Neither a Committee, nor the "Boss" should design a website

When it comes to decisions on how to design a website, we usually work in a team involving one or two MarCom people from our client staff, a designer, a content marketing strategist, and programmer developers.  But who makes the final design calls?  From experience, I will tell you about two disasters when it comes to design decisions, and then who should design your website.

The Wrong Way to Design Your Website

1. By Committee –  we once had a a law firm client insist on making all design decisions during a round table discussion of people trained… in the Law.  As you can imagine, they made very poor decisions this way based on what they thought might work.  We did finish the job, but you can imagine if we hired the same law firm to represent us in court, then insisted that all legal decisions come from a committee of designers and developers, what probably would happen.
2. Your Company “Boss” Decides -  rarely does any boss have the skills and experience needed to make good decisions for both design, and user interface optimization, two related but separate disciplines.   Odd then, how often they think they do.  Even odder — they hire a team that designs and develops 15-30 websites a year, plus brings career design, usability, advertising and marketing experience to the table, then wish to over-rule the experts they hired at every step.  Luckily this does not happen often, but it does make you wonder why they hired professionals in the first place.

How to Design a Website — for Best ROI Success

I’ll give you two simple rules here that will pay off in business goal results (like leads), assuming you’ve set trackable business outcome goals for your sites.

1. Respect Design/Usability experts — These professionals know how to direct eye flow on a page, set the tone for corporate identity, develop clear and easy navigation, and produce persuasive content that will increase your desired business outcome goals on your site.  Period.
2. Your Customers/Prospects themselves trump the experts, the professionals, the committee, and gasp… the boss.  If the prospects are shown to download a white paper more often in an A/B test because the button was green, but everyone on the internal team likes the blue button… which are you going to choose?  It’s that simple.

Customer feedback on what works and doesn’t, through a number of different testing methods, must trump the “faith based” (I believe this will work) HIPPO (Highest Paid Person in the Organization) every time.

And since we’re on the web, there are lots of efficient and cost-effective ways to get key feedback from real users — in one word, always be testing. You can even do this before the coders start to build your site with both heatmap results and written answers to your UI questions (check out FiveSecondTest.com). Then, during launch a carefully designed A/B, or Multivariate test almost always pays off to increase ROI (see: WhichTestWon.com)

These test results should trump your Boss, your Designer, your Web Developer… and even your own opinion (I am consistently surprised at results, even after a long career in advertising, marketing and publishing).

Three Final Website Design Tips:

• Always tie your design into trackable business outcome goals at your site (contact us to help you develop some custom analytics reports to help you do this)
• There is no “best practice” to be derived by reviewing other tests because your mix of goals, offers, value propositions, and prospect personae’s are different
• The “design” is not finished when you reach first implementation… in fact, it is never finished. Via testing both B2B and B2C companies continually improve their results by testing color, type, placment, image, and message variables on a regular basis.

And in case you’re still wondering what to do when the boss or the committee asks for an unreasonable change at your website, tell them you will test their idea, and let the customers decide.

I write for other publications from time to time, in the area of WordPress Development strategies and Optimization tactcs. This is the second post in a CMI series on Connection Cycle Marketing (CCM). 

Remember you are not optimizing a “website,” but actually optimizing the way your visitors/prospects THINK about your company and its offers.

With that in mind, it’s TLA time, folks (Three Letter Acronyms)! I’ll walk you through three types of optimization and their associated tests: what they are, why you would use them and when they make sense.

VBO – Visitor Behavior Optimization

VBO answers the “why” of visitor behavior beyond the “what” we get from analytics. For instance, with VBO testing you can ask a visitor “Why did you exit our shopping cart?” or “Why did you choose (or not choose) to download our white paper?” Analytics only report what users did or did not do.

One popular method to test for VBO is to get a heat map of where people click on a page and then ask them questions that get to the “why” of their behavior.

Take a look at FiveSecondTest.com. The screenshot shown is one kind of VBO test we did for CMI (click to enlarge). It provided feedback on where people tend to click on the page (heatmap at left) and what they remembered and believed the site to be about.

Another way to hear what real customers think (not what “HIPPOs” think – see below) is to do an exit survey. I like 4QSurvey.com for this. Note that there are a lot of survey plug-ins and methods out there, but the 4Q people provide a robust community to help you analyze the results you get.

When to use this:  VBO testing is ideal once your have a preliminary design for your site before it is developed. You can quickly get feedback and make changes based on feedback before expensive programming changes are required.

LPO – Landing Page Optimization

LPO focuses on what a user does on a particular page, such as a lead form page for a B2B company or a shopping cart page for a B2C company.

One tactic that works well is a simple A/B test to rotate a different page with a twist on the headline, graphic and call to action to every other visitor. Then you pick the page that “won” (i.e., resulted in the desired outcomes).

An alternative to this is the multivariate test, which rotates in different combinations variables of page elements, so several versions of a page are presented. In a simpler multivariate test where you mix two headlines, with two compelling graphics and two calls to action, this would create nine versions of a page to test. Because you test more combinations, there is a greater chance you will find a version that “wins” with optimal results. Multivariate tests often result in better optimization gains, but require more visitors to the page to get actionable results.

