Ever done a bunch of research, finally decided to get a product, gone to the website and found the only way to contact them is through a contact form?  While eCommerce websites are usually pretty savvy about letting their customers contact them through multiple ways, normal businesses sometimes give off the “go away” vibe unintentionally.

You’re afraid of spam email or solicitor phone calls, so you don’t put either your email or your phone number on your website, just a contact form.  While this probably does cut down on spam, how many potential customers are you turning away as well?  Is it worth it to turn away even one potential customer?

Most email programs are pretty good at filtering out spam.  And while you should answer the phone as much as possible, voicemail also does a pretty good job (most people are understanding on that front).  But, if someone can’t use either method and has to fill out a contact form (most of which tend to ask for a bunch of unrelated information), there’s a possibility that they won’t bother.

Contact forms do their have their place and use.  Sometimes you have a specific type of contact (for media or advertising or whatever) that you do need additional information for.  Or you’re using a contact form on a landing page for your marketing or advertising.  There are many good uses for contact forms, but they should never be the only way someone can get ahold of you.  Even in the cases mentioned here, there still should be a way to contact you directly.

How do your customers contact you?

(photo by ellievanhoutte @ Flickr CC)

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Technorati tags: customer service, brand, customer experience, business, marketing strategy, marketing

Pageviews, visits, unique visitors, followers, etc. are all great ways to measure success online, but what about actions that don’t lead directly to a conversion or lead (but probably will down the line)? How do you measure actions that may lead to something important later, but there’s not a direct connection online?  Assigning a value to those actions may help…

A website visitor may play around with your ‘build a car’ feature but not do anything else online.  Are visitors who ‘build a car’ online more or less likely to eventually buy a car from you?  How many people that do buy a car from you use the ‘build a car’ feature on your website?  Obviously there’s an offline component that needs to be tied to the online action.  The only way to really know how the online action ties to the offline action is to do a little market research.  This could be as simple as asking your customers or a more in-depth market survey.  Once you know how the ‘build a car’ function on the website is tied to actually buying a car, you can assign it a value.

Sometimes both the actions are online, but may not be directly connected.  For example, a website visitor clicks on your clearance ad in an email, but doesn’t purchase anything that day.  So what’s the percentage of people that click on the clearance ad vs. the number that buy?  This conversion is a bit easier to calculate, but it still may make sense to assign a value to clicking the clearance ad.

Why assign a value to a particular action?  Because it can help you understand how certain online actions influence the sales funnel.  More importantly, it can help you figure out how to organize your site, what actions should be emphasized, and what actions should have marketing or advertising campaigns.

Do you assign value to actions online?  How do you figure out what’s important on your website?

(photo by kennymatic @ FlickrCC)

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Technorati tags: analytics, statistics, marketing, strategy, business

My article on Facebook for eCommerce sites – Selling (and Socializing) on Facebook -  is up over at Practical eCommerce.  I hope you find it interesting and useful.

But the real power is in what Facebook inherently offers – the ability to socialize and communicate directly with your customers Once customers become a fan, or join your group, you can send them messages, updates and news. Most importantly, you can see exactly who they are and can reach out to them to gather information about why they like your products and what can be improved. – Selling (and Socializing) on Facebook – Practical eCommerce

You can see the other articles I’ve written for Practical eCommerce here.

Despite what TechCrunch may have said about Blaine Cook, his talk today on Real Time Web wasn’t delivered from under a rock.

He talked with the Web 2.0 expo crowd about how HTTP refreshing isn’t the right protocol for applications that use messaging, such as Twitter. His take is that the best messaging service out there, one that is open, free, web ready, standards based, easy to use, all these thing in one is the Jabber protocol

Jabber’s event driven messaging means that a service like twitter doesn’t have to constantly poll on status of customers when usually the result is ‘nothing new’ Event driven messaging like Jabber allows the service to ‘ping’ the Twitter service to say ‘hey, Im back’ or ‘Hey, I have a message’ Following this on, this means that the Twitter service to then send on that message to you, the subscriber once and only once when its fresh. Jabber is Client-Server not p2p, which is applicable here.

