Posts from — June 2008

It’s not easy to look at the website you work on every day and tell if it is effective. You already know the content, navigation and all the features. And it’s not like just looking at the website is going to really tell you everything anyway.

What you really need are some tools and techniques that get you in touch with what your users are experiencing. You need answers to questions like:

• Is my website up or down for my visitors?
• Can visitors find what they are looking for and searching for?
• Why are visitors coming to my website?

And now that we are talking about questions, how do you know how well your landing pages are working, how your offers are working or how full your online sales funnel is?

Simple, old-fashioned log file based website analytics isn’t going to answer all these questions. You need a comprehensive data collection and analysis process that gives you complete, actionable answers to the questions that are vital to making your website is working well.

There is good news though - getting these actionable answers has never been easier. Log file analysis, custom coded surveys, and huge expensive usability labs have given way to JavaScript based analysis tagging, easily deployed online surveys and usability labs using your video camera in a cubicle. With all these newer techniques available, it makes sense to revisiting how you get answers to your “does my website work?” questions. Almost every single question has a new, better way of getting it answered.

Is my website up and available for your users? How fast do my site pages load where my visitors are?

Internal site monitoring tools are useful for figuring out if your hardware and software are available for your visitors. But they have one significant limitation. They can’t tell if your website is available outside your network, out there on the great big Internet. Fortunately there are tons of hosted solutions that can be used to simulate visitor site access from around your country and around the world then alert you if problems crop up. Considering the price of these services are as low as $25 per month there isn’t a reason to not get a monitoring solution in place today.

Is my website easy to use?

Not long ago usability testing was the domain of big software companies. These companies had tons of money for a complete dedicated usability testing suite that often costs $100,000 or more. While usability test suites are expensive, the biggest problem with old style usability testing was that the software needed to be completely functional before testing could be done. The software had to be so complete that it was hard to get the usability testing feedback back into the development process and get the software out the door on time.

Somewhere along the way common sense took over and someone discovered that there was a ton of value doing informal testing early in the development cycle. Instead of big usability suite and tons of folks in the process, think small test groups and a home video camera with testing going on in a conference room or cubicle. Instead of complete functioning software, think HTML wire frame or screen markups. Small amounts of this type of informal usability testing will yield amazing insight into the usability of your site for a really low cost.

Can users find what they are searching for?

There are tons of visitors that come to your site and use your search function straight away. So if your search function isn’t working well, then you have big, big problems. Luckily there are two great ways of getting insight into if your visitors are finding what they are searching for: Search results analysis and an after-search survey feature.

Search results analysis helps you tune your website content so that searchers can find what they are looking for. Hopefully the search function on your site records what each and every visitor searches for – if not then it needs to. Once you get a hold of this data simply spend an hour a week looking through the searches visitors conduct and what your search feature returns. This will give you invaluable insight into the effectiveness of your search feature and the content tagging and key word richness of your page content. Use this insight to tune your content and your site search will get a lot better. The real bonus part of this activity is that you will help your SEO efforts with this search results analysis as well.

An after-search survey will give you insight into if your visitors are satisfied with the results of the searches they are conducting. The best implementation of this sort of survey is to add a small form to the bottom of your search results pages with the question “Did this search give you the information you needed?” with a yes/no and submit button. Getting good feedback using this simple piece of functionality gives you great actionable insight into your visitors thoughts on your site’s search effectiveness.

Why are users coming to the site? Are users satisfied with the website?

Sometimes the easiest way to get information you need from your visitors is to simply ask them. Sure, you could get a developer to code up a survey for you and figure out a good way to distribute it, but why bother? There are tons of great, hosted survey services offerings out there that require no developer time, no additional infrastructure and little to no setup cost. And you get great reports and can brand the surveys with your website look and feel. Using a survey service to get feedback directly from your users make sense on so many levels.

Are my landing pages successful? Are my offers successful?

Effectiveness of landing pages, offers and other forms has long been a challenging thing to measure - old style web log analytics solutions work but it’s not a pretty solution. Sure, your developers could make it work but your website would end up with fugly URLs, it’s difficult to scale if you traffic a ton of campaigns and it is far from web 2.0/ajax friendly.

But using JavaScript tagging solves most of these issues. Instead of analyzing web logs created by your webservers, JavaScript tagging uses an in-page script that is run when the page is loaded on the clients browser. When this browser script is run the clients’ browser communicates to a separate server to record the access. Using JavaScript tagging enables your website to keep its nice URLs and your developers can easily create a way of recording other information, like which campaign drew the person to the landing page, when the script is run. JavaScript tagging is a much cleaner, easier, accurate way of getting form conversion data about landing pages and offers.