Have a good look at WhichTestWon.com for some great examples. Instead of making arbitrary guesses on what will do well, you let your real visitors choose what “wins.”

When to use this:
I recommend using LPO after your site is launched. These are tests you can continually run and tweak.

CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization

Like LPO, CRO focuses on increasing the number of “conversions” on your website. Conversions are desired business outcomes, such as when you “convert” a visitor to a prospect when they complete a lead form. The main difference with CRO is that you usually test a series of pages instead of a single page. In essence, you are looking at the sales funnel that leads from your home page to a secondary page to an actual desired outcome page.

The CRO testing method may involve all the elements and methods discussed so far. It answers the “what” question but then you need to use the other strategies to understand “why.”

While you can use A/B and multivariate tests for CRO, Google Analytics provides a visual way to review such sales funnels, but you only get a “what” answer with it — what visitors did (went through the funnel) or did not do (bounced away from one page), etc.

This screenshot from Google Analytics (click to enlarge) is one way to consider a funnel (i.e., a series of pages leading to a goal). This is for the site CoffeeNutHut.com, and shows which pages best “engaged” visitors. We can study the top pages and ponder why they engaged better than those that didn’t. Often, we think of a funnel as leading to a specific outcome. For instance, in B2C that might be an ecommerce sale, or in B2B, a lead conversion. Here, we are just looking for best ways to funnel visitors into becoming “engaged” — continuing on to view three or more pages at the site.

TIP: All studies show that “engaged visitors” are most likely to buy your service or products, so this is an important custom segment to follow in analytics.

When to use this:
Like LPO, use CRO once your site has launched to continually improve your site.

General strategies for testing

Regardless of the test you use, keep these tips in mind:

Always be testing
This is a great way to continually improve your site ROI. Vanquish the “brochure site” mentality. Your website is NOT done when you finish the design; it’s only DONE when you finish optimizing for desired results, then start over.

Always build in a component to answer “why”
While analytics are critical in answering what your visitors are doing and not doing, aim to understand why your site visitors behave in certain ways by using tools such as VBO heat/memory tests, exit surveys and polls. You need to actually ASK your customers and prospects for this information.

Stop relying on the faith of your HIPPO
Often, content marketing teams default to the the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” (HIPPO), which is “faith based”, as in, “I really believe this will work.” Instead, reply with “let’s test that with another idea in an A/B test and see which test wins…by actually seeing how real visitors behave.” Worried about offending the HIPPO? Don’t. You are respecting their opinion by including it in the test, plus using a method of increasing site ROI that they can appreciate.

I look forward to your comments and questions. You can find more posts in the series on “Connection Cycle Marketing” on my author index page at Content Marketing Institute.

One of the best things you can do to wring more ROI out of your website is to optimize for desired business results like sales leads.  Few clients are doing this yet.  Why?  Not in their habit path, no one understands it, or sometimes even worse — they are making faith based assumptions (“I think this is going to work”) and gambling their web results on guesswork.  WebFadds provides testing services, and to help you understand more about them and how to be successful with them — here are some strategies and tactics with visuals to help:

• Measurable Desired Business Outcome(s):  What is the desired, and measurable result that your MarCom team  wants?  For B2B, this is often leads generated via a lead form, and to track conversion rates, we need a unique “thank you” page that a prospect sees only after filling out the form.  Sometimes it’s “engagement.” Sometimes a download of an important White Paper.  We can’t improve results unless they are well defined and trackable.
• General Factors that Improve Results:
  • The clarity and strength of your value proposition:  Often, clients are unclear on the question of why choose this company and its product or service.  Another mistake is to believe that visitors will choose to surf the site and figure out their value –not true and dangerous for two reasons:  they may not take the time to do this, and even if they do they may take the time, they may form a very different concept of value about your company,  its services and products.   State the value clearly on the testing page.  You have the opportunity to help them visualize and “feel” good about your company — take it.
  • Reduce “friction”:  Anything that feels too hard or takes too long = friction.  Longer forms do not convert as well as shorter forms.
  • Reduce “anxiety”:  People worry about the credibility of a company, and what they will do with email and other personal information.
  • Increase motivation:  Promise them something like a free white paper, etc.

Types of Tests

• VBO – Visitor Behavior Optimization: In VBO, we are interested in the “Why” of visitor behavior, beyond the “What” we get from Analytics. Sometimes “Where” too. One popular method here is to get a heat map of where people click on particular pages, then ask they questions that get to the “why” for the behavior.  This is good to test a design before you even implement it, because the visitors are just reacting to a JPG of the page.  Another type of VBO test you can take is an exit survey to help you answer the “Why” of visitor behavior.  Analytics answers “what” your site visitors do and don’t do, but not why — so the best thing to do is simply ask visitors questions that help you understand more about their behavior relating to your desired business outcomes.
  
