Phase 4: Total Integration

After you’ve evolved from internal orientation to objective measurement through to user involvement, you’re ready to enter the phase that can potentially unlock the most rewards: total integration.

This is where the first three phases feed into each other in a never-ending improvement process:

• developing and prioritising strategies internally
• measuring your results objectively
• capuring insights from users to acceleratete the process

These aren’t “steps” so much as never-ending improvement loop.

So the ideal website development and optimisation process goes something like this:

1. Conduct research of your market, competitors and opportunities.
2. Develop your site based on your “best guess” (plus smarts and experience) as to what is most likely to work
3. Measure everything so you can track what’s working and what’s not
4. Try different approaches and if they work, keep them.  If they don’t, revert back to the control.
5. Glean insights from users to add new ideas to the mix.  Selectively test, measure and optimise.
6. Rinse and repeat!

With most optimisation processes, it is normal to reach a stage of diminishing returns, once the most obvious improvements have been made.

But in the case of online sales funnel optimisation, the field is developing so quickly that there are always new opportunities to test new tools and strategies.

Even if your online sales process is relatively “mature”, it’s still possible to generate ongoing improvements of 10 or 20 percent per month using this process.

About Marketing Results:

As Australia’s leading internet lead generation experts, Marketing Results specialises in helping fast-growth companies generate more enquiries and sales online while eliminating marketing waste.  Find out more about our internet consulting services here.

Phase 3: User involvement

User involvement (also called “qualitative analysis”) simply means getting users’ input into the optimisation process — what they do and don’t like, why they would or wouldn’t buy from you and the “WHY” behind what they do on your site.

There are many ways to get this information, but until recently, the cost or effort was prohibitive, especially for smaller organisations.

Two of the most useful tools for getting this qualitative input are the 4Q iPerceptions exit survey tool and user testing videos provided by UserTesting.com.

I’ve written a previous review of 4Q iPerceptions, but the “Cliff’s Notes” version is that 4Q allows you to understand why users came to your site and whether or not they were able to achieve their main goal for their visit. If not, why not. If so, what they liked best.

Input from 4Q can easily by fed back into your website improvement initiatives (for example: copy ideas to test, pages to emphasise, pages or elements to de-emphasise etc.). And the cost? $0.

Then there’s UserTesting.com — I’m very excited about this because it makes it fast, easy and cheap to get informed end-user feedback on your site.

Here’s how it works: for (only!) $29 per user, a trained user tester will review your site and deliver output in two formats:

1. A Flash video that records the entire session, showing you every mouse movement, click and keystroke, along with spoken comments.
2. A written report detailing what they liked, what they didn’t like and what would have caused them to leave your site.

There are a few reasons why this is a very significant development:

1. Traditional user testing costs around US$250 per user at a fancy usability lab. Now, for around 1/10th of that price, you can get pretty much the same thing, from anywhere in the world, without leaving your computer.
2. You don’t need to test a lot of users - 1 to 3 users can be enough to give you a good idea of general patterns and trends that you can ACT on.
3. Crucially, this input is coming from outside your business or sphere of influence. This is nothing like the traditional business owner practice of “emailing a few friends to see what they think of the new site”. Such “insider” feedback is almost always tainted by filters that don’t impact on results.
4. It’s a good way to introduce fresh ideas into your improvement process which otherwise may not have been considered

I’ve introduced a number of colleagues and clients to UserTesting.com and they are universally impressed with insights and value it provides.  I invite you to check it out!

So now you know about internal orientation, objective measurement and user involvement. What’s the next step? Tomorrow we’ll look at Phase 4 – Total integration.

Phase 2: Objective measurement

Yesterday we looked at some of the advantages and disadvantages of relying on internal knowledge and resources to develop your online strategy. Today we’ll look at the next phase - objective measurement.

Objective measurement tools tell you WHAT users are doing on your site and whether or not tweaks or changes are working.

I’ve written extensively elsewhere on these “quantitative” strategies, so I won’t expand further here, except to provide some examples of typical objective measurement tools and what you can use them for:

• Google Analytics - broad-based analytics package, great for showing a range of key visitor (’How many visitors did we get last month?”) and conversion (”What percentage of visitors from search engines are downloading our White Paper?”) metrics.
• CrazyEgg - shows you WHERE on your webpage visitors clicked and presents the information as an easy-to-understand “heat map”
• Google Website Optimiser - multivariate testing tool. Use GWO to test different page elements (e.g. headlines, copy, offers or designs) and establish which elements convert best.

According to a survey we conducted last year of 324 Australian small and medium business owners, approximately 4 in 5 Australian companies have NOT yet evolved to this level. If you’re already using some or all of these quantitative tools, you should give yourself a pat on the back!

The great advantage of these tools is that they tell you what’s actually happening on your site — what’s working, and what’s not.

That allows you to test new things and if they work, keep them; if they don’t work, scrap them. This step-by-step process of is the basis of our online sales funnel optimisation service that we implement for SME clients.

The disadvantage of a purely quantitative approach is that you don’t have any insight into WHY users are doing what they’re doing. You have to make a “best guess”.  While you can certainly produce dramatic results from a quantitative approach, these types of tools are relatively inefficient for answering the following types of questions:

• What do prospects and clients really think of our website?
• Which specific elements of my website or sales copy are unwittingly turning new customers away?
• What new ideas should I test to improve user experience and conversion further?

To answer these types of “WHY?” questions, you need to evolve to Phase 3: User involvement.  That’s what we’ll look at tomorrow…