Here’s a snippet of a conversation I had the other day with a local marketer.

Marketing Guy: “Dan, what is one of the greatest benefits Sitebrands new product [relevance7] will bring to marketers in general?”

Dan: “That’s easy, zero integration.”

Marketing Guy: “Are you referring to the one line of code that is required for your tool to be fully implemented into a website?”

Dan: “well, sort of.”

Marketing Guy: “Can you elaborate?”

Dan: “Zero integration means that there is no longer a need to involve IT, this means that marketers have 100% control over what they want to do on the website.”

Zero Integration = No need to pester IT = Marketers get to do what they want when they want.

His eyes lit up.

Marketing guy: “Really? What do you mean?”

Dan: “If you want to change content on your site to better reflect the type of visitor you currently have on your site, go ahead, you can do that through our UI without the need of your IT department. Whether or not you have long release cycles or other organizational roadblocks to do the types of online marketing you’ve been accustomed to doing in the offline world, you can now do it in the online world without pestering IT. If you want to tap into any data point you or your vendors own, you can do that without the techies. In other words, our one line of code will allow a marketer to tap into all of the various back-end data sources you have in order to offer the most relevant message in real time to your visitors across multiple sessions.”

Marketing guy: “So what you’re saying is that Sitebrand has designed a personalization tool that puts the power of marketing where it belongs, in the marketers’ hands”.

Dan: “That’s what I said, zero integration.”

I’m on month three here at Sitebrand, and man, how time flies when you’re having fun.  I find one of the most interesting things to take in, is the company pitch and core values when you’re new.  Rarely can you experience this in such an unbiased fashion after you’ve spent time with a firm.  So I wasn’t surprised to hear the buzz around web site personalization.  Coming from the audience measurement space, I was no stranger to the idea, but was anxious to hear what Sitebrand had to say about it.  Let me illustrate with a bricks and mortar example.

This past weekend, I was walking through our local big box hardware store; I needed furnace filters, excitement at its best.  I rounded the corner of the furnace aisle and was greeted by a salesman.  He very quickly realized my intention and prompted me with ‘What size filters are you looking for?”.  Nothing remarkable about that you say.  But ask yourself, how does that compare to the online experience?  The fact that I entered the store obviously meant I was a visitor and the fact that I walked down the furnace aisle meant I could be segmented.  But it was the combination of those facts along with a relevant message that made the experience truly personal, and that’s where I’m going.

Personalization isn’t just about segmenting users, and it isn’t about delivering a unique message to a visitor because you can.  It’s about optimizing the conversation you’re having with your visitor.  It’s about having a dialogue rather than a monologue. The ability to segment web traffic is no different in the online world than the ability to stand in the furnace aisle and whistle Dixie.  The key is combining a set of likely visitor expectations with the information you have, to deliver you guessed it: the right message to the right visitor, at the right time.  I wasn’t asked whether it was my first visit to the store, nor was I directed to the humidifiers section.

So what’s the takeaway here?  It’s simple, don’t get lost in the technology, or with the variety of methods and techniques to get in front of users.  Sure, we now have the ability to stand in that online furnace aisle, and that’s a great thing for Marketers, but that’s not the end of the story.  Success always comes down to relevant messaging, segmentation just places you in the aisle.

After I had the right furnace filter in my hand, the salesman kindly asked if he could help with anything else, “no” is what I said, so he pointed me in the direction of the checkout counter.

There is a  lack of tested business practice when it comes to website optimization.  This is because it is a brand new aspect of the (in itself young) discipline of eMarketing.  That said, one of the most compelling aspects of optimization is that there is no right way or wrong way to do it.  Given the cyclical nature of an optimization initiative, if you make a change to your website and get lousy results, you are that much more likely to do better on the next pass.

Given that Sitebrand is a personalization company, we spend all of our time assisting customers in getting their own conversion optimization efforts off the ground.  Because of that, I have a few points that I think should be considered by any marketer about to get started in this space.  If you follow the first point, and remain aware of the second, you should be off to the races in optimizing the desired outcomes of your web property.

POINT 1:  You can’t score if you don’t know where the goal is.

Don’t bother tinkering with the zeros and ones that make up your website unless you are aware of and educated on your traffic and the goals you have for them.  Let’s say you want to rebuild your home page to grow your conversion rate (for simplicity, let’s assume conversion equals making a shopping cart purchase:

• How many page views does the home page have?
• What is the bounce rate for this page?
• How many home page views were the entry pages for a session?
o What is the conversion rate of this visitor type?
o  How does it compare to the overall site average?
o If it was 10% higher, how much money is that worth?
o How does it trend for the last year?

These questions will allow you to see a rough revenue opportunity for your optimization, and provide some baselines to show if your changes have created a noticeable lift in goal outcomes over time.  The end-game of optimization is not a feeling, it’s a number.  Make sure you have clarity about what the number is and where it comes from before you start trying to play with it.

(If you want to get really into it, start drilling down a little and looking at the conversion rates of homepage visitors by source, geographic location and new or returning visitor status.  Give each one an opportunity cost, and alter your page to speak to the one worth the most money.  When you are done drop me an email, I would love to hear about the results)

POINT 2:  There is a difference between optimizing the medium and the message. (sorry Mr. McLuhan)

An important consideration when considering online optimization is that it is delivered in two key pieces, what you say and where you say it.

Sounds Obvious huh?  However most of the current discipline around site optimization focuses on where things are said.  Look at some of the case studies online, where you see that moving the ‘buy now’ button two inches on the screen has an impact on conversion, or making a green menu blue decreased bounce rates by 52%….

I’m not at all saying the numbers are wrong, but I am saying that changing the shopping isles and front door of your store is only part of the equation.  Moreover, it the most easily automated.  Someday soon a software tool will be announced and:

• it will have a really cool sounding algorithm
• it will take every element of your site and shuffle them in real time to optimize your store layout.

Proper site optimization takes what is being said in equal (or perhaps more) consideration with where it is being said.  The better your dialog with a visitor, the better your goal outcomes. The better your dialog with a visitor, the better your goal outcomes.  Look at the messaging, the incentives, the calls to action and the relevance to the visitors you are targeting.  You need as much Eisenberg as you do Taguchi.

Map out your goals properly, remember that the message is important too, and have fun growing your business.

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal” – Henry Ford

Cheers,

Jim