  Above are some results of one kind of VBO test we did for Content Marketing Institute , and  for International Performance Group (Click to Enlarge).  It provided feedback on where people tend to click on the page (heatmap at left), and also what they remembered and believed the site to be about.
  
• LPO Landing Page Optimization:  This is probably what I will recommend for this client based on your comments.  Here we focus on improving desired business results on only one page.
  • We work with either Google Website Optimizer, or another good option Visual Website Optimizer.  Each offer certain strengths — VWO offers a WordPress CMS plugin, for example.
  • A/B Test: Here you are testing two separate page designs.  This requires a complete separate design for each page, and approximately 1000 unique visitors for a valid test (see next point).  Google has a short video example:
    
    
  • Multivariate Test: Here you only need one page, but you test different combination of persuasive elements on that page to optimize for desired business outcomes.  One popular set to test is:  Two Headlines, Two Persuasive Images, and Two Calls to action.  You would then be showing six different page element combinations to visitors, so you would need 3000 unique visitors for a valid test (see next point).  Google has a short video example:
    
    

• CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization: This one is similar to the nature of LPO in that you are interested in increasing the number of desired business outcomes, called “conversions” in analytics (when a visitor completes a lead form they “convert” from a visitor to a prospect). The main difference here is that you usually will take a series of pages into consideration — the sales “funnel” leading from your home page to a secondary page to an actual desired outcome page, for example.
  Above (click to enlarge) is a “funnel visualization” (series of pages leading to a goal) for a client that would like to have more visitors download their whitepaper.  CRO often involves looking at which pages are not functioning well to get visitors to complete a desired business outcome, and here one problem is the homepage.  They have no call to action on their home page to funnel visitors to this goal.
• Number of Visitors to get a Valid LPO Test: Think 1000 for an A/B test (500 interact with each page), and 3000 for a 3 element Multivariate Test (500 visitors interact with each of six page element combinations).  Google adwords is an excellent way to gather visitors for a test (figure .50 cents average per click, or $500 for 1000 visitors plus management fee).  CRO tests may require move visitors.  We can give you a quote on managing your PPC ad campaign.

Two Final Pieces of Optimization Test Advice:

• Always be testing — drive this tactic into your marketing culture, and you will definitely see an increase in ROI.
• Avoid the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), because at best when a C-Level Manager says “I think this will work”, you are gambling on faith instead of asking your prospects and customers directly via VBO, LPO, and CRO testing.

Read more here:  WebFadds VBO-Max Services |  Contact us today for a quote.

Last week I wrote about how Content is the Kings’ Gold… but not the King. In that post, I promised I’d write a bit more about “Authentic Connections”, and different kinds of Optimizations that the King can use  as he or she pays out the gold.  We’ll get a big picture feel for how this works here.

Connection Cycle Marketing:  Online marketing continues to rapidly evolve and so do the related TLA (Three Letter Acronym) disciplines of SEO, SEM, CRO, LPO, VBO, etc. All are part of the marketing mix you need for success, but there must be a simpler way to think about going about it?  Yes… and no — we’ll look at the bigger picture here — the “Yes” part because it’s simpler. 

I like to include them all together under an umbrella term I call Connection Cycle Marketing — CCM.  The important point about this focus is that Connection, between you and your prospects, is the real King you are after.  You are King of your business, but your prospective customers are King of your livelihood, so while Content is very important (your Gold) it is a kind of currency you pay out to get to that final goal — the authentic Connection with site visitors.

“… you think in terms of optimizing visitor behavior at your site — a subtle but very important strategy.  You want to optimize for what visitors will think, instead of just what you want them to do.”

Understand Using the Rule of Fours…

Let’s consider high level strategic thinking by grouping tactics four ways.  People seem to like grouping things in fours, going back thousands of years.  We have the Greek concept of four primary elements, four Apostles, the four noble Truths in Buddhism, and the four Horsemen of the Apocolypse.  We will look at three interesting “fours” for Connection Cycle Marketing.

1 – Optimize. 2 – Connect. 3 – Convert.  4 – Repeat. That’s the first “four” approach — the WebFadds rule of Four.  Optimize includes not only SEO, but also Landing Page Optimization, and Conversion Rate Optimization.  Plus you need an optimized CMS — another TLA standing for Content Management System. SEO gets people to your site, and the others make sure they complete desired business outcomes.  Then you Connect with visitors so that you may Convert them to customers.  What did I leave out?  Well, it’s implied that if you’re optimizing something at a website, it must be Content.  Let’s look at that closer in the next grouping of fours…

1 – Social Media Marketing.  2 – Content Marketing.  3 – Optimizations.  4 – CRM for Lead Nurturing. Now we start with Social Media and seek to connect there with real people, gaining an “authentic connection” instead of simply auto-blasting links to posts and content on your site.  We use good Content marketing tactics to further “romance” prospects “authority, liking and reciprocity”, as Scott Brinker writes about it – in Four Principles of Conversion Content Marketing. Then we convert, often with a lead form, and while they are prospects we use a CRM (this TLA stands for Customer Relationship Manaager) for lead nurturing.