What is the ROI for my online campaigns? How many online visitors, prospects and customers are visiting my website? Are the leads I am forwarding to sales good leads?

Sometimes you need big tools that are expensive to make and maintain to get good answers about your website. And this is one of those cases. To get critical end-to-end metrics like online campaign ROI, the effectiveness of the leads forward to sales and the like, you need tons of data. And that data isn’t available on your website. And even if it was in your website database, your transactional website DB is not setup to do in-depth data roll ups and reporting.

Let’s face it. The only place that campaign data, online visit information, sales data, and customer data come together is in a data warehouse. Hopefully the folks that run your CRM and ERP systems are already on the road to implementing this sort of thing and you can leverage those efforts. If not, then creating a marketing data warehouse is what you need to look into. There are a couple of vendors out there who sell “pre-built” marketing data warehouse products but don’t look for a complete solution without some heavy customization.

But after going through the implementation of a marketing data warehouse before, it’s worth it. Until you can give the business the answers they need to judge the end-to-end effectiveness of online marketing, they are just shooting in the dark. Even the most basic of end-to-end information has tremendous value. Expensive but well worth the investment.

There you have it - getting good actionable answers to your website questions has never been easier. And once you get them in place there is so much value that you will wonder how you got along before hand. Why not give these ideas a try and let me know how it goes?

Internet Marketing is a beast. It’s complicated. There are tons of experts. Tons of blogs. Tons of hype. And tons of “answers”.

It gets worse. Your website probably has some tricky marketing stuff going on, too. It’s marketing a wide range of product from cheap to pricey. It’s marketing lots of these products, in many different product lines, for numerous internal customers. It’s supporting an e-commerce, direct and indirect sales channels.

Given all that, and the pressure that comes from the fast pace of websites work, it’s easy to see how website honchos might get a bit lost and overwhelmed. How do you get your arms around what you need to get done strategically with all this going on?

I feel your pain. In fact, once I ended up with even more tricky marketing stuff, or perhaps a better way to say it is, with a trickier internal customer. I ran the website and Internet marketing group for a marketing-intelligence, web analytics company which made everyone there a bit of know-it-all… because well, they did know it all. And I spent more time than I would like to admit behind the power curve before we managed to get our act together.

But we did get it together. From 20 campaigns a quarter to 170 campaigns per quarter. From 900 unqualified leads to 27,000 qualified leads per quarter. From no marketing database to a data warehouse of 600,000 names. In two years.

Getting to a place where Internet marketing worked for us wasn’t easy. It was all pretty new and we didn’t really know what would work and what won’t. However, figuring out what works will be easier for you. Because I am all about sharing what works. In fact, this entire website is all about sharing what works.

The first thing you need to do to get good at Internet marketing is to get your mind around a couple of good practices: make your website the centerpiece of your marketing efforts and treat email marketing and your website as a single integrated effort.

Make your website the centerpiece of your marketing efforts

Your website is the most cost effective, targeted, measurable way of marketing. If you drive folks to the site, it’s probably fairly cheap to get them there. You can target your exact market very specifically. Your website can triage their needs and point them at the right product and the right sales channel. Plus you have ways of tracking how they got to the site and if they ultimately buy. It’s like old-school direct mail all jacked up on steroids except cheaper.

But your website can only do its magic if it is the centerpiece of your marketing efforts. If you want your Internet marketing efforts to be successful, then your marketing has to focus on driving folks to the website – the end result of all of your marketing should be your website.

That means that all campaigns drive folks to the website. All advertising drives folks to the website. All email marketing drives folks to the website. Even brand building activities should drive folks to the website. The more you focus your efforts on driving folks to the website the more folks will get there and get into your sales pipeline to potentially buy.

Email marketing and your website must be integrated

There are still so many companies that still treat email marketing and website marketing as separate almost unrelated things. But really they don’t work well until they are completed integrated together.

Websites really need email marketing to keep the company/visitor conversation going when your visitors aren’t at the website. If you wait for your website users to come back by themselves you are likely to wait a long, long time. Why not have a conversation with them and get them back to the site ASAP?

Without a focused persuasive website email marketing isn’t going anywhere, either. The website has to provide a great landing spot for email campaigns and have great marketing materials to support those visitors if they start poking around on your site.

You have to have both a persuasive website and great email marketing to make Internet marketing really work. It’s as simple as that.

So now that you are on board with some good Internet marketing practices let’s talk about getting you started on building a more effective Internet Marketing program. It’s just 8 steps but each will really help focus you on what is important.

