At Boston Interactive, we view websites as living, breathing, evolving things. They need to be consistently updated, maintained, and refreshed in order to be effective. One way to regularly make sure that your website is operating optimally is through A/B testing.  However, to continually improve your website and better serve your customers you can never go wrong with A/B testing, a form of research that allows you to test different copy and design elements on your website and determine which are most effective.

What is A/B Testing? 

A/B testing involves deploying multiple versions of a website or e-mail and measuring how each performs in order to determine which design or copy elements are most successful. It is important in A/B testing that variables are isolated, so that you can identify exactly which factors are making the test more or less successful.  The tests are generally preformed on a live website rather than in a controlled environment and usually without the user’s knowledge.

Example

Let’s take a look at a Twitter page and see how it used A/B testing to convert more of its visitors into users.  Below are two versions of the same message on the Twitter homepage.

The only difference between the two pages is the text on the button.  Nothing was altered design-wise and the message is the same on both pages.  Twittter used these tests to determine, whether “Sign Up” or “Create an Account” was a more effective call to action.

Benefits

• Constant Improvement

A/B testing allows you to isolate small, but important aspects of your website. This way, you can work in small pieces until you get your site working the way that best benefits you and your visitors and continually make improvements.

• Hard Evidence

Implementing A/B testing into your design project can eliminate the guess work as to which approach is most effective.  If you are torn over which way to go, often times the best thing to do is let the visitors decided for you.  That way you know for sure that you made the correct choice.

• Immediate Answers

Many companies will use A/B testing by sending e-mails to a small group overnight with different subject lines. Whichever gets the most opens is the one that gets used in the next days e-mails. By using tricks like this, you can get immediate answers and be confident in you decisions.

Keep in Mind

A/B testing should be used on aspects of your website that affect specific goals, such as the copy used in a call to action or the placement of a button. Avoid overdoing to by testing every aspect of your site, especially sections such as ‘Company Leadership’ or ‘History’ which don’t generally have major impacts on conversion rates.

Resources

Here are some great tools and resources on A/B testing.
Google Website Optimizer

www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

This should probably be your first stop.  It is straightforward and easy to use and has tons of resources to walk you through the A/B testing process.  Best part is it is free!

The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing by Smasing Magazine

www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/24/the-ultimate-guide-to-a-b-testing

This guide provides dos, don’ts, and lots of examples of A/B testing.

An Overview of A/B Testing by WebAppers

www.webappers.com/2010/08/09/an-overview-of-ab-testing

This article covers the very basics for getting started with A/B testing.

I’m excited to share that Boston Interactive has been named to the Inc. 5000 list for the second time. The Inc. 5000 is a listing of the fastest-growing and most entrepreneurial companies in the United States. This year, we were ranked #44 in the Boston metro area, up over 40 places from last year! Nationally, Boston Interactive placed #1,476  on the 2010 list.

We’re very excited and would like to thank all of our amazing team and clients. You can check out our Inc. bio and the complete list at inc.com.

Below are some photos from our winner’s packet :)

Rockland Trust

www.rocklandtrust.com
Rockland Trust, a sole bank subsidiary of independent Bank Corp. (NASDAQ: INDB) has been in business for over 100 years and is the largest publicly traded bank headquartered in Massachusetts, with over $4.5 billion in assets. Boston Interactive created a new website for Rockland Trust that conveys both the bank’s financial strength and its commitment to personal relationships with its customers and communities. The new site is easy to use and offers intuitive navigation, reinforcing Rockland Trust’s customer-focused mission. 

Atlantic Power

www.atlanticpower.com
Atlantic Power Corporation (NYSE: AT; TSX: ATP) is a leading, independent power producer, which owns interests in a diversified and growing portfolio of power generating and transmission projects in major markets in the US. In July 2010, Atlantic Power became listed on the New York Stock Exchange. To prepare for its NYSE debut, increased site traffic, and new demands for investor communications, Atlantic Power partnered with Boston Interactive to full redesign its website. The new site offers intuitive navigation, a fresh visual design, and easy access to important investor relations information. 

PharmaVigilant

www.pharmavigilant.com
PharmaVigilant offers unique software solutions to address the complexities of global clinical research. As a leading provider of patient-based software solutions, organizations from around the world look to PharmaVigilant for its extensive suite of products that offer robust, high-quality, and cost effective technology to automate the collection and management of clinical trials, registries, and other post-marketing studies. As an important resource for healthcare staff and other website users, the PharmaVigilant website needed to allow users to easily locate both products and resources. Boston Interactive designed and launched a new site for PharmaVigilant that showcases its global presence and innovative nature, while clearly communicating its product offerings. 

Rainbow Seafood

www.rainbowshrimp.com
Rainbow Seafood, a Massachusetts-based company owned by Alder Foods, has been distributing high-quality seafood to military commissaries for over 25 years.  Alder partnered with Boston Interactive to create a new online presence for Rainbow Seafood in order to provide both its wholesale customers and consumers with a better sense of the company’s unique brand as well as important nutritional information. 