One More Group of Four…

Brinker's Post-Click Marketing Heuristic (click to see larger), is a good way to work through a Marketing attack keyed to audience types.

1 – Audience Type Awareness.  2 – Content to Persuade each Audience Type.  3 – Visitor Behavior Optimization (VBO).  4 – Transform Leads to Customers. A couple of key differences in this fourfold approach:  you begin by understanding different types of visitors with different learning styles, needs, and thought processes will visit your site, then instead of thinking about optimizing a site… you think in terms of optimizing visitor behavior at your site — a subtle but very important strategy.

You want to optimize for what visitors will think, instead of just what you want them to do.  This requires some different testing methods, and design tactics.  Scott Brinker, again, has some very interesting related insights and has developed a detailed chart in a post on “A Post-Click Marketing Heuristic.”  He identifies three major focus areas in his chart:  Context, Content, Conversions (I guess that would be CCC).  I like his work, but respectfully submit that he has left out the whole unification of the web team with the sales team via quality of lead captured and automatically entered into a good CRM. Finally you need feedback from Sales to MarCom-Web Team so they can adjust tactics based on sales results.

This should give you some good ways to approach CCM, and all the other TLA’s.  We’ll talk more about them here as we go, and I look forward to your thoughts and comments.

Web Engagement, Social Marketing Tip, and Visual Optimization

On today’s web, it’s all about Engagement and Connection.  In fact, Connection now trumps Content (see why in Why Content is King No More)  as the most important part of your marketing tactics.  Connection to who?  Prospects, leads, and customers.  One on one.  Think of this like what your sales people do at a tradeshow.  They engage booth visitors and get to know them.  People buy from those they know.  That’s the promise of Social Media, and many national brands have already proven this — two times in a row, SouthWest Air has had its highest ticket sales ever, from promotions that only happened on Twitter.  So… what is your “1:1″ marketing strategy?  In this post, I’ll give you some tips, tactics and techniques to help you. One big key — insights into your potential customers. Learn more about 1:1 marketing strategies and tactics from Marketing Experiments (highly recommended) – One To One Marketing.

Another new TLA — W.E.M., Web Engagement Management

Ok… so how do we engage and learn more about our prospects?  How about yet another TLA — Three Letter Acronym.  Tired as I am of TLAs, I like what this one is about… WEM — Web Engagement Management.  In a great post on the “5 Pillars of W.E.M.”, writing at CMSWire, Barb Mosher identifies them as:

1. Content Optimization
2. Multi-Channel Management
3. Conversational Engagement
4. Demand Generation
5. Sales & Relationship Automation

More on each point in future posts, but the key is that all five are required for an effective Web Engagement strategy.  Read the source article here:   5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management

Social Marketing Tip with HootSuite

So, let’s look at a tactic to address two WEM “pillars”:  Multi-Channel Management, and Conversational Engagement.  Time is a scarce commodity in most MarCom departments, and especially during this time of rapid social technology change.  That’s why I like HootSuite for its team workflow and cross platform engagement automation features.  So, my tip of the week is show below — use HootSuite’s “hidden” ability to profile tweeters:

Above (click for larger view), using Hootsuite to first monitor important business conversations, we can then learn more about a prospect by clicking on their photo/logo, then clicking on “view more tweets from…”.  Use this tactic to find out how influential the prospect is, and what their major interest focus might be.  Contact us to explore ways to use this engagement tool in your 1:1 marketing strategy.

Visual Media Optimization for Your WordPress CMS

With millions of smartphones, and now over 2 million iPads sold with more “tablets” on the way, now is the right time to consider your visual media methods of engagement and persuasion on your site.  We develop successful CMS solutions on the WordPress platform and are always looking for good ways to do this, so I’m pleased to recommend a versatile way to do that — with one note of caution.  Slideshows are great visual ways to explain B2B technical concepts in a persuasive and easy to understand way.  Consider the slides we did for a recent client, Lopez Research (click small image at right to see site).  This is a simple and effective way to present what you do in a way that engages emotions.  Remember — everyone makes a buy decision based on emotion.  What’s the caution?  Well, right now Apple has said they will not use Flash on their platforms, and most slideshows are done using Flash to drive them.  We look for new emerging standards in HTML 5.0 to break through this wall soon.

Above, a new plugin offers you the ability to show images that zoom and pan, while text explains the concept pictured and gives a link deeper into your site content.

Have a Web Engagement Management challenge you’d like us to review?  Great — contact us today and we’ll do a free review.

WebFadds is an Agency specializing in CMS Websites and Business Blogs, plus Marketing techniques optimized for Connection Cycle Marketing — CCM. We focus on delivering SEO savvy, Content Management System solutions on the market-leading WordPress platform, then provide Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Landing Page Optimization services to ensure you get maximum visitors converting to prospects, leads, and customers.