8 Steps to Improve your Internet Marketing Program

1. Model your funnel – In the off line sales world, savvy sales folks know all about their sales funnel. They know how many folks they need to talk to, present to, create a proposal for and ultimately close to meet their quota. But do you know how many new visitors you need to hit your sales goal? Or how many new names you need on your list? How many prospects do you need to get qualified and off to sales as leads? Or close via e-commerce? You need good answers to these questions or it’s like you are flying a supersonic jet in the mountains with your eyes closed. You need to start managing your website just like the off line sales pros do - with a sales funnel.

2. Attract and engage using deliverables – Because you are a sharp marketer it’s likely you can target and attract the right folks and get them visit your site. But most visitors are going to bail quick if you can’t convince them that your firm and its products are the right choice to fulfill their needs.

You could convince them by offering competitive prices or slugging it out with your competitors on a feature-by-feature comparison basis. And provided you have a good position, it’s likely you will get this sale. But you want more than that. You want these folks to keep coming back to the site to buy again and again. To get those repeat visitors and sales you need to implant your firm as the thought leader about the problem your visitors need to solve. That way your visitors will be very likely to return over the long haul to get more of the thought leader knowledge that only you can give them. And return to buy as well.

The best way to achieve thought leadership is to attract visitors by offering the prospect information (a deliverable) that positions your company as the experts about the products you sell and the problems they solve. By using these deliverables and mixing how your traffic your deliverable offers out (co-branded email, SEM or adwords, etc.) you are going to fill up your funnel with the right folks. And these folks are very likely to stay in your sales funnel until they buy.

3. Tune your content - When folks show up at your website they are at different spots in the buying process. Some are just learning that they have a problem while others are ready to buy today. If your content is only for buyers or for learners, then someone isn’t going to get what they need. To make sure they get the info they need, identify what types of content is needed for each stage in your buying process. Then make sure you have content that fits the need. It’s the only way to keep your visitors engaged and your funnel full.

4. Optimize your landing pages – Landing page optimization is a cottage industry these days. Rightfully so, considering landing pages have an enormous impact on the effectiveness of your online campaigns. The good news is that landing page optimization should not be a huge battle over creative issues. Getting the right metrics and analysis process in place is half the battle. Getting good at trafficking marketing campaigns and tuning your landing pages is the other half. The creative part of landing pages tends to take care of itself if you use the metrics from your landing pages to guide your actions.

5. Close the deal using offers – We see it all the time. 3 for the price of 1. Sale today only. Offers come at us left and right all day for one simple reason. They work. And if you want to get your prospects off their duff and have a reason to buy now, you need to get offers in front of these folks pronto. To make that happen, you need the capability of delivering an offer to a prospect via an email or on your website. Then use that capability as much as possible without annoying the folks you are trying to close. Without offers you are leaving money on the table.

6. Qualification, qualification, qualification – In the real estate business it’s all about location, location, location. With sales leads it’s all about qualification, qualification, qualification. If you aren’t collecting important qualification questions like time until purchase, opportunity size, and “which product do they need?” questions, then you are spamming your sales folks with leads. Leads that aren’t ready to work with a sales person yet or might not even need any product you sell. And not only are you spamming your sales folks, if you don’t properly qualify leads, you are annoying the hecky-darn out of the prospects in your pipeline too. Qualification is, without a doubt, the most important part of the sales lead process.

7. Does your website work? – To get the critical insight to your websites’ effectiveness, you need to answer to questions like:

• Is my website up or down for site visitors?
• Can users find what they are looking for/searching for?
• Why are users coming to my website?

And now that we are talking about good questions, how do you know how well your landing pages are working, how well your offers are working or how full your sales funnel is? Simple, old-fashioned log file based website analytics isn’t going to answer all these questions. To answer these critical questions you need a comprehensive data collection and analysis process that gives you complete, actionable answers. Without these answers it’s pretty darn hard to end up with an effective website.

8. You can’t start a fire with a hammer – You need the right tools to start your online marketing fire. And a hammer, or in this case a couple of HTML pages, just isn’t going to cut it. That’s why your website better have a robust SQL database back end. Your email setup needs to support email list management and sending out tons of email. Campaign management including an automated way of creating customized landing pages is key to trafficking your outbound activities. Oh, and while you are at it you need a robust analytics and reporting capability tied into your marketing data warehouse, which includes sales, customer and contact data. Not small things but important tools if you want to get Internet marketing working in a way that is effective and measurable.

So now you have the basics you need to improve your Internet marketing program. Make your website the centerpiece of your marketing efforts. Get your website and email marketing efforts working together. Then get these 8 steps underway. Not simple stuff but these are the steps that I seen make Internet marketing really work. Why not give it a try and let me know how it goes?

