K1 Technology

What does your welcome message say?

Sun, 10 May 2009 22:37:00 -0700

When a person signs up for your email list, you probably send them an email to confirm their action (well at least I hope you send them an email confirming their action). How about doing more with that welcome message? This is one of the first chances you have to connect with this visitor - make it a good first impression. Here are a few ideas:

Use the welcome message to ask questions to ensure future emails are relevant.
Use the welcome message to tell the new subscriber about current relevant promotions.
Use the welecome message to link to highlights from your past emails.

And one last tip - don't hide your unsubscribe link - even in your welcome message. Make it easy for people to join your email list. Make it just as easy to get off your email list.

Listening to Customers

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:05:00 -0700

I was impressed this weekend when I took my wife shoe shopping at John Fluevog. Not because they are a cool Canadian shoe company, but because they really listen to customers.

Here are three specific examples of how they listen:

Inside the store on a wall near the counter you can see some "proposed" designs of some upcoming shoes and you can write feedback on the designs. (There was lots of good feedback from customers on there, and I'm sure they take it to heart).
The shoes that we ended up buying were inspired by a customer, and then the shoe was named after that customer. How cool is that!
On Saturday morning when I 'twitted' that I was going to be visiting Fluevog, I immediately received a a follow. (Anyone on twitter will probably know what that means)

So how does this relate to you? At K1, I want to model the company around a "customer engaging" experience. It's not always easy (we have local customers, and we have customers on the other side of both oceans) but it's always right.

I personally have a google doc with features and changes that customers have recommended. Some of the best features are coming from clients who who use our products every day. We are constantly look to our customers for ways we can improve their website and ultimately improve our product... so keep the requests coming. If you have a great idea, send it to me (or your account rep).

Thanks

Welcome Brian Zacharias

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:00:00 -0700

We would like to welcome Brian Zacharias to the K1 team this morning. (We'll get his picture up someday)

Brian joins are team in a programming and development role. For the first few months he will be working on some custom development projects. Brian has a Bachelor of Computer Information Systems and has a strong background in webservices, C#, and database development.

If you end up talking to him, seeing him in the office, or seeing him at the gym with us make sure you say hi.

Reviews and Ratings Sell More Online

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:21:00 -0700

77% of online shoppers use reviews and ratings and 63% are more likely to purchase from a site if it has reviews and ratings.

It seems that companies are hesitant to use reviews and ratings on their websites because they fear the bad or negative reviews that their products might get. Research from BazaarVoice, a leading ratings and review marketing specialist, indicates that negative reviews can increase the product conversion rate. People realize products are not perfect and that everyone has a different opinions.

User Reviews vs. Critic Reviews

Who would you trust more when buying online, a critic’s review or user generated reviews? The results from marketing surveys done by Market Sherpa are totally one-sided. 86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friends’ recommendation over a review by a critic, and 83.8% said they would trust a user review over a critics review.

So here is what to think about when you’re putting your review section up on your site:

Placement (above the fold)
Size
Stars or other graphics
Ease of reading
Sorting
Rate Distribution
Use across the site
Rate product or the product attributes.

Rating and reviews are a great way to increase your visitor’s activity on your site and you can offer incentives for them to come back and write reviews and rate your product. Send out an email 10 days after their purchase asking them if they liked it. You could offer free shipping on their next purchase once they write a review.

5 Ways to Sell More Online

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:00:00 -0700

A propective customer and I were talking a few weeks ago and he asked how he could tweak his website to sell more online. He has a great looking site, stunning photography, but there were a few mistakes being made that were costing sales.

1) Close the disconnect between the website and the webstore. On his website (and you see this on lots of sites) you click on 'Wine' (he sells wine) on the main navigation, and see a list of the wine, read about the wine, but when the time comes to order the wine, you have to click 'store' on the main navigation, remember the title of the product and go purchase it in a seperate area on the site. It should be as simple as possible for someone to purchase from you. This means having the 'Add to Cart' button right there with the product details, product photography, etc. Your product page and your store should be one.

2) More details on the actual product. There is no limit to the amount of information you can put on a website. A large part of the buying population are methodical people or humanistic type people who enjoy reading a lot of detail. More detail will see more products.

3) No forced account on checkout. when a customer wants to checkout, they want to give you their credit card, not come up with a unique username and password to create an account. Forcing a person to create an account on checkout will result in lost sales.

4) Own the search for your own product. If I hear about your product somewhere, and now I go search Google for that product. That brand should come up number one on the search. Not coming up number one (or in this case not showing up at all) will cost sales.

5) Have an environment of monitoring and testing. Google analytics is free and pretty easy for a web developer or designer to setup. On the website in question I noticed that google analytics was running on part of the site, but not on the store part of the site. You really want to get a solid connection on analytics between your website, your store, blog, etc. Without strong analytics it's really hard to gauge the performance of a website.

And a few bonus ideas...

1) Provide assurances in the checkout. The right security assurance message will increase the number of people completing the checkout form.

2) Make sure the website on your current business cards is redirected to your live website (Again this was specifically directed at this prospect, but if your not building your own website, ensure that the domain on your marketing material is your domain)

Too many social links?

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:07:00 -0700

You see the links everywhere. Digg. Stumble. Add to Google. Redit. Del.icio.us.

It's clear that social media is here to stay. So how much social media should you put on your site? Will adding these buttons to your blog, to your content, or to your store bring you more visitors? More traffic? More sales?

Leading usability researches such as FutureNow, e-Consultancy, and others have done endless research on usability and e-commerce shopping. As far as social media links, I've yet to see an research on the effectiveness of these links and I personally feel that the jury is still out but that studies are coming (and perhaps in the works right now)

The power of consumer reviews

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:45:00 -0700

The statistics are everywhere. Consumer reviews generate more sales.

