Extra! Extra!

Extractable’s clients use their sites to accomplish a broad set of goals (Lead Generation, Online/Offline Revenues, Reach/Awareness, Customer Loyalty).  One key to discovering which variables influence conversion of visitors is knowing whether or not visitors convert in 1 visit, 2 visits, 3 visits, etc. Whether filling out a lead form, purchasing an upgrade, or entering some product feedback, we typically see that the most valuable actions from visitors are on the 2^nd+ plus visit.  So why is it that most sites look the exact same each time a visitors comes back?

The first time visitors see Amazon.com, the visitors can be impressed with the sites wide selection of products, the wealth of information about every product, and the ease of purchasing.  But the most impressive aspect of Amazon is what happens on the 2^nd visit, 3^rd visit, 4^th Visit, etc.    The site keeps track of what you looked at (whether you made a purchase or not).  The site makes personalized recommendations based on what you viewed and how many items you viewed.   Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook are personalizing navigation and recommendations based on past navigation patterns.  BannaRepublic is customizing product recommendations based on the products that you looked at most recently. 

With a lot of the sites that we view, the first visit is an introduction.  The visitor is looking at high level product and organizational information – they are browsing around at wide breadth of content.  The first time visitor is validating the site/product as a viable option.  On the second visit, their navigation is much more focused.  When a user comes back, they tend to be a little more focused in their clicks/searches. 

Knowing what content/products a customer has looked at makes a big impact on what they view on their second visit.  Most sites should follow Amazon’s example.  It doesn’t take a significant about of planning and programming to think about how to make that 2^nd visit a little easier and ideally, get a better conversion rate.  We’ve had great success with clients websites by simply placing quick links to previously viewed promotions on the homepage.

I am cheap.  No, I am not trying to ask my boss indirectly for a raise (although with gas prices and my long commute I wouldn’t mind one) its just that I have just been using the Internet since Al Gore invented it (jk) and am accustomed to getting cool services for free on the Internet - news, language translation tools, playing in a fantasy league,etc.   I have even found some great FREE search engine optimization tools (that can be used as plug-ins with Firefox) that I would highly recommend:

• SEO Quake - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036
• Search Status - www.quirk.biz/searchstatus
• SEO Book - http://tools.seobook.com

The tools above capture and display a lot of valuable information that you will need when optimizing your website for search engines - Google Page Rank, backlinks, internal/external links, Alexa ranking, cached site pages, IP address, whois info, robots file, sitemap, compete rank, keyword density, etc.

The SEO Quake and Search Status tools can be used when viewing a particular website while SEO Book shows much of the same vital SEO information from search engine results pages.  Happy optimizing!

The Search Engine Strategies (SES) 2008 was one of the best conferences I have had the opportunity to attend recently. Some of the more interesting “take-aways” I got from the conference included:

• When marketing your brand online always tell a compelling story that will make customers connect with your brand.
• Optimize pages on your website for long tail keywords while keeping the visitors intent in mind. By figuring out what stage of the buying cycle they are in (researcher, comparison shopper, buyer, etc) you have a better chance of offering relevant information to the visitor and getting them to “convert” (eg. make a purchase).
• Always be A/B testing! Test the pay-per-click ads that bring traffic to your website and test the color of the button on your site that converts a visitor.
• Reduce home page bounce rates! How many visitors came to your website and found nothing on the home page that engaged them about the site’s content?
• There are ton of free Firefox plugins that can help you with SEO like: Bit.ly/gadocs, Bit.ly/gagoals, Bit.ly/gatabs, Bit.ly/gaiceberg
• Leveraging social media sites (examples: Twitter, facebook, delicious, digg, propeller, etc) can have a big impact on increasing organic search traffic if done right.
• There is tremendous growth opportunity in the search industry outside the US.
• Understand what your visitor wants to accomplish on your site. They don’t care if your are the company Best Buy they want to purchase the iPhone.
• The “Google Dance” which invited SES attendees to drink, eat and dance was a blast!