The use of jabber in Twitter makes perfect sense. What you can learn from Blaine’s experience is still a bit muddy, however. Twitter has known scalability issues, but how much of those were HTTP/Jabber problems? We just don’t know. The reality is that for the B2B business, you will likely never face their kind of subscription traffic issues. That means that Jabber should be looked at for the right projects that needs Presence, Subscription, and Messaging. It is XML and looks very much like email in its design. Look at Jabber as a choice for your Web Messaging needs.

Oh, he also laid the gauntlet by saying RSS is good for basic content subscription, but APIs should use ATOM due to parsing being cleaner. Evangelists are still liking RSS, so this was an interesting reveal.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, real time web, B2B

As mentioned in a previous post, usability is important in designing a customer-centric site. Usability, as defined by Wikipedia:

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.

In the non-Internet world, we expect certain things to be in a certain place and to act in a certain way. In the US, traffic lights have red (stop) at the top, yellow in the middle, and green (go) at the bottom. Even someone who is colorblind can read the traffic light due to the consistency in the position of the lights and what they mean. If every state had different colors and positions of lights, we would see a lot more accidents.

Design on the web is the same way, people expect certain things to be in a certain place on a website. If they are not there or are in a different place, they have to waste time trying to find them. Often people won’t bother with searching for things. They will just visit another site that is designed in a manner that they expect. Designing for usability is extremely important for eCommerce sites where one misstep leads visitors out of a buying process. While not quite as obvious as when a visitor has an item in a shopping cart, design missteps on corporate websites can be just as damaging, but not as easy to measure.

Designing for usability is not particularly difficult. You just need to be patient, know what to look for, do some testing, and be prepared to make constant improvements to your site. Redesigning your site can certainly help, but you will get the best results out of constant refinement.

We’ll examine what data to look at when redesigning your site in Website Usability Basics – Part 1 – Research.

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, usability, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a feed which sends content from the website out to a feed reader. RSS provides an easy way to check hundreds of sites for updates in one place. Google and Bloglines both offer a web-based reader, and there are several software based readers including NewsGator.

More importantly, what good are RSS feeds to a B2B Website? Having RSS feeds for the content on your website allows your readers to subscribe to the feed and be alerted through their feed reader when you update content on your site. You can set the feed up to send out the entirety of your content or just snippets to entice visitors to read the rest on your site. Most mainstream sites send out their entire content, relying on visitors to come to their sites based upon their good information and functionality. RSS feeds also allow search engines and other web crawlers another way to access and index the content on your site which can increase your search engine optimization (SEO).

Many mainstream content management systems and blogging software already have RSS feed functionality, including the ability to customize how the feed looks and what content it sends out. There are also plugins, scripts and software available to create feeds from your web content. The more adventurous can also attempt to code their own feeds.

RSS feeds can also be used to take content from other sites and display them on your own (please make sure you are aware of any copyright restrictions). This requires software to turn the feed into code (HTML) which is displayable as part of your webpage. Many content websites already have this built in to widgets, badges and plugins they offer on their site (ex. Flickr, Twitter). For these sites, it is as simple as copying the code they give you into your own website code.

Once you have RSS feeds setup on your website, you can use RSS tracking sites, such as FeedBurner (just acquired by Google) to track how many people are subscribed to your feed, reading your feed content, and coming to your website from the feed. Without this type of specialized tracking, you can get ballpark statistics from looking at the visitors on your site. Many of the feed crawlers will announce themselves as such in their browser information (usually in the visitor information of analytics software). Google Analytics displays how many readers are subscribed and using the Google Reader. You will also be able to see visitors who come from web-based feed readers in the referral section of your analytics program.

RSS feeds for B2B websites allow your visitors to be constantly updated when you post new content on your website. SEO is improved by giving search engines and web crawlers a way to be updated when content is updated on your site. And you can improve the content on your own site by looking for badges, widgets and plugins that allow content from other sites to be displayed on your site (through RSS feeds).

Technorati Tags: RSS, web analytics, SEO, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting