Video is becoming more and more prevalent on websites. And why not? If done well it can be a powerful marketing tool. But what is the best way to get your video content online? There are two options host or post. Posting to an external site has advantages: Easy to upload video No bandwidth costs Lots of traffic Easy to
Read moreWhen reviewing website performance we tend to gravitate toward the positive interactions. These are the metrics we hope will be high: visits, clicks, conversions, etc. However it can be equally important to measure the negative interactions, opt outs and bounces. By keeping those numbers low we increase the opportunities that the positive interactions have. Bounces specifically can be important for
Read moreEvery offer made online through email, social media, ads, or sponsored links should direct people to a webpage on your site dedicated to that offer. These landing pages are a tried and true best practice because if people land on a page that doesn’t reinforce the offer they were interested in, confusion and abandonment multiply. However, good landing pages bring
Read morePictures (and multimedia) can be worth a thousand words. Just make sure that the images used in your online marketing are the ones you want to say. Years ago most images on a website (at least professional ones) were analyzed, if not labored over. The reason was that every page counted and just the right image was necessary to make
Read moreThere is one metric that most people use to measure social media: Contacts (LinkedIn) Followers (Twitter) Friends (Facebook) However the number of people watching is not always the most important number to review. Certainly social media is about interaction but our ultimate goal is what needs to be kept in mind. For example I worked with a client who was
Read moreWebsite metrics are often simplified to website metric, visitors. While the number of visitors is certainly important as we need traffic, many other metrics are a better measure of success on a website. There are several web metrics that can be used to define success based on the company objective: Bounce rate – This serves as a reverse goal, meaning
Read moreA good call to action is a Siren Song. Your target audience shouldn’t be able to resist its lure. However, many times websites calls to action are a dud. They ask for a lot and provide little in return. Make sure that your call to action is appealing to your website target so that conversions are consistently generated. The first
Read moreJakob Nielson wrote a great article on email usability. There is a lot of good points but I wanted to focus on his section about subject lines. As a rule of thumb, if you have doubts on what the subject line should be . . . be direct. There is a great example in the article of a subject line
Read moreIn a previous post, I said that email testing didn’t have to be a monumental task for smaller lists. While that is true, the statement shouldn’t be taken to mean it is easy. Detailed analysis is necessary to get a true picture of how your campaigns are running. An integrated set of reports that takes all of your online initiatives
Read moreSite 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
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