterResearch. “Leading vendors will forge ahead by making data accessible and actionable while expanding offerings into adjacent marketing technologies.”

I agree.

Several people have accused me and my firm of having a Google bias. (Full disclosure: FutureNow is an authorized Google Optimizer consultant.) This simply isn’t true. A sizable percentage of our clients use other tools like Omniture, WebTrends, and Coremetrics. Our policy has always been to work with the analytics/tool vendors of the client’s choice. For many who are just getting started or are experiencing a marketing budget squeeze, the free and robust Google offerings simply make sense. Others have found a need for features available in other tools, and we’re happy to help them use those tools better.

A tool is just that, a tool.

A tool doesn’t persuade your visitors to take action, nor is it exclusively responsible for a company’s success in optimization. So when a client approaches me requesting a tool suggestion I always answer the same. If you have a tool in place now, use it better. If you don’t, start with something free and get good at using it.

A free tool may be all you need. While certain analytics vendors offer what are considered enterprise-level tools, the free and lower priced solutions are typically labeled for use by small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Still, you’d be surprised at the number of large clients who are satisfied with free or cheaper tools. And, we also have several SMB clients that have more sophisticated needs.

Bottom line: don’t get hung up selecting a tool. Any business, no matter the size, that isn’t optimizing today can extract great value from any tool on the market today. The important thing is to get started optimizing and measuring more effectively. There are no more excuses, not even a lower optimizing budget.

Which brings me to my next point. How does one use a tool effectively? You must operationalize it. Your process must lead your team to take an action, e.g., make a change that you can measure. Lastly, you must be able to gain insight about customer behavior from the data. And, you must do this over and over again. Without those three things in place, no tool will usher in the success you seek.

You must always do the work of optimization. A better treadmill won’t, all by itself, trim your love handles. Likewise, a cheap camera in the hands of a skilled photographer will always take better pictures than one used by a clumsy newbie.

A tool is a tool is a tool. Pick one, learn how to use it effectively, and you’ll see optimization success. Then we can talk about what other tools you might need.

Then we can all afford drool worthy gas grills in our backyards.

*Cross-posted on ClickZ.

. .

Editor’s Note: If you’re buried in data and looking for a better process to keep your campaigns customer-focused, accountable and metrics-driven, contact us today for a confidential and free consultation.

PayPal recently announced a streamlining of its payment flow process that doesn’t require a PayPal account to use. In other words, you can “check out” via PayPal, reap the security benefits of the merchant store not knowing your financial details, and pay for your item without having created any long-term relationship with PayPal (although they wouldn’t mind).

Adding PayPal to an e-commerce site can sometimes result in lower conversions — which makes sense because you’re being taken away from the experience you were just having at the merchant site. On the upside, some mid-sized UK merchants using this new process are reporting an increase in their monthly total payment volume, with gains of over 9% on average.

But I’ve got a different request altogether.

I use PayPal. A lot. Probably at least $500 a month of online purchases of various things that, at the time, I’m convinced I really need. It always amazes me how confusing the PayPal part of the checkout process is. First I’m on the merchant site. Then I’m off it — but not so obviously that I notice right away. It’s just a white, empty-feeling page with the merchant logo and a familiar PayPal button. Then the interface changes again to make it obvious that it’s PayPal.

In order to return to the merchant site, I have to click a small-font text link that competes with PayPal-branded buttons for my attention. At this point, I’m still not sure if the purchase “took” — that confidence doesn’t come until I return to the merchant site.

Won’t some of those e-tailers enjoying that volume increase please, please, PLEASE put just a fraction of that revenue toward hiring a bright developer to create a way to do this undercover? Its seems this could be easily resolved with a bit of (*buzzword alert*) AJAX.

Enter your PayPal user name, maybe some kind of modal lightbox pop-up to asks for my password, it goes back behind the scenes to confirm this with PayPal, then seemlessly closes the pop-up and updates my status on the merchant site to say, “Purchase completed via PayPal. Thanks for your business!”

I like using PayPal. I just don’t want to notice it. Kinda like the electricity in my home; I just want it to be there when I plug in my laptop.

What do you think?

InformationWeek chronicles a software patent filed by Big Brother, er, I mean Microsoft….

Overall, the software is like adware that figures out what ads to display based on files on the hard drive and what’s being displayed on the screen at a given moment. The advertising software, which could be part of the operating system, a standalone app, or an application feature, would use information gleaned from documents, music, computer status messages, and e-mails as context for ads. However, the software could conceivably gather information on every file on a user’s hard drive and send it to advertisers, and the application does little to assuage security and privacy concerns. Read the entire spooky article...

So, you mean to tell me there’s software in the works that’ll gently reach into my happy little computer, harmlessly read my innocent hard drive, stream my private data on a soft, fluffy cloud back to Microsoft, then, based on what it finds, kindly deliver me even more pleasant and delightful ads than I already get?

Boy, I can’t wait! The pop-ups, the spam, and the intrusive banner ads just aren’t enough to feed my appetite. Please, please, please give me more.

The answer to your marketing woes is not some new ad delivery system, or some new technology. When are businesses going to figure out that the simplest thing to do is work create a great product or service experience and let the rest take care of itself?

If you want a more sophisticated marketing strategy, try this.

If you don’t know how to create a great customer experience, try this — and pay special attention to Chapter 14.

Go ahead and download it now: Mac – PC. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.

(Betsy, I want more!!!)

And now for something completely different.

We do a lot of brainstorming … projects, problems, reports, how to communicate a difficult idea. And we’re pretty visual folks around here; we work best when we can “see” how our thoughts relate.

A while back, I wrote an article about the top ten application toolsthat consistently made our day. MindJet’s MindManagerwas (and still is) on the list. It’s the tool that lets us develop our ideas and visually map out plans of action on the spot, then share those creations with others.

Given our happy experience, I’d love to turn you on to mind-mapping. We mentioned the program to our colleague, Fredric Gluck, who was so thrilled, he wrote up this review so I could share his (and our) enthusiasm. Think of this as one of my very few word-of-mouth spots! Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 126

Let me first swear up and down: nobody bribed me to write this and nobody is planning to pop my picture on their “packaging” (although I am receptive to offers!). We were just sitting around the offices one day feeling really happy. The source of that happiness? Folks out there had developed a particular application that helped us accomplish some task with a minimum of fuss and bother.

And that got us thinking about those applications without which we really couldn’t do our job well. So what essentials are in the prop room of a conversion rate marketing boutique? Walk this way …

Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 95