Extra! Extra!

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.

We often hear about a web site being 508 Compliant or needing to be 508 Compliant, but how many of us really understand the true meaning of Section 508? Sure, we all know that being 508 compliant means that your site is accessible by people with disabilities, but what exactly is involved in making this happen?

What is Section 508?
In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require that Federal agencies make electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 lists 1194.22 guidelines specifically for web-based intranet and internet applications based on access guidelines developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), that help promote accessibility.

What that means is that Web Accessibility involves the ability of a web page to be read and understood by anyone, using adaptive technologies where necessary.

Populations to consider include:

• Blind people using assistive technology such as Braille or voice screen readers
• People with weak vision who may not be using assistive technology
• Deaf people
• Color-blind people
• People with motor control weakness

Making your site 508 Compliant
The good news is that you don’t have to redo your website from scratch in order to be Section 508 compliant. Here are some easy-to-implement tips to follow:

• DO include descriptive ALT tags for all images which have meaning or content
• DO use relative font size
• DO use high-contrast text and background colors
• DO include text links in addition to or in place of image-based navigation
• DO NOT place text over distracting background images
• DO NOT use color as the sole means of conveying information
• DO NOT use animated gifs, Flash presentations, or Java Applets that cause the screen to flicker with a frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than 55 Hz (These can cause seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy)
• DO NOT force users to click a button or link rapidly, or to fill out a form in a short period of time
• DO NOT use frames of any sort

Priority Levels of Section 508

Priority 1
A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.

Priority 2
A web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.

Priority 3
A web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.

Conformance Level “A”: all Priority 1 Checkpoints are satisfied;
Conformance Level “AA”: All Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints are satisfied;
Conformance Level “AAA”: all Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints are satisfied

A description of the Priority Levels checklist can be found on this page: Priority Levels Checklist.

Further reading

If you’d like to get more information on the subject, these sites provide a deeper understanding of Section 508 compliance:

• 508 Site: http://www.section508.gov/
• W3C: http://www.w3c.org
• Access Board: http://www.access-board.gov

We always recommend that our clients review their site analytics with us at least once a week. Reviewing the data often requires some leg work in marrying information from disparate sources. From there, our dedicated analysts interpret the data to explain fluctuations, identify opportunities for improvement, and make predictions (forecasts). Every review and analysis results in progress towards the primary KPI’s of the site. Piece of cake, right?

The difficult step for most organizations seems to be in forming an ‘analytics habit.’ Reviewing web analytics regularly and drawing useful conclusions from it should be a requirement of every company that has a website and should be followed as web marketing 101. We frequently notice that marketing departments with limited resources managing campaigns across all channels have a difficult time giving analytics review cycles the priority it deserves. Most companies are great at starting the process and performing the weekly reviews for the first 4-6 weeks. After that, it is a battle with other priorities to get everyone’s time and commitments. It has never been difficult showing that regular analytics analysis results in huge benefits for the organization. It has been difficult getting people to sit down regularly, over an extended period of time, to gather and analyze the data. Many of our clients would prefer to outsource 100% of this work, but it really needs to be a team effort in order to be successful.

Almost all organizations perform regular maintenance on their web sites. Adding content, making updates to product information, freshening up the homepage, adding new job post and press releases have all become an ongoing part of having a web site. Performing maintenance without analyzing the analytics behind the site has the potential of actually making the site worse. Interpretation of the analytics shows what site visitors are looking for and how they want to find it. At least 20% of all updates to a site during maintenance should be focused around optimizing the content and the functionality of the site to serve the requirements of the organization and the perceived interests of visitors.

After a company has performed an analytics analysis every week for several quarters, it becomes a very healthy analytics habit. These are the companies that start to think of new ways to use analytics and integrate analytics from several channels (i.e. offline). We find that these are the clients that receive the most benefit (ROI) from their web initiatives and are the most likely to have successful initiatives moving forward.

In the past several years I have had the opportunity to work on four Credit Union (CU) website redesigns. Most of these projects included a search engine optimization (SEO) report that we produced during the Strategy phase. This SEO report included a list of the most popular keyword phrases users were searching on (in Google.com, Yahoo.com, etc) to find the CU website.

In all off the Credit Union website redesign projects where we looked at the website analytics, the data showed that the top keyword phrases were all branded to the particular Credit Union.

For example, while the four Credit Unions had a decent amount of organic search traffic; 80% to 95% (with the remaining traffic coming from PPC banner ads, direct links, user directly typing in the URL, etc) almost all these searches revealed that the person already knew about the Credit Union.

For example, ABC Credit Union (note: I am using a fictitious name for client privacy) had their top 14 most popular keyword phrases contain the Credit Union name “ABC” and their second most popular search was their actual url!

It is important that members who know about ABC Credit Union were able to find the website but when users searched for phrases like “Michigan Home Loans” or “Detroit Car Loans” the Credit Union did not appear in the top 100 listings of the search engine result pages (SERPs).

In my next blog, I’ll discuss how Credit Unions can start capturing search engine traffic from potential members that do not necessarily know about the products/services that the CU offers and rely on search engines for their research.

Do we drive choice online or do we simply offer choices? Do we design for specific user types/segments/personas/profiles or similar subsets of humanity or do we pretend to design for all? Do we craft websites with specific click paths in mind or do we assume users will find content via multiple paths? Do we leave a wide open dialog box and ask users to donate whatever they wish or do we prompt them with specific choices and ask them to check one?

All and none might be the obvious answer in each instance. And there is much study and debate over each. That last question might seem a stretch and somewhat out of place, but I don’t think it is. I was reading results of a recent study (more on this study in a later blog), and it clearly shows that users would rather not ask themselves too many questions — in the case of a non-profit that was testing notions as to how best to request donations, users were given the option of providing a number entirely of their own choosing, or to select one of several options. Meaning very simply, users had to enter an actual number in an empty field or they could click one of several boxes. The latter approach saw a higher conversion rate and significantly more revenue per session.

Applying this approach more broadly, those of us who tinker with websites should remember that users would rather not think. Not a new conclusion perhaps. Just a reminder as we continue to refine our methods of second-guessing users.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one the most daunting tasks for a Credit Union to undertake. How does even a large Credit Union with a devoted SEO budget compete (with big financial institutions like Wells Fargo, Bank of America or Fidelity) for search traffic on keyword phrases like “mortgages, auto loans, IRAs, etc”?

Answer: They don’t.

Financial terms rank #2 as the most popular search category with over 100 million searches taking place each month in the US. While popular keyword phrases like “mortgages” are searched millions of times per month the aggregate sum of less popular words can draw significant traffic to a Credit Union site and usually tend to have a higher conversion rates since the visitor is presented with content more specific to their query.

For example, as illustrated in the graph below, a Credit Union in California might SEO their website for terms like, “California Credit Unions”, “California Car Loans” or “Credit Union Student Loans” which (as an aggregate) have over a thousand searches month.

Chris Anderson from Wired.com coined this type of traffic as the “long tail” and Extractable works closely with all our clients to identify keyword search phrases they can draw organic search traffic on.