With hundreds of Content Management Systems (CMS) on the market, how does a company identify the best one for their website?
Over the last 5 years I have created a cheat sheet that has simplied this process to 3 main steps.

1.  Create a Requirements Checklist
Come up with a CMS requirements checklist.  What do you want the CMS be able to do?  Ask as many people that will be using the CMS system fill out this checklist, ranking each factor on a “must have”, “would like to have”, or “don’t care” scale. Ideally, have at least several employees (who will be using the CMS solution) from several different business departments complete the CMS checklist since requirements tend to verify by departments. 

Some example requirements might include:
• Permissions / Roles – Some users might have the ability to write or modify content while the authority to publish might be limited to only a few.
• Rollback / Versioning – Accidently removed the biography of the CEO?  How important is it to have a CMS system that will let you revert back to an older version of the webpage?
• WYSWIG – The benefit of having a CMS system is so non-technical users can update the website.  Make sure the CMS system has a friendly MS Word-like editor that enables non-technical users to quickly and easily update webpages .

Lastly, compile a master CMS requirement checklist in Excel where you can turn on the auto-filter feature to see any requirements all CMS users identified as “must haves”.

2.  Demo the CMS
Identify several CMS systems (within your budget) that meet a majority of your CMS stakeholder requirements.  Spending an hour on Google searching for phrases like “cms solutions compared” should help narrow down your list of CMS vendors. 

Verify with your IT team that the CMS solutions you have on your list could be implemented and maintained within your current infrastructure.  Example: If no-one at your company knows how to program in Java you might not want to proceed with evaluating any Java based CMS solutions.

Contact over the phone (and screen) several CMS vendors that are willing to come on-site and conduct a demo of their CMS solution.  Ask the vendor to demo basic functionality (authoring, publishing, etc) but make sure they also address all your “must haves” and “would like to have” the requirements that you identified in your companies CMS checklist.

3.  Gain Buy-in
Ask your CMS users (that attended the demos) which CMS they preferred; which CMS would they most be comfortable using?  At this point you should have a pretty good idea which CMS solution your team prefers. Now you just need your boss to write a check for it…

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
~ Henry David Thoreau

In the high tech world of web design, everything moves fast. Projects are on tight deadlines. Technologies change and converge. Our lives are pretty busy too. Moore’s Law seems to affect more than technology. While our future depends on sophisticated technology, it doesn’t mean that it must have a complex outcome. We design and plan use cases and scenarios for experienced users, and end up complicating our designs with fringe cases and feature creep. We may be designing an advanced application, but it can still have a simple user experience.

No wonder users are frustrated by our best intentions. They crave simple experiences, easy to learn applications: a few steps, minimal instructions, obvious designs. “Don’t make me think.” And yet we (as designers) still assume that they (as users) are savvy enough to figure it out. When dealing with a complex project, it’s important to relax, take a step back, look at it from a different perspective, and remember Thoreau’s watchword: Simplicity.

The other day I was reading about more negative news on the US economy when Jay Leno came on TV and began to ask people on the streets of Los Angeles (mostly young adults) basic financial/budgeting questions. Obviously, it was funny (yet shocking) how little some of the people he talked to new basic financial concepts.

More and more leading financial institutions are recognizing the importance of educating their members of the different financial products and/or services that are available to them. Why wait until a customer asks if you offer a 401K instead of educating the value of retirement services to them up front? I took a look at some of the leading financial websites (and some smaller ones) and its evident that many financial institutions are realizing the importance of actively educating their members on financial related topics. Here are some websites that caught my eye (and actually increased my financial knowledge along the way):