How do you capture key prospect information on your site? Until recently many using a CMS simply installed a forms processing plugin and enjoyed the convenience of an automatic contact form entry to their email. But now there are new options that include cloud computing solutions for better Customer Relationship Management (CRM). We’ll examine the relative merits of three ways to process lead forms in this post.  These solutions are key to what happens AFTER your landing page is optimized to increase conversions… more visitors converting to leads is great, but you have to “nurture” those leads in an efficient and effective way.

Three ways to process your lead forms

1. Old School CMS Forms Plugins (that’s so 2008): Content Management Systems (CMS) made a big splash in the last 4-5 years as excellent ways to efficiently manage content and operate on the web.  Part of their allure is the array of “plugins” available — mini-programs that help you get things done.  For example, we build sites exclusively on the WordPress CMS platform, winner of Best Open Source CMS for 2009 (PACKT Publishing), and there are a number of free open source plugins available for it, including our preferred “cForms II”, a very robust and extensively featured solution that includes the ability to develop multi-page forms.

• Advantage:  Automatic forms processing sent to one or more Admin. emails, plus a variety of features depending on plugin used.  Free, if you are using an Open-Source program, though we always recommend you donate to plugin programmers.
• Weaknesses:  Does not provide lead nurturing (sales focus and follow-up) features — requires manual entry into a corporate CRM, or custom programming for same.  Does not include other features including survey and poll reporting, the ability to collect payments for seminar sign-ups (etc.).  Mainly — no easy integration with an emerging set of business mission tools including CRM systems, and eMail Newsletter software.  Your IT group is forced to focus on maintaining a free plugin and to rely on the plugin programmer to keep it in compliance without professional and timely support.

2. Forms Processing Providers – More Integration & Features:  Recently a number of good forms processing companies like WuFoo.com, and FormStack.com (we’ve used both — compare pricing and features at those sites).  This is a smarter way to collect data, for several reasons including range of features, and ease of integration with other services like CRMs, Payment Providers (PayPal), and eNewsletter providers (MailChimp, etc.).

• Advantage:  Better integration with key business systems.  More features including the ability to collect and assess surveys, and the ability to accept payments for events.  Good prompt technical support.  Easy interface for creating forms.
• Weaknesses:  Does not provide lead nurturing (sales focus and follow-up) features, although most service providers automate import into CRMs.  It’s not free — but then nothing really is.  Even “free” open source plugins require configuration work and may be in conflict with other plugins.

3. CRM Form on Your Site For Direct Capture of Prospect Details:  All major cloud Customer Relationship Manager systems like SalesForce.com (larger companies), and BatchBook.com (for smaller businesses — we use them) offer the ability to plugin forms and collect prospect data directly from  your site right into the CRM.

• Advantage:  Eliminates manual entry into CRM.  Provides immediate sales and lead nurturing focus, a very important strategic objective for every business.  Good integration with other business systems including eNewsletter providers (MailChimp), and forms processors listed above.
• Weaknesses:  Does not provide some features of Forms Processors including payment acceptance, and poll and survey processing.  It costs money — most good business services do.  Initial learning curve for sales and marketing team, though we see this as a net gain and a real strength after everyone comes up to speed.  Why?  Done correctly, you should close more sales.

A couple of FAQ’s

Why Would You Ever Need Both a CRM and a Forms Processing Solution in Addition to Your CMS?

First of all, CMS options are limited and picking from the healthy field of both CRM solutions and Forms Processors gives you an excellent selection of features, beyond what a CMS can provide.  Next, recall that open source plugins are “free” and so do not provide professional support options.  Most CRMs currently do not provide the same out of the box features of Forms Processors including payment processing, and survey/poll management.  We’ve been asked, “shouldn’t the CMS do it all?”  No.  A CMS is a complex system on it’s own with a primary focus on delivering site content dynamically, not Forms Processing, or Customer Relationship Management.  To do Forms Processing and CRM well, requires a sophisticated system which is best maintained, updated, and supported separately from your CMS.

What is Your Recommended CMS/CRM System?

At this time we always recommend a good CRM for the focus it brings to the sales process.  It is not just about content — authentic connections are what it takes to get the sales you need.  Your CMS is for web content management, not lead nurturing.  Then, we recommend an integrated eNewsletter provider like MailChimp.  This is our “solution set #1″:

CMS –> CRM –> eNewsletter Provider (ie. We use WordPress –> Batchbook.com –> MailChimp.com)

When you need direct payment processing, or survey management, we then add a Forms Processor that will integrate with the first set, and seamlessly inport data into your preferred CRM.  You may only need this option seasonally.  It is our “solution set #2″:

CMS –> Forms Processor  –> CRM –> eNewsletter Provider (ie. We use WordPress –> WuFoo.com –> Batchbook.com –> MailChimp.com)

Contact us at WebFadds.com for a 1-page proposal with more details geared to your operation.

WebFadds has added a Mobile Readiness PAK for WordPress CMS installations based on installation, configuration and testing methods reviewed here. Cost ranges between $399 and $999 depending on the complexity of your theme, configuration, and features required. Below you can learn more about how it works. Contact us for a quote today.

As most people have noticed, mobile device use is exploding, and with the high-successful launch of the iPad, now is a great time to consider your Mobile Readiness strategy for your website.  Is it ready for web visitors with tiny smartphone screens, and also for site admins working on the road?

Smartphone Trends = Mobile Browsing:

• The top three smartphone makers sold 800 million units last year — all carrying web browsers that do better with sites optimized for their small screens
• Apple is on target to sell around 5 million iPads (close to 3 million already) — just in 2010 — and sold 25 million iPhones in 2009 (a 100% increase over the previous year)
• Flash is not supported by the majority of mobile phones. Steve Jobs has said the iPad will not support Flash. Flash looks to be sunsetting in favor of HTML5 video standards.

Solutions to Make Your WordPress CMS Website Mobile Ready:

There are two sides to the site mobile readiness game, both involving simplifying delivery of site content and functions for a smaller screen — for site visitors, and site administrators.  And, the solution technology is emerging and evolving quickly.  At last count there were  eleven plugins for WordPress with mobile solution features, and more than one online service designed for same.  We’ve tested several and believe the following three solutions are flexible enough to accommodate just about any WordPress CMS set-up.

Above, the Wapple plugin for your WordPress CMS aims to make on the road editing easy for administrators using a smartphone.

For Administrators, Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress: This plugin helps you write posts and manage your site from mobile devices. WordPress Mobile Admin is a WordPress control panel for your mobile. It works on every device and is fully featured. You can write and edit posts, moderate and reply to comments, update and manage tags, categories and pages.  Learn more here.

For Visitors to your Sites - WordPress Mobile Pack: The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to your iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini mobile, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm visitors without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme. The theme also includes the ability for your visitors to easily switch between the WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.   Learn more here.

Above, Mobify is a one source solution for mobile design, analytics, mobile advertising, and integration with Social Media.

Combine mobile design and ads with Analytics with Mobify: Mobify is an interesting service play offering extended styling to design a mobile layout for your website, the ability to capture mobile traffic from Twitter & Google, and a platform to manage mobile analytics & advertising. They have their own WordPress plugin for smooth integration in to your WordPress CMS.  Take a tour at Mobify.

We believe that the best solution will involve a couple of the technologies profiled here, and selected to best meet your website mobile mission objectives.  Contact us today for a no obligation consultation.

In this ISSUE:

In this issue we will reviewhow WordPress 3.0 (coming in late April) allows you to adjust your menus to deliver popular content, a new, easy way to do optimizations in your WordPress CMS, and how a well-known SEO company optimized a landing page to increase sales by $1 million a year.  Our topics are directly related.  The more ways you can deliver what your visitors actually want (not what you think they want), the more successful you will be.  $1 million.  Can’t promise you that much, but following the techniques given here will definitely increase your conversions — when a web visitor “converts” to a prospect, lead, or customer. And that’s what it’s all about in the Connection Cycle Marketing (CCM) game.  Let’s learn some specifics.

WordPress 3.0 to Deliver Precision Content Delivery via Menus ::::::::::::

Above, note that you will be able to easily create a menu item that links to individual posts, media, categories, and post tags.

Know what your prospects want.  Deliver it. Have you used Analytics to note key content that “engaged visitors” hunt for at your site (“engaged visitors” are those viewing 3 or more pages)?  Once you do, you’ll be able to better deliver it to visitors using WordPress 3.0 enhanced menu options.  Due in late April, this menu option enhancement should prove to be very popular with CMS managers on the WordPress platform.  Why?  For the simple reason it will be easier to deliver exactly the content that visitors seek with the new system.  Imagine a menu link directly to a compelling sales video.  How about direct to a list of post and pages for a popular “tag”?  Good work WordPress core team.

New Visual Website Optimizer for WordPress Plugin ::::::::::::

Above, the Visual Website Optimizer shows you which page variation gives you the best chance to beat the original test version.

Optimize visitor behavior. It’s one thing to get visitors to your site and help them find the content they seek — next you have to convert them from visitors to prospects, leads, and customers.  And, now there’s a helpful plugin from Visual Website Optimizer to help you do just that.  This is good because although Google also makes a Website Optimizer (we like and use it too when its strengths are appropriate), this company provides a WordPress plugin to help you set up the campaign parameters on your site.  We also like its easy to understand reporting charts.  You define a control version of a page, then some variations.  The Optimizer tracks what visitors do, and reports the best variation showing the highest likely improvement.  Always be testing.  Always be optimizing.  Get the plugin here.

