Site owners often tell me things like, “Users are going to love this feature” or “This tool is perfect for what our visitors should be doing.”  My response is usually, “Is that what testing has shown?”  The reason I ask this question is because many site owners make decisions on gut feel.  After making the gut call, many of them will lament/blame, “Users are really missing the boat with this, here’s all the great things they could be doing . . .”  Your users are not you, so don’t presume they feel just like you.  Do some testing to ensure that a feature or tool you are developing is something users desire.

Doing a short reality check on how well your presumptions match up with user needs is worth the effort.  In a recent conversation with a site owner, he was complaining about an event matrix tool that he had launched for his users to track events of interest related to his site’s content.  He was sure that every user would want to use it.  After spending significant time and energy, he discovered very few users had an interest.  He could have saved some time and/or developed a more desirable tool if he had done a reality check before investing in the tool.

Testing doesn’t have to be a giant undertaking, though for large sites or in depth campaigns it needs to be thoroughly planned.  For smaller sites it is less in depth.  Testing can be a sample of people that visit your site and provide feedback on how they use the site and what they’d like to see.  It can also be a user test session where a person uses the site and the site owner observes how and what they use.  This is sometimes more valuable, as actions will speak louder than words.

Here are the primary things to look for from the tests when deciding  if the feature you feel is great, actually cuts the mustard with users:

• Navigation – A great tool is worthless if people can’t find it.
• Usability – Users have to be able to easily use the feature or tool.  Make sure it is intuitive so that users will stick with it and get the maximum benefit.
• Functionality – The feature or tool better do what you claim it will.  Setting expectations that aren’t met will harbor resentment.
• Communication – You won’t have a lot of time to highlight your feature or tool using online communications.  Spend some time boiling it down to its most basic benefits so you can concisely generate interest.

I recently had a client call me out on what they felt was a contradiction.  I harp on content being king.  For a successful site they need engaging content that people will want to consume and they need to present it in a way that is friendly for Search engines.

I must have over-harped because I suggest a redesign for a section of their site that was content rich and growing rapidly.  My client said, “But the content is great.  You always tell me to focus on the content.”  While I agree that content is most important, it can’t come at the expense of a professional layout.

Here’s why.  A poorly designed site degrades credibility.  Users have to have faith that the content is coming from a credible source.  If great content is displayed in an amateurish way, users will move on.

A professional layout is the ring to your content’s diamond.  It supports your content while displaying the information in a pleasing way that let’s users appreciate what you are offering.  A poor layout is like burying a diamond in mud.  It’s still a diamond but no one wants to undertake the work and the mess of uncovering it.

Never assume you know how you achieved success online.  Theories are fine but every theory that we intend to take action on needs backed up with data.  Running online marketing campaigns on presumptions will lead to erratic results and makes it impossible for consistent gradual improvement.

Recently I was working on an ongoing online marketing campaign to promote events.  One event in particular got a surge of registrants.  The owner of the company was thrilled.  He then declared that the success must have come from the new list of email addresses that had been added to the subscriber list.  These new arrivals were 200 (roughly) people that had opted in to receiving promotions at a trade show.  The event had 40 registrants (roughly) so if they all came from the new list that would represent a 40% conversion.  A phenomenal number!

A problem arose when a follow on promotion was developed and sent there was no response.  All 200 people had suddenly lost interest. In fact 10 unsubscribed, a 5% attrition rate.  How had things gone so poorly?

Upon analyzing the initial email only 1 of the 40 registrants came from the new list of email subscribers.  The other was a mix of people who found the event through internet sources and long-standing email subscribers.  The second email did poorly because it was based on a false presumption.

My theory (haven’t proved it with data) is that the new list responded unfavorably because they got an email and then a quick follow on email presuming they were interested.  Immediately getting two emails and assumptive “sales” language led to a distinctly negative response.  They feared they were opting in to a SPAM list.

It turns out that the email subscribers that registered for the event had, on average, been receiving promotional emails from this company for 3 years.  The spike had more to do with the topic and presentation than a fresh list of names.

Don’t take action on presumptions.  It costs time, money, and future opportunities.  It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so, that can cause the most problems.  Use your email and web data to confirm your theories before acting on them.

Note: These numbers are rounded to easily illustrate the point and provide some anonymity

Increasingly email and conversion experts are advocating multimedia.  They point out how video is engaging and can quickly grab a visitor’s attention.  Metrics also support the claim.  Here’s what’s lost in translation.  Doing multimedia takes more time, money, and/or energy.  So while multimedia is advantageous, you need to decide if it’s worth investing in, or whether it’s something you want to graduate into.

For instance doing a video email campaign will likely show improved open and click through rates over a static one.  However if the email campaign is in its infancy and only has 100 subscribers, the extra cost of producing the videos probably isn’t worthwhile.  The key to making a decision on doing multimedia is factoring in the return on your investment.