Q1 Labs

www.q1labs.com
Q1 Labs is a global provider of high-value, cost-effective solutions for centralized security management and compliance monitoring. Q1 Labs partnered with Boston Interactive to create a dynamic and engaging website that would showcase its product line and reflect the brand’s global leadership status. 

Holy Cross Family Ministries
Family Rosary

www.familyrosary.org
Family Rosary, a ministry of HCFM, seeks to support the spiritual well-being of the family through prayer, especially the Rosary with face-to-face mission events and through use of media. HCFM partnered with Boston Interactive to develop a global online strategy for its ministries to engage users from around the world and expand its reach. HCFM’s new global online presence includes more than 15 websites in 17 countries. The new Family Rosary (English version) site is the first site to be launched as part of HCFM’s new web strategy.  In addition to the Family Rosary site, Boston Interactive will work with HCFM to develop three other core websites (Holy Cross Family Ministries corporate site, Family Rosary International, and Family Theater Productions).  

Also…

ASPCA – People’s Voice Webby Awards
st Charitable/Non-Profit website

www.aspca.org
The global interactive community voted back in June, 2010 and decided the website for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is the best Charitable/Non-Profit website of the year in the People’s Voice category. Voting for the Peoples Voice Award was done online on the 14^thAnnual Webby Awards’ website and was open to the public. This year over one million people voted online for their favorite websites. 

It’s been a great summer and we’re not finished yet. Now get outside and enjoy what’s left of the nice weather!

Amazon & Facebook

At the end of July Amazon and Facebook launched a new application, connecting the two networks and delivering a new form of product recommendations.  Users opt in to this capability and Amazon pulls information from Facebook preferences and interests to come up with product recommendations. Amazon can also pull information from your Facebook friends, tell you what items are popular among your friends, remind you of their birthdays, suggest gifts, and share their Amazon Wish Lists with you.

For those concerned about privacy, it’s important to note, that Amazon pulls information from Facebook for this tool. Facebook cannot access information from Amazon related to purchases, addresses, or credit cards. And only information that you and your friends make publicly available through Facebook can be accessed by Amazon.

Overall, Facebook and Amazon seem like a great fit or “A Perfect Storm of Recommendations” as Jolie O’Dell of Mashable puts it. This new tool seems useful and like most social applications, will become even more relevant as more people begin to use it.

Visa

Last week, Visa became the latest marketer to launch a shopping application as it released Rightcliq, a free online shopping tool designed to make e-commerce more social. The app lets users create wish lists as they shop online, gather feedback from friends, view special offers, pay for transactions with stored information and track shipments. What users are sure to love about this tool is that it is not heavily branded by Visa and allows users to pay with other major credit cards as well.  “Consumers told us loud and clear, ‘this needs to reflect what’s in my back pocket,’” says Charlie Wilson, Visa’s senior business leader for e-commerce and authentication. Visa hopes that this tool will help to increase its e-commerce business by making shopping easier and more fun.

What really differentiates this tool from Amazon’s is that although it’s branded, it doesn’t push a particular product or store, but allows users to shop from e-commerce sites around the web, gather feedback, and access special offers.  Rightcliq seems incredibly useful for online shopping, and it’ll be interesting to watch how it performs and what kind of ROI it delivers.

What’s Next?

Website personalization is something that many e-commerce sites like Amazon, and the FAO Schwarz site we built at Boston Interactive a few years ago, have used for years to recommend products and increase order sizes as well as overall sales. Making e-commerce social is a logical, but major next step in the evolution of e-commerce.  We’re excited about these new applications by Amazon and Visa, and even more excited to see what comes next, as we’re sure that more e-commerce sites will follow suit and begin adding more social components to the online shopping experience.

The success of a website is largely impacted by the process used to create it. After all, an effective website requires the proper understanding of the audience, competitive analysis, strategy, and architecture in addition to its aesthetic and functional components. One hot trend right now in the world of web design is agile development, which promises a fast, yet effective approach to creating websites.

Agile development, sometimes referred to as “scrum” or “rapid prototyping,” is a development method that allows for the best possible solution within a set time frame.  It allows for an evolution of the project through a recurring process of rapid team and user feedback.  Essentially what that means is that agile development is a process of continuous review and recommendation by both the client and developers.

The rapid prototyping process starts out by establishing the goals and audience of the website as well as understanding the brand identity.  Information Architects and Designers then take that information and develop wireframes and then design concepts.  The client can  then make requests for changes. From there revisions are made and final designs are presented.  The process continues until both sides are satisfied with the outcome.