How an Optimization company made $1 million for SEOmoz.org ::::::::::::

Million Dollar Case Study: If you’re concerned with SEO, you should be aware of the helpful professional tools and information you can find at SEOmoz.org.  They’re great at SEO — which gets visitors to your sites.  But, the major lesson to note here is that SEO only gets people to your site… you could be leaving literally millions on the table, unless you do what SEOmoz was smart enough to do next.  They optimized, with the as a team effort with Conversion Rate Experts.  Here are the major success points for their campaign:

• They did a lot of listening — to the customer.  Time and again, I see clients making the mistake of thinking that people who know their product and service inside the company… know what to do.  They don’t.  Only your customers know what they need you to do.  SEOmoz, heeded this wisdom, talked with paying and non-paying members, and let their consultants become a customer.  They took surveys and analyzed them.  They listened.  It paid off.
• They used quick wireframe pages to consider new page prototypes
• They ran a series of tests for continual improvements
• They ignored “best practices” and quadrupled the length of the conversion page to better engage visitors
• They explained precisely what customers would get
• They used compelling video to tell the story
• They served customers after subscription (reducing cancellations and charge backs) with a getting quick started guide

Read the rest of the article>>

That’s it for this issue — contact us when you need to Optimize, Connect, and Convert!

SPECIAL: Mention this post to me, and receive 10% OFF on a Social Media Marketing campaign thru June of 2010

WebFadds.com is an agency focused on CMS & Business Blogs, Social Media Marketing, & Landing Page Optimization solutions — a “Connection Cycle Marketing” approach for web mission success. Contact us today for a free quote. And, be sure to download our latest Guide: “Winning Twitter Marketing Tools & Tactics”.

In this ISSUE:

NOTE: There’s still time to save on our WordPress Service and Upgrade PAK — thru. Jan. 15th. See: WP 2.9.x Features & Upgrade Special

Best ROI for online marketing in 2010? ::::::::::::

We have a new poll at LinkedIN of C-Level Marketing Managers to find out what popular marketing methods they believe will be key for ROI this year — you can take it too: BEST ROI POLL . Initial results (51 respondents) are shown here (click to enlarge)… and there’s a demographic breakdown revealed after the poll is taken showing age range, company size, role and other metrics. So far, CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization – is winning, by a nose over SMM – Social Media Marketing. Did you hear that Pepsi pulled out of the Super Bowl advertising in favor of Social Media? Hmmmm. This is definitely the year for Social Media in terms of spending, but I am in agreement with the current poll stats that CRO will be best for your ROI. I’ll report more on the Poll results in a future post, but in this issue I’d like to give you some tips about each for each of the tactics queried in the Poll: CRO, SEO, PPC, eMail, and SMM.

CRO Tip: Click Heat Maps for VBO… ::::::::::::::::::::::::

Above, (click to enlarge) the click heat map for WPsiteHosting.com shows what elements draw clicks and gives some commentary.

Ok, get ready for another TLA (Three Letter Acronym) for this issue’s tip on optimizing — VBO… Visitor Behavior Optimization. How many times have you been in an internal discussion about what color a box or link should be on your page so more people would click it? Everyone’s got their opinions — even the pros, and often just about everyone’s opinion is wrong — even the pros. So why not ask your visitors? WebFadds has been doing just that and learning some very good things about what visitors do at our site and client sites. Some methods include Click Heat Maps (click screenshot to see one for WPsiteHosting.com — where a lot of our clients have their sites), recorded visit tracking (no audio), and usability testing with transcript and recorded audio. We’re building this in for original design, redesign, and landing page optimization — read more about it here, and contact us for a quote.

SEO Tip: Title & Primary Terms:::::::::::::::::

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org (excellent site with tools to review your web performance), has done a couple of studies in the US and in Europe that point to a key tip for SEO workers: make sure your primary key phrase is in the FIRST part of your Title Tags. Below is a screenshot of an SEO plugin we install as part of our Max-SEO service with a key phrase highlighted in the Title Tag Entry field. To this advice, I would add that the most successful results we see with our clients come when that same primary key phrase (don’t try to use too many keywords/terms in a shotgun approach… instead, rifle in on one phrase for which you want to rank well) is used in seo-savvy copy that still reads well. This relates to the part of Google’s ranking formula called “density” — the number of times a phrase occurs on a page or in a post.

SMM Tip: Listen to Local Tweeters :::::::::::::::::

Above, Nearby Tweets is "tuned" into local talk about SEO.

Use NearbyTweets.com (version 2 BETA adds some great features including saved searches, search radius and more), to find people in your city talking about what you sell. Engage them. Meet them. Do so from a social, or soft-sell standpoint. Don’t begin by pushing what you have to sell. Just talk to them, and listen. In sales, there was a strategy called “consultative selling” that was very popular early this decade. It still works. Listen and wait for them to ask your advice. Then consult. Speaking of consulting, contact us to schedule a SMM training session with your sales and marketing team.

