Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Web Measurement Strategies for Small Businesses

I've just returned from presenting at an Internet marketing seminar targeted at small and medium-sized businesses. Preparing for the presentation made me think about how to coordinate an effective digital marketing measurement program when you don't have much of a budget. I'm a great believer Arthur C. Nielsen's quote: "The price of light is less than the cost of darkness." Still, companies must live within their means and small businesses often don't have huge amounts of money to spend on data collection and analysis.

So what's an effective Web measurement strategy for a small company doing business online? It actually doesn't look much different from a large organization's strategy. Just the scale and some tools might be different. A small business still needs a holistic approach to measuring its online channel and the right tools in its toolbox. It must have clearly defined online goals and objectives, which can be translated into a set of KPIs (define). A small business still needs the right processes in place to ensure its data's integrity.

In some cases, it might be easier for small businesses to measure online performance. Defining business goals and KPIs may be easier because fewer people are involved in the process. Managing its processes may be easier to ensure pages are correctly tagged and campaigns are properly tracked, for example. Measurement may be easier because one person might do everything.

Small businesses might find it harder to take a holistic view of measuring their online channel by having multiple tools in their toolbox. An effective strategy for measuring and optimizing site performance has four key components:

  • Good market intelligence

  • Sophisticated visitor behavior analysis

  • Excellent user profiling

  • Effective site-performance tracking

Market intelligence provides the context for the business's own performance. While the majority of a digital marketer's time can be focused on the brand and its site, it's important to remember that the neither the brand nor the site operate in a vacuum. External factors and forces are also at play. Larger businesses might buy into third-party data providers, such as comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings, and Hitwise. These services are often out of small businesses' reach and may mot even be suitable for sites with lower traffic levels. However, a small business can still uses online resources, such as government statistics and sites like ClickZ, to keep a breast of trends in the industry.

Visitor behavior analysis comes from Web analytics tools. Some sophisticated reporting packages are available for free or at low cost. Google Analytics is free and will suit many businesses' needs for a long time to come. (Microsoft is launching its own service soon.) For those willing to invest a little bit, other tools are suitable for small businesses. I like ClickTracks for its ease of use and some of its powerful analysis features.

User profiling is the process of getting to know who's using your site and why. The basic principles of marketing are about understanding your customers and meeting their needs. In our online environment, a business must know the following:

  • Who is visiting my site?

  • What are they trying to achieve? What are their goals?

  • Were they able to do what they wanted to do? If not, why not?

This data can be collected from surveys, and there are plenty of cost-effective Web survey services around (SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, etc.) that allow you to create online surveys at a reasonably low cost. Just because a survey is cheap to run, it doesn't mean it's low quality. Pay attention to the type of information you're asking for and the way you ask for it.

Finally, site-performance tracking looks at a site's effectiveness from a technical perspective. It encompasses speed of page delivery, site availability, and responsiveness of transactional processes. A Forrester report on this subject shows that users find slow Web sites are less interesting, less believable, and less trustworthy. If you're a small business trying to cut through the Internet's noise, don't burden your site with these perceptions. Tracking and measuring your site's speed are an important component of the mix. If you can't afford to buy into continuous services such as Keynote Systems or Gomez, find sites to test your site speed for free or on an ad-hoc basis.

For small businesses, the price of light may not be the actual price you need to pay for data services but rather the time you need to spend managing, interpreting, and understanding the data you can get. In this competitive environment, doesn't it make sense to work smarter?

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Apps Us Marketers Can't Live Without

Here at VerticalResponse we have roughly 70% of all employees using Apple computers. Our engineering department refuses to use anything else, and our latest convert was our Vice President of Product Management, Josh, who is on the latest Macbook Pro - where if he really needs to, he can run Windows.

As a side note, check out one of our customers, Due Maternity, talking about us on the Apple website.

We love our Macs and we love web-based software (after all, our product is web-based). I figured I'd share some Apple-specific software that works for us and web-based software that anyone can use. I've asked Alf, our Director of Marcom, and Ivan, our Web Producer, to weigh in on what they like too.

Janine's Picks

Typepad2 Typepad - Online tool for blogging. I use it to publish this blog - it's about $5/month and totally easy to use.
Salesforce Salesforce.com - Online CRM tool for managing contacts and marketing to them. You can use VR from within this application. It has a few limitations with a Mac but still worth it! Just $95/month or $65/month depending on your flavor. The best part? You can use VerticalResponse right from within you salesforce account, then when someone clicks or opens your email, it is reported right back into the lead record. Booyah!
Filemaker FileMaker - Software to customize and store your database if you aren't into the online thing like Salesforce.com. $299 for the product, and you can totally customize your database.
Newsgator NewsGator - This is a great online tool for tracking keywords that appear on blogs and in the online world. We use it to see who is talking about us, and better yet, who is talking about our competition. You can really track where your press releases are being picked up more or less, real-time. I think we pay about $15/month.