Some folks swear by their homegrown content management system. Others like their open source content management system (CMS). Still others have gone all out and purchased a big package to solve the giant content management problem they have.

And that makes sense. There isn’t just one solution that works for every site and every organization. There is too much diversity in what folks want out of their content management system and processes.

Regardless of how you solve your content management problem, I do think there is a sweet spot of just enough CMS. A place where you get ease of use and the efficiency promised by content management systems. But not so much that your team loses its creativity, agility and control.

So what sort of features should you implement with your CMS to get into that sweet spot? Here is my take:

Use site-wide themes

To get the most value from your CMS, use its theme capability and make sure that you can globally change the look and feel of your website by changing a few template files. By template files, I mean something similar to themes in WordPress or a skin in DotNetNuke. You also want a globally included well-designed CSS so that you can make small styling changes without radically changing your content. If you are in roll-your-own mode you can still accomplish theme-like feature for your CMS without a ton of development work. We implemented a theme-like feature at NetIQ/Webtrends (we called it a page framework) and it worked really well.

Optimize for the list-view pattern

Tons of the content on websites is in a list-view pattern. Press releases are a great example of this pattern. Almost all sites have a list of press releases which link to individual press release views. Anytime there is a list of links – product data sheets, events, FAQ, knowledge base articles, sales offices for instance– and each of the links goes to content items of the same type you have content in a list-view pattern.

Because this pattern is so common, making a common authoring, storage and display system for this pattern can save your team tons of time. To take full advantage of the list-view pattern, make sure your CMS can:

• Create new “types” of content – Say you already store FAQ and product data sheets in your CMS. And tomorrow you find out that you need to store many “tutorial video clips” for download… Each tutorial video clip will have a title, one or more video clip files, tags and of course any text/html for the download page itself. You want to simply create a new content type in your CMS called “tutorial video clips” and start up loading them.
• Author all the types of content with a single authoring application – you want to be able to create press releases, events to go on a calendar or store “tutorial video clips” using a common set of tools in a single authoring application. This saves tons of time by not having to create custom admin interfaces for each type of content that your system will need to store.
• Ability to control the content displayed in a list – Say you want to list just 5 “tutorial video clips” for a product sorted by date. To support this sort of requirement, which is sure to come, you will need to be able to query the content database and get a list of links that have a limited number of entries, filtered by tag (in this case the product), and sorted by any field.
• Associate a view template to a type of content – Each type of content will need its own list formatting and view formatting. Press releases, “tutorial video clips” and FAQ lists and views are all going to look different, right? You need an association between a content type and a set of list-view templates, which described how the content should be formatted. Using this association you can make press release look like a press release and set of calendar events can be formatted on a calendar.

Authoring content in a web page

You want everyone to be able to author content and the ability to do it using an editor in a web page is super cool. With significant ease of use and accessibility using XHTML / AJAX based editors like FCK editor, your entire team can participate in the content creation fun. The ability to apply basic CSS styles even makes styling content easy and consistent. The only down side is that training will be required for your content creators to make sure your site ends up with well-constructed and well-edited content.

Don’t write the copy

I have seen some web shops where the web producers write the copy that goes on the website. Not a good idea. The business owner of the copy should be the person that gets the copy written. Ideally, they will get a professional copywriter to write it or, heaven forbid, do it themselves.

Limit content approval steps

Lots of big sites have very sophisticated content approval processes. But this isn’t where you get good value out of a CMS - keep your approval process basic with a single signoff from the business owner for the content. If there is legal or some other approval needed to get content on the site, then get the content’s business owner to solve that problem himself or herself. Don’t let your overachieving legal departments or micromanaging executives complicate what should be a simple straightforward process.

Use staging & publishing

Tons of sites develop, review and approve content on the live website and don’t use a QA server. But working on a live site for major changes in content or even small look and feel changes is like doing a high wire act without a net. Screw up one thing and your site is down until you can somehow patch it back together again. Ideally your CMS setup has the idea of a QA server, a staging server and a robust publishing process that gets the content out to the site. I find the lack of staging and publishing features a significant omission in popular open source system (hello WordPress) and amazingly, higher cost commercial software, too.

Make version control transparent

It sucks to lose work. There is nothing worse than saying to your boss “it was all done but someone overwrote the changes and we can’t get them back.” So naturally I recommend that your CMS should support file versioning, locking and rollback. It should take very little effort from your content authors to use version control with your CMS – version control should be completely transparent to the user and only announce its presence when there is a problem.