For instance if the email campaign above has a 20% open rate and of those opens it has a 5% click through rate, then we know that 1 person takes action on every email (as an average).  Let’s pretend research showed that a video email campaign in the same industry and similar business size resulted in click-through rates tripling.  If the average action results in a $5.00 sale, then the subscriber list likely needs to grow significantly to justify the investment into multimedia campaigns.  However, if the average result is a $20,000 sale, then we’d be foolish not to begin a video campaign.

Multimedia has shown to increase conversions in email and on the web fairly consistently.  However, like most business decisions we need to weigh the pros and cons.  Spend some time with your web and email metrics to see if adding multimedia is a worthwhile endeavor.  It’s very possible that you’ll want to graduate into the technology, just make sure the numbers agree.

Every email in an email marketing campaign should provide a next step for recipients to engage the company.  There should be between one and three options for a next step. 

If an email is informational or content driven it might have several possible ways for a recipient to interact.  Some common next steps might be a request for more information, seeing company activities or events, or a promotional offer.

If an email is advertising a product or service or specific event then it should have one next step.  That next step should be a call to action that prompts the recipient to convert (buy or register). 

A next step is always a single action.  In most scenarios a recipient should be able to make the desired conversion in 3 or less clicks.  1 is most common.  Three is only acceptable if they are customizing an order for a complicated product or service.

The email might have a secondary next step for getting more information depending on the complication of the product, service, or event.  However this is not the primary next step of conversion.  A converted recipient means they have provided information about themselves and/or payment for something in return. If the recipient doesn’t provide anything, it’s not a true conversion.

Linking to a homepage is by far the most common error in next steps.  A recipient linking to a home page is not a conversion.  They might gather data and then convert but they are equally as likely to be lost and immediately leave the site.  Recipients shouldn’t have to navigate to their next step.  Everything they need should be instantaneously available.  Landing pages are a common technique to provide all pertinent information in one place.

We all get bombarded with messaging and email marketing recipients usually have other things to do besides reading your communication.  A smooth next step ensures that a conversion provides little friction. When a recipient decides to engage further with your company, next steps point them directly to what they expressed interest in and takes as little time as possible for them to obtain it.

As fantasy football hits full swing, it occurred to me that internet marketing and managing a fantasy team is a lot like managing internet and email marketing.  Its about paying attention to numbers, making educated guesses about what will reap the most reward, reacting to past trends, and hoping for a little luck.

People get obsessed with fantasy football but few people get consumed by their internet marketing numbers.  The truth is online marketing can be fun.  Yes, looking over the numbers and formulating a strategy to improve can get tedious but no more so than pouring over player stats.  Seeing the results is typically more fun than winning a fantasy game as it can show a measurable impact on the business.

The secret to motivation in online marketing is not placing bets for performance or setting up a smack talk feature.  It’s realizing that you are gambling with a lot more than fantasy football glory.  Online marketing has the power to drive sales or leads which will improve business returns and likely improve the lifestyle of the people who make up the organization. 

Think of it as a game, but one that needs to be taken seriously.  You should have some fun but also need to focus on what and how you are improving.

Why bring this up?  Too many people focus on the wrong end of improving their online marketing.  They want to do the “fun” stuff like redesigning the webpage or putting together cool banner ads.  Nothing wrong with those things but they aren’t likely to significantly increase ROI unless the metrics have been weighed and evaluated. 

Find the fun in incremental growth.  It will keep the site improving toward set goals and avoid a lot of energy wasted on “improvements” that likely won’t display measurable benefits.  That can be a lot more exhilarating than hoisting your virtual trophy.

- Eric
eMarketing Innovation

P.S. Yes, I am a fantasy football player (I limit myself to 2 teams a year to avoid the addict label) so I know first-hand how all-encompassing it can be.

For the most part site owners are beginning to see the value in tracking their sites performance.  Several surveys have indicated that most people gather the data and never do anything with it.  That’s not the best idea as reports are nice but the whole point is to measure improvement.  However, there is a growing number of people that do take action on the numbers.  Unfortunately, many are finding that their actions are negatively effecting site performance.  Take time to critically analyse site data to make sure that the prescribed solution is not an oversimplification of the problem.

I recently encountered a site that had been performing moderately well, providing small niche recorded material.  The site owner had let data compile for two months and sorted through it to see if he could improve orders.  He was reasonably pleased with his traffic but felt that pages were being abandoned too much.  He had a 5% order rate. 

His conclusion was that people weren’t getting the information they needed because the time on page was small.  For his products index page the average time was 2 seconds.  Since it had the lowest amount of time per page he decided to focus his efforts there.  He set out to increase that time and felt some revised content that was more in depth would help conversion.