PPC Tip: Quality Score & LPO :::::::::::::

Ok… here’s another TLA for you — LPO, that’s Landing Page Optimization. I actually think that PPC is getting overlooked in the Poll — it can offer great ROI, but there’s a factor in adwords, Google calls your Quality Score that helps determines your placement, per click costs, and so your ROI. Unfortunately we see a lot of clients who are unwilling to give control of the Landing page advertised in adwords ads over to your marketing team. There’s a longer explanation to it (see our colleague Tom Hale’s excellent post on the subject), but to think about why it’s important, remember that Google wants people who click on ads to find highly relevant information, and there are ways to make that happen. One way, is to make sure the key phrase in the Ad headline is used prominently on the landing page. Of course, PPC, like organic SEO, just gets you targeted visitors — what they do after they get there is the other part of LPO. Contact us if you’d like to increase conversions on your landing pages.

eMail Tip: Subject line length :::::::::::::::::

Finally, here’s a tip on the other marketing tactic that’s languishing in the Poll — email Marketing. Email marketing can and should be optimized and tracked in Analytics for best ROI. Mailer-Mailer, an email marketing service provider, has created an excellent report with recommendations on Subject Line Length, Subject Line Content, Personalization, Bounces, and Click Rates. One tip… emails with subject lines of 35 characters or less get more opened more. And the best part of this tip… is the report is free for the download, here: Mailer Mailer Report. Pretty good marketing for Mailer Mailer, huh?

So, I’ll leave you with the challenge question: What are you offering for viral reports, ebooks, and white papers that can be tracked and shown to bring you more business?

WebFadds.com is an agency focused on CMS, Social Media Marketing, & Landing Page Optimization solutions. Contact us today for a free quote. And, be sure to download our latest Guide: “Winning Twitter Marketing Tools & Tactics”.

In this ISSUE:

A Big Wave is coming ::::::::::::::::::::::::

Hail, Google: All of information, in the all knowing cloud mind, in the all present psyche of the ever inquiring consciousness of the googlezonification of the world. Pardon me. I just riffed poetic about Google — evil overlord, or ultimate resource of freedom — and it’s apparent continuous march to be, well, the ONE content management system. Case in point: the Google Wave. The Wave itself is a sort of embedded chat, plus email, plus documents… plus applications. Then consider that you can take a Wave and embed it in your WordPress CMS or Business Blog. Hmmmm.

What’s the Advantage of a Wave? Above, I played a game in a Wave with four other people, where the game could be any application (ecommerce apps are coming, with real-time translation).  Now remember that Waves can be played back… for an educational advantage, and also that they can be embedded in your websites.

Hey… I have some Google Wave invitations (Wave is still in Beta-By Invitation mode) left, so email me if you want one.

Optimizer Tips ::::::::::::::::::::::::

Never Say Submit: Two of the most important things I can tell you about optimization are that it’s not just about SEO, and sometimes a change to just one tiny element on a page means more conversions of visitors to customers. Oh, and never say “submit” in your buttons. Why? Well you can take a look at the two buttons below. Guess which one 96% more people continuing in the checkout process? You don’t have to guess… vote and see the results at Which Test Won.

Note that neither button said “Submit” — click image to go vote for a winner. On, and one final rule… always be testing — WebFadds can help you… Contact Us.

WordPress News :::::::::::::::::

Two items in this edition: WordPress just won the “Best Open Source CMS” Award award  for 2009 from PAKT Publishing, beating out Joomla, Drupal, MODx, and SilverStripe — it’s come a long way from its humble beginnings as a blogging platform.

And, WordPress is adding new editing features scheduled for the 2.9 upgrade, due in early December, include some image edition tools which Content Managers will like:

Above… you can now scale, rotate, crop and align — all in the new WordPress image editor.

Twitter Tips :::::::::::::::::

Think Like a Journalist: I’ve often said that in today’s sphere online, Publishing is the new Marketing, but Marketing still equals sales. What’s that mean? It means you need to think like a Journalist first when you’re publishing, but write with conversions in mind. Conversions? Yes — an Analytics term where you can track your web efforts to see which are most effective at creating actions where your visitors “convert” to a prospect, lead or customer. One example is when a visitor fills out a form at your site, and so becomes a sales lead.

Ok… now what does this have to do with Twitter? Two things: first, you need to write short tweets that provide valuable information to your prospects/readers — just like journalists do. This might even be a question (in journalism school you learn that one of the most effective “leads” to get readers to read a story was the “question lead”). And, second, make sure your staff time spent is “ROI positive” by setting conversion dollar values in Analytics (contact us, and we’ll explain more).

A recent post on Mashable, detailed how five real-world journalists use Twitter and Social Media. You can learn from their techniques, and also remember that journalists are seeking information there, so if they use your tweets and credit you, it’s another way of amplifying your reach. Read the whole story here.

I’ll conclude with five tips to use Twitter like a Journalist:

• Instantly check sources before retweeting, by checking in forums, Facebook, etc.
• You can become a recognized expert to followers and potential journalists for interviews
• Pose a question to followers, then lead them to a poll on your site or LinkedIN that you create. Later tweet the results of the poll.
• Consider “angles” for a tweet and related blog post, the way Journalists consider angles for a story — by understanding how other people online relate to your subject matter (read their tweets)
• Remember that your “community” of readers/prospects extends beyond your blog and twitter — but be efficient by uploading a video to Facebook, then tweet and blog about it.

WebFadds.com is an agency focused on CMS, Social Media Marketing, & Landing Page Optimization solutions. Contact us today for a free quote. And, be sure to download our latest Guide: “Winning Twitter Marketing Tools & Tactics”.