Financial Education
• CEFCU: https://www.cefcu.com/learning/financial-basics.php - The site has some great financial calculators, tools and articles.
• UFCU: https://www.ufcu.org/learning/index.php?loc=menu – Educational material for students, home buyers, vechice purchasers, etc.
• Visa Practical Money Skills: http://www.practicalmoneyskills.com/english/index.php - Financial literacy information targeted by user segments: School, Home and Work. The site has strong content with a personable voice and a nice range of features.
• Schwab Money & More: http://www.schwabmoneyandmore.com/toolsResources.php?nav=2#articles – Site has various financial calculators, articles and a glossary:
Life Events (mostly targeting Gen Y)
The following websites do a good job at presenting specific financial products/services based on major life events a member might go through.
• CEFCU: https://www.cefcu.com/learning/life-events.php
• Schwab: http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/planning/life_events?cmsid=P-1897641&lvl1=planning&lvl2=life_events
• WAMU: http://www.wamu.com/personal/learn_plan/browsebylifestyle.asp
• 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy: http://www.360financialliteracy.org/Life+Stages/
• Schwab: http://www.schwabmoneywise.com/milestones/ - Directly targeted at young adults or for adults who want to talk about the management of money with their kids.

Congratulations to Citizens Equity First Credit Union (CEFCU) for launching the new website CEFCU.com!

CEFCU worked with Extractable to intuitively organize information on its website for members while making sure CEFCU’s business objectives were addressed. This was done while maintaining the integrity of the website’s great visual design!

The new website has better exposure to their competitive rates (which will hopefully lead to increased applications), targeted custom marketing banners, increased number of financial tools, and a financial Learning Center section that aims to educate their members.

Congrats to CEFCU!

There are a few applications that are standard on almost all web sites. Every site should have a search engine and there are some great search engines out there from companies such as Autonomy, Omniture, Google, and Surfray (Check out SearchTools). Every site should also have an analytics application such as those provided by Omniture, CoreMetrics, or Google. Most sites have a Content Management System such as TeamSite, Rhythmyx, Ektron, or Contribute (Check out CMS Watch). For applications such as ecommerce, chat, and application servers there are many excellent options in all price ranges for each category.

Then there is the crown jewel of customer support applications – the knowledgebase, were the number of good options a web developer has narrows significantly. Application providers like RightNow Technologies and Talisma provide good solutions . But they are priced out of the range of small to midsize companies. The knowledgebase is the key to customer self service. I don’t think the average user is very pleased with the phone support they get from the majority of companies they interface with. Good knowledgebase applications allow customers to solve their problems quickly and easily without forcing them to navigate frustrating phone trees. Knowledgebase applications show customers multiple ways to solve every common problem as well as give customers an easy ruote to rate the quality of support solutions. Yet, the vast majority of sites out there don’t have any knowledgebase to speak of.

One key point to make about knowledgebase applications as a part of web development is that they are probably the easiest application to calculate a healthy ROI. Good knowledgebase tools with excellent support content reduce call center volume, increase customer satisfaction, and offer excellent opportunities for personalized upselling.
Some examples of good knowledgebase tools are below:

• RightNow Example (Plantronics)
• Talisma Example

Many financial institutions (and almost all credit unions) have their membership base defined by geographic boundaries. Most credit unions are even bounded by law that all members need to live, work or pray in the areas that the credit union is located.

When people search for financial terms in Google, Yahoo or MSN the search engines don’t put to much weighting on your physical location (by using a reverse DNS lookup) when producing the search results unless you include a geographic term in your search phrase (eg. “San Francisco credit unions”). For example, when I searched for “credit unions” in Google.com (from Foster City, California) the first 100 results included a credit union for practically every state in the USA!

Using Wordtracker, I did some further research and discovered that not many people include geographic keywords when searching for financial services/products. For example, the specific phrase “car loans” is searched for over 15,000 times a month but the phrase “San Francisco car loans” produces no searches (or at least less than what Wordtracker records).

While it is important to produce websites that are “search engine” friendly, it seems like one of the best opportunities to gain additional memberships for financial institutions that operate in a certain geographic area is to use Google and Yahoo’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) services that display paid ads to only people searching for financial related keyword phrases in the areas they operate. For example, a San Francisco based financial institution could bid to display an ad on the search engine results pages for only people searching for the phrase “student loans” in the San Francisco area. The financial institution could further increase their conversion rates by optimizing the ads to speak directly to these users (eg. San Francisco is expensive but your Student Loan doesn’t have to be).

Here are some screenshots from Google and Yahoo who allow you to display your PPC ads in only selected regions that you define.