2009 September | Online marketing with Paul Carter, ClickBasics

So you’ve decided you need to improve your internet marketing. What exactly should those improvements be? Will they be well received? Will they actually help your organization? Who will make the changes? These and many other questions are common concerns that should be addressed from the start. It is my hope that this post will lead you in the right direction. Here, we’ll focus on the website component of internet marketing.

Start with your organization’s goals

Whether you’re a not-for profit or a sales organization, your internet marketing efforts can be effective only if they have something to be effective about. Tie your website objectives to an organizational business goal (increase sales, reduce cost, improve customer experience, etc.) and define results in a way you can measure. For example, within three years the website will double online sales (or customer leads, memberships, requests for information, etc.).

Know your audience

Perhaps the biggest mistake website owners and developers make is not properly understanding their audience. Relevance is the key. A website must quickly identify the problems or concerns faced by its visitors and guide them down the path to a solution provided by your product or service. Different types of visitors look at the same problem from different perspectives.

For example, a browser might just be looking for ideas, whereas someone who is ready to buy wants the quickest way possible to select an item and check out. On the web, many people have short attention spans. If you do not grab their attention within the first eight seconds, you might never achieve your objectives.

Decide on an approach

There are really only two ways to improve a website: (1) focus on your own opinions or (2) focus on the opinions of your visitors. Focusing on your own opinions or the opinions of your website development team, has become known as the HiPPO approach, an acronym that stands for the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

The HiPP0 approach is based on the mistaken belief that we can know in advance how website visitors will respond to our opinions about what will work. It’s basically guess work, and results are hit or miss.

The alternative approach, and the one I strongly recommend, is to focus on the opinions of your visitors.

The Internet (the technical foundation of your website) is different from other communication media. The Internet is unlike print, radio, and TV. These are one-way media. You (the speaker) put out the message. The audience (the listener) takes in the message, or leaves it.

The Internet, on the other hand, is like face-to-face or telephone communication, which are two-way. You publish something on your website, visitors take it or leave it, AND they give you information in return. Whenever a visitor clicks on a link to a page, that sends information back to you. By paying attention to this information you open vast new opportunities for understanding and exchanging information with your website visitors. You and your visitors become partners in a two-way conversation.

There are three, free tools by which you can listen to your website visitors: web analytics, visitor feedback, and experimentation & testing.

Use web analytics

A good web analytics program, well configured, will tell you what your visitors are doing on your website. The good news—such a program will provide you with an incredible amount of information. The bad news—such information will quickly overwhelm you. The trick is to focus only on information that leads to actionable insights—that is information that will be really useful for taking action to improve your website, such as

How many visitors arrive at your website and leave immediately? This is called your bounce rate.
How many visitors come to your site and achieve one of the goals for which you have built your website? Possible goals include:
- Purchase a product
- Contact Us
- Request information on a specific service
- Sign up for a training program
- Sign up for a newsletter
This is called your conversion rate.
How many visitors start toward a goal, but abandon the effort? This is called your goal abandonment rate.
How much revenue the website is producing? Enough said.

You can start by using a free web analytics tool by Google. I recommend this tool because it is high quality and free. Although it is free, it does take some savvy to set up and use correctly.

Useful as web analytics information is, it does not tell you the why of your visitors’ behavior. Other tools are required.

Get visitor feedback

Let’s say that when you are thinking about how to make your home page content more interesting, you are uncertain what changes will really work well. You wish you knew more about the why of visitor bounce behavior. You could predict what changes would work if you knew

why they come to your website
why they like it or hate it

It’s simple to get this information with a feedback page. A form allows your visitor to answer questions and send answers to you with the press of a Submit button. This automatically delivers the submitted information to you by e-mail or via your website server for later retrieval and processing.

You can:

Provide a series of buttons from 1-10 and ask: “Based on today’s visit, how would you rate your site experience overall?”
Provide a drop-down list and ask: “Which of the following best describes the primary purpose of your visit?”
Provide a set of yes/no buttons with a text area boxes and ask: “Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit today?”
and
“If you were not able to fully complete the purpose of your visit today, why not?”

With a handful of responses, you will find it much easier to create exactly the home page content that interests your visitors and reduce your bounce rate.

The tricky part is giving your visitors a good reason to fill out the form. Consider offering free information or a product discount in return for the favor.

Other customer feedback options include:

triggering automatic, yet permission based surveys on exit from your website
including space on your pages for visitor comments, as in a blog.

Useful as visitor feedback information may be, it does not give you the final verdict on what changes to your home page will really work. Another tool is required for that.

Experiment and test

Let’s say you want to change a page, but are not sure which changes will actually produce a positive result. There are tools that will serve up alternate versions of a page and keep track of which one works best.

Prepare for the experiment by selecting an existing page that contains a link which, when clicked on, you consider a successful outcome. In our case the link takes the visitor to a page where he or she can download information. Use an educated guess to create a variation on this page (images and copy) that are more likely to cause the visitor to click on the link to a successful outcome.

Let the experiment run. After the program calculates a significant statistical result, you receive a report indicating which caused more visitors to click on the link.