Here’s an interesting thought. Many companies are very concerned about how well their marketing message is getting to and is received by their customers. They are tweaking this and that to help their efforts be seen and acted on by their audience.
What happens next? How well do you respond?
A company called Hornstein Associates sent out an email to forty nine major corporations and they simply said: “What is your corporate policy regarding the turnaround time for e-mails addressed to customer service?”
Only half responded at all, and only 33% responded within a 24-hour period. Five years ago 86% responded and 63% responded in 24 hours.
That’s horrible! You are working your tail off to try and get business, then someone is taking the time and making the effort to contact you. There needs to be some kind of non-automated response from you. The faster the better. Even if this question doesn’t really have anything to do with your business a fast and polite response can make a wonderful impression.
Unfortunately I have found myself that impersonal, automated or no response at all are getting to be the norm these days. Not just with big companies, but with all of them. Imagine how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, in a good way, by just simply answering your customers in a timely manor. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard from people “I didn’t expect you to answer me (so fast).” My first reaction is still “Why Not?” and I hope it always will be.
It’s true that with all of the spam out there these days it gets harder and harder to sort through it, but if you are willing to do the work you will find it’s well worth the effort and your customers will thank you for it.
What’s the difference between good content and great content? According to By P.J. Fusco it’s your conversion rate. I don’t think I can argue with her either. If you’re reading my blog you are probably doing business on the web or thinking about it. What’s your main purpose in having a website? Converting visitors into customers.
I have designed another site called Fast Discount Banners.com. It’s a site where people can come in and design a large full color canvas banner right on the site and then place an order and we ship it to them. I made a page that listed the clip art I made for people to put on the banners. That page has become extremely popular with Google Images and even through the site is only a couple of months old they are sending me much more traffic looking for clipart than what they are sending me for banners. Currently it’s almost 100 to 1.
Right now bandwidth is not a big issue because I keep these images small, but it could become one if traffic keeps picking up. I thought about putting ads on that page to make something from the unrelated traffic, but all of the ads were for competitors banners and not clip art, so I took them off. Google doesn’t let you filter for keywords.
My job now is to get these visitors to go to my main page and to play with the banner maker instead of just copying the clipart and leaving. I believe if they play with the banner maker they may become a customer or recommend us to someone who will. I’m adding a line to the page to invite people to do just that. I’ll keep you posted on how it works.
In the meantime read the article by P.J. Fusco on the ClickZ website called “From Good to Great Content”.
Before you redesign your old site is the perfect time to start planning for SEO.You want to build your new site with the search engines in mind because getting them to like and trust your site can be the biggest boost to traffic and sales that you can have. You want to be able to improve your sites appearance, while making it more easily spiderable and also be sure that any hard earned rankings that your old site has built up will be retained and improved.
Paul O’Brien has some great tips on his blog series called “Search Engine Optimization”. This post is “Do Not Redesign Without a Plan for Search”
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in english and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Tuscan Farm Gardens. This site has a very clean look with easy navigation. I especially like that the site looks like the name, an old country garden.
Note 02-16-08
This site had improved since I last saw it. I like the content in black on a white background much better.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Strong mathematical minds at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed off their creativity and dexterity for the school’s fourth annual Student Origami Competition. Just some amazing stuff here, well worth a look.
As a follow up to yesterday’s post “Does Your Message Sell” I thought I would post some helpful ideas on how to improve your actual webpage content.
So you’ve looked at the content on your website and decided it needs some work to help get your message across to your visitors and to help increase the chances of them taking some sort of action on your site. That could be buying something, signing up for your newsletter or maybe just bookmarking your site. You have decided which action(s) that you are looking for and worked long and hard on which information to present to your visitor to help you obtain that action.
The next question is what’s the best way to present that information to them?
I found a list by Jason Lee Miller, a staff writer for WebProNews, called “20 Tips For Good Web Copy”. He covers all of the basics with this article. It’s a fast read, but you’ll use these tips over and over again.
It seems many times that I have had a customer tell me exactly how they want their site to look (add 5px of padding to that paragraph or move that picture up and over to the right just a smidgen) and never give a second thought to their actual message.
My job as a web designer is to make the site look as pleasing to my customer as possible and to explain to them things that might look weird in different browsers or resolutions.
Then the SEO in me will kick in and I will point out things like optimizing headlines and not enough/too many keywords, but in the end since it’s their site I have to be able to step back and let them be the final decision maker.
It is not my job to write their marketing message or any other content for that matter. After all who knows about your business more than you? I feel that it is my job to be a fan of my customer’s business, to want them to succeed in all aspects of their endeavours. In that respect I am always willing to offer my advise and opinion, even though it may not be something that they want to hear. The example above comes to mind where a customer spends all of their efforts on the “look” of their site and don’t pay attention to the message. The content of your site is just as important as the look of it. If your site looks bad no one will stick around to read your message, but if your message does not motivate your visitors into some sort of action you have not accomplished anything either.
Todays article is by Julie Chance is on the Business Know How site and is called “Six Steps To Developing A Marketing Message That Sells”. It’s a good article that will help all of your marketing efforts.
I have written before about how e-mail marketing is still going strong. A year ago when I started this business I would have told a client with a new website that if they wanted to start a blog they could use that to replace their e-mail marketing efforts.
Well live and learn. E-mail marketing is still going strong and shows no signs of letting up. Truth be told even with all of the Spam out there these days e-mail is still my favorite means of communication.
and I subscribe to several e-mail newsletters.
One of the questions that I am asked my my customers who want to send an e-mail newsletter is, “Should I remove names from my list who don’t opt-out, but seem to be dead?”
I have always resisted that idea, but I have also seen some lists get so big that they are almost unmanageable (and expensive). I have recently begun reading the blog by The Email Insider at mediapost.com and today Melinda Krueger “The E-mail Diva” posts about a good way to clean up the list. She talks about a campaign with a series of e-mails directed at just these names. It seems like a very logical and effective solution to me.
Sometimes when designing a new site for a client it’s hard to get them to consider SEO as an important factor. Sure they will give it lip service “We want our site to be easily found on the search engines”, but when you explain to them what it takes you get the nodding of the head and right after that they tell you that they want something that is completely the opposite. I try to explain what they want may hurt them with search rankings, but after that if they insist I’ll do what they want. What I have found is that before a site is built or redesigned SEO is not very important to most customers. They are quite confident they will be found. Then, after the fact when they aren’t getting the traffic that they expected it becomes a problem. That is why when a customer insists on doing something that I feel is going to hurt their rankings I send my concerns in an e-mail and save it with their account information, because fixing a problem after a site is designed, up and running can be much more work than in the beginning.
That brings me to todays post, what is really important for SEO and what is not. Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com writes a very good post about this and is followed by some comments that are worth reading also.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
If you’re like me you have many old CDs and DVDs around the house and office. For some strange reason even if they are not useful any more you just can’t get rid of them and they do look cool.
Here are some great ideas for what to do with them on the techeblog site. Enjoy.