Benefits and pitfalls of agile development

Benefits:

• Time savings – decisions are made and changes are implemented on the spot
• Ability to react to changes quickly – if you don’t like something it can easily be changed back
• Multi-skilled input (designer, strategist, developer, client, producer, etc). – Everyone works together to make sure the site is both beautiful and functional
• Forces all parties to see the big picture and not waste time on non-essential details. – Since the agile design process is meant for speedy delivery it does not allow for non-essential details to come into play.

Potential pitfalls:

• No team consensus – The team leader makes the final decision to make changes or move forward.
• Intensity can lead to burnout – Since agile design is high intensity people can become burnt out easier than with the waterfall method.

At Boston Interactive, we incorporate some aspects of Agile Development and Rapid Prototyping into our process, while other aspects are more unique, such as creating multiple design concepts in order to provide choice and conducting user interviews in order to maximize our understanding of users’ needs. When exploring approaches to web design and development, we recommend considering multiple approaches and modifying them as necessary in order to create the most effective website for your organization.  Feel free to let us know what types of processes you’ve used and what has your experience been.

Just Because You Can’t Measure It Doesn’t Mean It’s Not There

Scott Monty, Head of Social Media at Ford Motor Company once famously said, “What’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?” His point was that there are some things that are nearly impossible to trace ROI from, but they are absolutely necessary in order for businesses to succeed, or even function.

Augie Ray, author of Forrester’s latest report on social media echos this sentiment:

Many marketers can draw a straight line between investments in social media marketing and financial results, but many more cannot.  This doesn’t mean social media marketing is ineffective; it just means that marketers have to recognize benefits beyond dollars and cents.  Facebook fans, retweets, site visits, video views, positive ratings and vibrant communities are not financial assets–they aren’t reflected on the balance sheet and can’t be counted on an income statement–but that doesn’t mean they are valueless.  Instead, these are leading indicators that the brand is doing something to create value that can lead to financial results in the future.

Ray says that we don’t need to reinvent the metrics to measure social media, we simply need to pay attention to measurements such as awareness, purchase intent, and brand preferences, rather than simply looking at financial measurements.

Financial Figures Go Beyond Revenue

Sure, social media efforts can result in increased revenue, but they can have a financial impact beyond that too, according to Forrester’s new report. Petco.com found that products that have reviews have 20% lower return rates than those that don’t. These figures become even more pronounced when products have 25 or more reviews— they have 45% lower return rates than those without reviews. This saves a significant amount of money on shipping, restocking, and customer service costs, streamlining operational efficiencies, allowing the online retailer to focus on what they really care about— selling pet products.

Coincidence or ROI?

Ford Motors has been a leader in bringing social media to the auto industry. In 2009, Ford hired about 100 “agents” from around the country to drive the new Ford Fiesta models and promote them through Twitter and Facebook. In addition to millions of impressions, on Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, Ford scheduled around 50,000 test drives by the end of the 6 month campaign, 97% of which were for cosnumers who did not own a Ford at the time.

Just last week Ford made history and became the first major auto maker to NOT debut a new model at an auto show. Rather, Ford debuted the new Explorer on Facebook, with a full day scheduled of video presentations. Ford now has an audience of over 56,000 on Facebook, watching as it debuts the car live at locations around the country.

So what does this have to do with ROI? Out of  “the big 3″ automakers, Ford has fared the best financially in the recession. In fact, it recently posted a $2.6 billion profit for the second quarter of 2010. Is it a coincidence that the most profitable car company is also the most deeply involved with social media? You could argue that, but I don’t believe it. To prove my point, let’s take a look at a social media savvy company from another struggling industry: the airlines.

JetBlue has 1.6 million Twitter followers. It has another account called JetBlueCheeps through which it offers special deals each Tuesday to its 68,000 followers. Nearly 300,000 people follow JetBlue on Facebook. Earlier this year, JetBlue ran guerrilla social media campaigns through Twitter, showing up in different cities, announcing its location on Twitter, and giving away free airline tickets.  JetBlue frequently handles customer service through Twitter, and has an active travel blog called BlueTales. Needless to say, when it comes to airlines in social media, JetBlue is on top.

In an industry where airlines are struggling to turn profits and cutting amenities (if you can call them that) from meals, to pillows to free-carry on bags, JetBlue has posted profits for 6 consecutive quarters. So while I can’t necessarily prove a concrete link between Ford and JetBlue’s social media endeavors and their profitability (perhaps their marketing or finance departments can?) I do believe that such a link exists, and that their social media efforts are creating significant brand loyalty, which is translating into profits.

Real, if Not Measurable

Note that in the title of this post, I stated that social media ROI is real, not that it’s measurable. Forrester’s report combined with these case studies and many others like them, all point to the fact that social media does provide brands with real return on investment. However measuring that ROI, and exactly where it comes from, is still no simple task, even with many of the advanced analytics tools available online today. At Boston Interactive, we recommend measuring figures such as social media interactions, retweets, website visits, brand awareness & affinity, press, and reductions in operational costs in addition to increased revenue when it comes to determining the value of social media.