Exploit Plug-ins

Your website isn’t just content. It’s going to include some features that have become standard website fair like mapping, blogs, forums and dozens of other smaller items. If you do have the option of getting some of this functionality for “free” using a CMS plug-in and the plug-in fits your requirements, then just plug it in and be done.

Implement a well-known stack

The ability to add custom functionality to your CMS and support it is vitally important to the long term viability of your website. But there are still closed content management systems out there or systems so difficult to work with they might as well be closed. Make sure your CMS is LAMP, Java or .net and uses a well know SQL database if you want to make things work long term.

What not to do with CMS

There are also a few things that are NOT in the sweet spot of CMS. These features are harder to implement, keep running and don’t add a ton of value. Features not in the sweet spot of CMS are:
1. Lots of authoring/publishing roles – You shouldn’t need to have more than 5 or 6 standard roles in your CMS setup. Adding a lot of roles makes things more complex than they need to be.
2. Multi-level content approval – Multi level approvals don’t make sense in most cases. Use a single level approval process for content.
3. Single sign-on/LDAP – If directory services and single sign-on come for “free” with your CMS package or it’s less than a couple of days, then this integration makes sense. Weeks/months spent on directory services integration doesn’t.
4. User level access permission – Assigning user access rights to content at the user level never makes sense. Assigning user access rights at the group level does.
5. Excessive security (firewall rules and encrypted sessions) – It’s not such a big thing to have your unpublished content zipping around on the Internet in clear text. The snappy performance of unencrypted HTTP is more important than security in my book.
6. Site rollback features – I have never understood the need to roll back the site to a particular point in the past or seen it work. Punt on this feature.

Summing up the content management system sweet spot

That’s my view on getting the most bang from your buck when you implement CMS for your medium to large corporate websites. If you can combine these features with some basic solid processes then you are well on your way to website content management done right. The sweet spot isn’t elusive if you work through these issues carefully. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

I thought that by 2008 every website would have content management figured out. One way of solving the content management system conundrum would have emerged and everyone would be doing it. But guess what? It’s still a free-for-all out there.

Some folks swear by home grown stuff. Others like open source solutions. And others have gone all out and purchased a big package to solve the problem.

And I guess that makes sense. There just isn’t one solution that works for every site and every organization. There is too much diversity in what folks want out of their content management system (CMS) and processes.

But even with the diversity of needs out there, I do think there is a sweet spot of “just enough” CMS. A place where you get enough CMS to get ease of use and efficiency but not so much that you kill creativity and agility. Check out the article “The CMS Sweet Spot” for the details.

Regardless where you end up with a content management system, there are a set of issues critical to figure out if you want to run a content rich website and keep from hiring a legion of web producers to keep the lights on. More specifically, I’d say that there are 6 issues you should get figured out to make CMS work well for your organization:

1. Didn’t We Just do Something Like That? When your group cranks out the same project over and over, then it isn’t a project - it’s content production. Separating the projects that tend to require more up front work and client interaction from the day-to-day “update this section, launch this product, post this press release, change this page” sort of stuff will save so much effort that it will amaze you.
2. Release a Release Checklist – Wouldn’t it be great if you could know when the project is ready to release instead of just guessing? It would be great if you could move the “it’s done” decision from gut-feel to science. And that is exactly what a release checklist will do. A release checklist for projects and content production items introduces a touch of science in what is typically an emotional call.
3. Find Your Site Design Guide – You probably have a site design guide. Somewhere. If it was up to date, maybe you could avoid that “I want my project to work completely different than the rest of the site” conversation again. And you could avoid a lot of work too.
4. It’s Supposed To Be Easy, Right? – I have never seen a website that wasn’t supposed to be easy to use. But few folks really get in there and test their content, information architecture or functionality to figure out if it is easy to use. There is so much value in just a little testing that once you start your team will be hooked on getting first hand feed back from real users.
5. If You Don’t Track Bugs They Will Squash You – It’s simple. If you don’t track bugs, they don’t get fixed. And lots of defects on your site will kill its effectiveness. Plus with tons of cheap hosted or onsite bug database options, there isn’t a reason not to have one. Most bug tracking software will even help you track issues, too.
6. Perfect Your Release Process – Getting content and functionality from the website group live on to the site reliably is a must. If your team can’t do it perfectly every time, then getting it perfected should be next on your to do list. Not hard to do but critical to do.

Nothing on the list is rocket science but there are a lot of meaty issues to get figured out. The nice part is that whatever CMS you pick to get these issues worked out will first make things all that much easier to get your content management system straightened out. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.