In marketing a lot of time and effort goes into the philosophy and science of targeting the proper markets, understanding your customers needs, and crafting a campaign that demonstrates your product as the superior solution to their problem. What if there was something you could do that would increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by over 300% but it had nothing to do with the actual campaign?

Reducing Friction

Go to this website, click that link, call this number, fill out that form; Anytime you ask people to do something you are creating a point of friction. Your audience will not continue unless the reward is greater than the friction they are experiencing. It is easy to forget about friction but doing so may severely inhibit the success of your campaigns.

Now that I have you thinking about friction, let me show you what happens to your marketing efforts when you reduce it. Read more…

Marketing marketing friction, optimization, user experience

I put together a lot of marketing strategies that revolve around a corporate website or microsite as a destination for visitors. A lot of effort goes into creating and executing these strategies. So you can probably imagine the anxiety I went through when one of the sites I manage was hacked. I was on the phone with my hosting company, Rackspace Cloud and they walk me through the steps of cleaning out the injected data, getting the site back up and running and finding the vulnerabilities. I thought I had taken the proper steps to protect the site, but I was wrong and I want to share that information with you so that you can avoid that same mistake. Read more…

Marketing chmod, file permissions, hackers

When Verizon first announced they were releasing a Google Android phone I was hopeful that this would be the phone that would keep me from switching to AT&T (just so that I could get an iPhone). Well, as it turns out that is exactly what they delivered! I picked up my DROID the morning of the release and have been running it through its paces to see what it can do. I have read a lot of the pre-release reviews and they all pretty much said the same thing, so what I wanted to focus on was how it actually worked out in the real world. Read more…

Marketing Android, DROID, Motorola, Verizon Wireless

When I was a kid I remember getting really exited about this amazing robot, The Omnibot 2000. It could supposedly do all kinds of amazing things. My eleven year old imaginination fantasized about a world where my Ominbot would fetch my drinks and do my chores…a brave new world indeed!  I never did get an Omnibot, but if I did, I bet the feeling of disappointment that eleven year old me would have felt is pretty close to how I feel now about Google Translate.

When Google translate was first announced it was seen as a potential boon for E-Commerce sites and with their new Google Translate widget it seemed like a “no brainer” for any website with an international audience. So, I recently embarked on a feasibility study for our website to see if our customers could benefit from computer translated content.

Secure Checkout fails in Google Translate

Read more…

Marketing ecommerce, google translate, localization, machine translation

As someone who is intrinsically interested in pulling back the curtain and seeing what’s going on behind the scene, I was somewhat surprised by what I found while looking through the source code of the president elect’s web site www.barackobama.com. It seems that his campaign is making great use of Google Analytics and Google Web Optimizer.

You can see areas where they have changed code and stopped web site functions in order to improve website retension:

/* Commenting out to try to fix exit and bounce rates in Google Analytics */

What I find most encouraging is that our new president seems to have surrounded himself with smart people.  Including people who know how to leverage technology like Google’s Website Optimizer and Analytics to improve their campaign, while at the same time keeping down their overhead.

Marketing, Web Analytics Barack Obama, Google Analytics, Optimizer