Usability testing is probably the simplest, most underused way to improve your website. It’s one-off work you can do that offers a huge amount of insight & pays you back every time someone new comes to the site. However, there are a couple of simple pitfalls worth avoiding…
I often see posts on forums asking “What’s the average clickthrough rate for banner ads?”, “What open rate should my emails get?” . This is human nature - wanting to judge yourself by how others perform. Or wanting to get a ‘benchmark guide’ to give yourself the belief that something is possible. It feels comfortable to reach for something ‘normal’…
If you’re having trouble with fraud, here’s a simple idea for an additional fraud check you can perform automatically when someone signs up for a new account: When a new registrant on your website says they’re based in New York & they’re shipping to Paris, you would expect them to have visited your site from either the USA or France. Taking a log of the addresses they enter & comparing those with their actual location allows you to automatically flag suspicious accounts…
Let’s say your website has 10,000 products. You have a sales team of 100 people & 2 product managers. How do you educate your sales team about all of those products with such a tiny resource?
Here are three stategy ideas:
Using your website to “turn your company inside out” is quite common. This was a message at the heart of the Cluetrain Manifesto & it’s one of the foundations of corporate blogging: Allow the individuals that make up your company to broadcast themselves externally & you benefit them individually & benefit the organisation as a whole.
A lot of brand management time often goes on a few things:
This is understandable - it’s usually the brief brand managers are handed from above. Not to mention the fact that most brand terminology is around this: “image”, “projection”, “identity”, “recognition”…
There’s a lot of chatter about “who’s winning online” in the US Presidential election. Pundits are claiming it’s the first presidential campaign to really be fought online (just as they said last time & the time before). Last week there was a Youtube debate, shortly there’s a Yahoo debate. So I thought I’d take a quick look at some of the freely available stats to see how Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama are each faring online.
Barack Vs Hillary - the ‘orange’ cells are the winners:
If you’re just starting an email newsletter campaign, or you’re reevaluating how you use email, there are 5 very simple questions you can ask to solidify your plan & give you the best chance of success.
Thinking of all of these questions together & the trade-offs between them will help you to understand why & how you want to use email, which gaps it bridges between you and your customers, and how you will know when you’re moving toward your goals…
If you’ve ever made regular, site-wide improvements to a website you’ve probably come across the problem of trying to please all of your visitors all of the time. You fix something because a couple of loyal buyers complain about it, then you notice your ‘new customers’ number is dropping. You simplify the cart to try and fix that, and suddenly your loyal buyers are complaining again. You look at your sales numbers & everything looks fine. Where did you go wrong? Are all of your ‘loyal’ customers unhappy, or is it just a few shouty complainers?
After a while this causes problems & slowdowns on new projects:
So what do you do?
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A very simple way to quickly improve a website’s performance is to pick out some key pages (eg. checkout pages, signup forms, product pages) and try out different versions of the page to see which performs best. This article explains 4 different test methods & the advantages of each…