Here’s the problem, the products index page only listed the items he had for sale with a photo.  It was a good thing that people were only there for a very short period.  Page tracking showed that 93% of them moved off to one of his half dozen products.  The page was working perfectly by getting people to the information they wanted.

He added descriptions to the links and found that time on page increased to around 25 seconds.  He was pleased until he found out his monthly revenue dropped slightly three months in a row afterward.  Upon further analysis we discovered that he had gone from a 93% rate of people making it to the individual product page to a 79% rate.  Site abandonment on this page went from 4% to 7%.  People couldn’t find the product they wanted as easily and were getting lost in added descriptive paragraphs.

The site owners oversimplification of the numbers blinded him to user experience.  He tried to apply a “universal rule” to his numbers and found it was actually detrimental. 

Understand who uses your site and how.  Always think critically about why analytics are showing what they are showing before making changes.  Most importantly track changes you make so that if you miss the mark on an optimization you have the ability to recognize the error and correct it.

Most site owners are beginning to see the value in tracking their results.  It’s really the only objective way to analyze results and make improvements based on data.  Unfortunately, there is still a majority of folks that gather the data but never look at it, or use it as validation for their own prejudices rather than for gradual improvement.  One common mistake is measuring each part of the data rather than the data as a whole.

Remember, the real value in tracking data is seeing how visitors interact with your online marketing campaigns and the website.  Understanding how your conversion funnel is performing is an extremely valuable piece of information to improve sales or leads.  However, it’s only valuable if it’s truthful.

Here’s a common example of segmenting tracking data.  People love to review open rates and click through rates on an email campaign.  The higher the better right?  For the email campaign that’s likely true but for overall performance that’s incorrect.  If every single recipient clicks through to a landing page and no one converts then it’s not time to congratulate ourselves on how well the email did. 

Don’t fall into focusing on the metrics you’re comfortable with.  All end analysis should be weighed on Return on Investment, either through leads or direct sales.  That’s the number that really drives the process.  Furthermore, once ROI is calculated then those numbers can be broken down into all online marketing activity to understand what the most valuable activities are and test ways of improving the process.

Certainly we want to celebrate victories but not at the cost of ignoring areas in need of improvement.  Think of the process as a rising seesaw.  Each time the balance goes back and forth the seesaw rises.  If email metrics are on target but conversions are low, do some testing and improve conversion performance.  Perhaps after completeing landing page conversion, email metrics will need to get even better.  So the focus can return to the email campaigns.  More likely you’ll notice that something like organic search rates could use a bump and will want to bring those up to par before putting more effort into landing page or email optimization.

The point is that online marketing is the sum of many parts.  When all those parts are analyzed and optimized, the whole is greater than the parts.

Most companies and organizations wouldn’t be content with just having a site.  Many people settle for that, but it isn’t their ideal situation.  Most people want to generate revenue or some kind of action item from their site.  Tableless design does nothing to promote that.  It’s an exercise in clean code and to some extent, accessibility.  That by itself won’t create any conversions on a website.

My rule of thumb is to make tableless or W3C compliant code on the “nice to have” list.  Priority should be placed on meeting business or organizational goals.  Put resources in place to ensure people can locate your site and have clear direction to convert to your desired next step.  If resources are left, then it’s time to explore ideal ways to build the site.  Make sure the end goal is met before moving on to secondary preferences.

I think the biggest problem I currently have with tableless design is that it that it can be a problem displaying on different browsers.  Table design has already gone through these growing pains.  I rarely find an issue anymore with a browser or operating system displaying a tabled design inaccurately.  The browser code has been refined over a decade and a half to make rendering HTML pretty consistent.  Tableless design is way behind the curve here.  Browsers rarely render sites exactly the same and tableless design is subject to all the compatibility problems sites used to encounter 10 years ago.

It is common to see rendering mistakes on tableless sites, even ones built by large specialized design firms.  In many cases, it doesn’t bother me. If a picture bumps to the left a few extra pixels, who cares?  The problem is that it can often render so poorly that text gets cut off or overlapped.  That’s a major problem.  That is a problem that can negatively effect the user experience and site conversion. 

Having said all that, designers and developers are getting more savvy at tackling these problems.  The trouble is that it usually requires (what my last post warned of) a stock layout with little variation from other sites or additional coding to render more accurately across platforms and browsers.  Those might not be deal breakers but something to consider.  Extra cose is also a common explanation for increased setup fees.  Usually the problem is that no one can foresee all of these issues.  Even the best designers and developers that test for rendering problems are likely to miss some.  The good news is that the testing can minimize risk of a bad user experience.   The bad news is that some visitors will likely encounter a problem.  I’m not sold that WCC compliance with separate CSS layouts is worth that.  There are few things that compare to a good user experience and site conversion. For me, tableless design is not one of them and often looks like an unnecessary risk.