I personally have had a few questions with clients and prospects about ratings and reviews, and in some of these conversations the client has been sceptical. The client has felt that a single bad rating can bring down the average or a negative review can turn off buyers. That's true if the glass is half empty.

A single bad rating can lend credibility to your product. When I look at reviews at Amazon and I see 19 good reviews and 1 bad review, it leads to credibility.

A negative review can turn buyers off, but it can also let you address a negative experience. Properly handling a negative experience shows class, and it can turn a person into a fan. (And if the consumer isn't telling you about their negative experience, you can bet they are telling their friends)

Don't fear the negative review.

The Missing Google Analytics Manual

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:00:00 -0700

Future Now Inc has published a great post titled 'The Missing Google Analytics Manual'.

We get a lot of Google Analytics questions - this is our new answer. (just kidding - we will still help you out)

Who takes care of the content?

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:59:00 -0700

Mike Duffy from The Winery Website Report wrote a nice little blog post this past week titled 'Thinking of Redesigning Your Winery Website?' where he links to a good article on 'Who takes care of the content'.

If you're planning a website the content plays a key role. So does photography (if you don't have a great photo next to your content, most people will just skip over the text). Website design, typography, 'call to action' phrases, button color, etc all play key roles.

AtK1 we have a set process we take our clients through:

Discovery Process: we determine the goals of your website, setup bench marks to measure against, etc.
Functional Requirements: we look at your current site, what your competitors are doing, determine the feature list, etc.
Wireframes and Site Map: here we spend time deciding where the key elements need to appear, how much priority they should have, content needed, etc.
Design Concepts: this is the fun part (and where to many web designers start)
Etc…

People's personalities differ - some of our clients are really creative and love design, some of our clients are competitive and are really focused on the 'call to action' phrases. We do have some methodical clients that spend an incredible amount of time on content (we really have a client like this right now).

People can fall into a trap and choose a specific area on their site where they really want to focus, such as the creative, or the widgets, or at neat little Web 2.0 button, etc and because their personality type isn't attracted to other elements such as the content, they skip over those elements. (I'm guilty of this – I'm a competitive person, and I typically just skim text – I have to remember there are methodical people that really read all the text, and there are humanistic type of people that really like people pictures and testimonials, etc)

It's our job as web designers and developers to help balance our client and come up with great design, great content, and ultimately a great website.

Thoughts?

The importance of being #1 on Google

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:04:00 -0700

On Friday the Google Blog offered a peak into some of the studies they are doing around their user interface.

This picture comes from an eye-tracking study that Google conducted. The deeper the color, the more a persons eyes focus on that part of the page.

Based on this image, all the focus is on the top two results. Coming up fifth or sixth on Google doesn't seem to garner much attention. It really pays to be number one or two.

As a side note, it's interesting to see that Google is constantly studying and testing their user interface. Too often a website is built and the interface is left alone for 2-3 years with no testing, tweaking, or continuous improvment.

Who's talking about you?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:00:00 -0700

Ever wonder who is talking about you? Or want to know who is talking about your competitiors?

Here are a couple of tools that can help you:

Google Alerts - enter a key search term and your email address and Google will notify you daily with any new search results. This is a great way to monitor your brand, and your competitors brands.
Twitter Alerts - our PR rep Melissa Dobson turned me onto this tool. Similar to Google Alerts, you can be notified daily of any search terms that are talked about on Twitter.

And if you really want to dig deep and spy on your competition or see how well your website ranks, Future Now provides links to these 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition.

Get Found on Google

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:00:00 -0700

Getting found on Google always seems to be a hot topic for our website clients. Here are a couple of interesting blogs that came out last week.

The easiest way to a first-page ranking on Google (from Forresters Research)
Sitemaps Decrease Crawler Response Time (from Search Engine Land). (Note that our current platform automatically creates these site map files and automatically puts them into a robot.txt file for you)

While we don't provide Search Engine Optimization for clients, we do have a very Search Engine friendly platform and we can recommend a few search engine optimization companies and are more than happy to talk with you.

Have you used your own website?

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 20:02:00 -0700

Have you used your own website? Try completing an order on your site. Try ordering multiple products. Where does the 'continue shopping' button take you? Can you figure out the shipping easily?

What are the most common questions customers ask? Try finding the answers from the homepage on your website - can you?

Have you tried emailing customer service from your website? How many clicks till you found the customer service email address? How long till someone responds?

Does your website have a New Years Resolution?

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 11:34:00 -0700

This is probably the first time I've publicly stated a new year’s resolution for our platform.

Enhanced User Experience. Increase the user experience in both our admin panel and clients front end websites. This involves both visual experience, and the way different components work.
Simplify. Make it easier for website administrators to enter data. Make it easier for end users to checkout, subscribe to an email, etc.
Smarter. Make our systems smarter. We have tons of data on hand, and we want to put more intelligence in the system to utilize this data better.

Truthfully, we have all been thinking about these three ideas for awhile. Our new platform launches in January and we are really excited about some of the new features. (If you want a private demo, email me and we can show you some of the new features).

In 2009 we have some giant plans. We've shared a few of these plans with some of our partners. 2009 is going to be a great year and you should see some amazing work by everyone one. (Hopefully that statement doesn't sound to arrogant)

If you have a new year’s resolution around your website I would love to hear about it.

Amazing Photos Of 2008

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:44:00 -0700

Amazing photos of 2008

Part 1: http://tinyurl.com/p2008-1

Part 2: http://tinyurl.com/p2008-2

Part 3: http://tinyurl.com/p2008-3

Via Twitter - http://twitter.com/veboolabs