Alf's Picks

Firefox Firefox Extensions - Alone, Firefox is a great browser, but add the treasure trove of extentions available, and it becomes an invaluable tool for marketers and developers alike. On the marketing side, one of my favorites is SearchStatus, it shows me the Google PageRank & Alexa Rank for any page I browse right in my status bar and lets me instantly check a page's keyword density, backlinks & indexed pages in a variety of search engines (among a few other goodies). On the development side Web Developer is da bomb, I know there's been a lot of buzz about FireBug (I have that one installed too) with all its Web 2oh AJAXy Goodness, but my loyalty is still with Web Developer ... it's just too useful.
Keynote Apple Keynote (Mac Only) - Them special effects is fantastic. Mac only (you can save to ppt for pc but why?) presentations & slide shows, this app kicks PowerPoint's *#$%. We use it to create the big-screen product presentaions for our trade show booth, and it's as easy as pie to use. Sync it up to a playlist in your iTunes library...click... and you have yourself an instant soundtrack, Rock On! Don't beleve me? Visit us at a tradeshow and see for yourself.
Omni OmniOutliner (Mac Only) - When I need to structure my thoughts on various marketing projects, I find OmniOutliner from the Omni Group to be the simplest hierarchical outlining app around. You can organize almost anything with this app, complex road maps, or simple to-do list. Its super flexibility and scriptability make it an irreplaceable tool. Can't wait to get my hands on Omni's sister app OmniPlan once its out of beta.

Ivan's Picks

Quicksilver QuickSilver (Mac Only) - Remember the LiveStrong bracelet at the apex of its popularity? Being marginally tech-savvy and not having this installed on your Apple is like forgetting to wear your LiveStrong bracelet in 2004. If you are fond of keyboard shortcuts, this is the app for you. Despite its overbearing trendiness, it turns out there is reason it fosters zealotry among its users - if you take the time to learn it, it really speeds up your workflow while simultaneously impressing your haughty, hipster friends.
Netnewswire NetNewsWire (Mac Only) - Just about every site these days has a news feed you can subscribe to, and this gem for OS X is the best way to manage those news feed subscriptions. Subscribe to all your competitor's feeds, industry blogs and publications. Become one with your business' marketplace. There is a free version (NetNewsWire Lite) and one you can purchase ($29.95). The paid version integrates into your NewsGator account, allowing you to synchronize your feed subscriptions across multiple computers, and even access them through a web browser if you are jonesing for an information fix.
Basecamp Basecamp - This web-based application is a great tool to manage your ongoing projects, streamline communication and enhance collaboration within a team. It came quite in handy when we were re-designing our website and needed to keep track of the seemingly-endless task list. If you're an Apple user, you can also integrate Basecamp into your dashboard with either the Telescope or the Basecamp widget.

Got any applications your marketing can't live without? Comment and tell everyone!

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Brand equity

Brand equity can be defined in many different ways. I have developed a simple, yet powerful, definition of brand equity. For a brand to be strong it must accomplish two things over time: retain current customers and attract new ones. To the extent a brand does these things well, it grows stronger versus competition, and delivers more profits to its owners.

Breaking down the definition of "brand equity" into its two components, we can more easily determine a reliable way to measure brand equity, and to track changes in brand equity over time. The components of brand equity, retention and attraction of customers, stem from people's experiences with and perceptions of a brand.

The ability to retain customers is largely experiential. High equity brands exhibit stronger levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty. History has shown that consumers will continue to buy a brand that offers them "their money's worth."

The ability to attract new customers is largely perceptual. Because customers do not have actual brand experience, they must go by what they hear, see and believe about a brand. The two primary ways the market receives this information is through messages controlled by marketing, such as advertising and PR efforts, as well as uncontrolled messages such as press stories and "word of mouth."

Scott White is President of Brand Identity Guru a leading Corporate Branding and Branding Research firm in Boston, MA.

Brand Identity Guru specializes in creating corporate and product brands that increase sales, market share, customer loyalty, and brand valuation.

This Article may be freely copied as long as it is not modified and this resource box accompanies the article, together with working hyperlinks.

Over the course of his 15-year branding career, Scott White has worked in a wide variety of industries: high-tech, manufacturing, computer hardware and software, telecommunications, banking, restaurants, fashion, healthcare, Internet, retail, and service businesses, as well as numerous non-profit organizations.

Brand Identity Guru clients include: Sun Life Financial, Coca Cola, HP, Sun, Nordstrom, American Federal Mortgage, Franklin Sports and many others, including numerous emerging growth companies.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Mini tutorial on SpamAssassin

Here’s a selected list of just a few of the hundreds of terms blocked by SpamAssassin, the most widely used network-level filter.

(Note: SpamAssassin uses open-source technology aimed at UNIX systems. My non-techie interpretation of this is that network administrators can configure SpamAssassin however they want.)

Some common trigger words or phrases:

- subject line starts with “free”

- subject contains FREE in all caps

- the word “free” in certain phrases (free offer, free leads, free access, free preview)

- certain words like “guarantee” in all caps

- words like “unsubscribe,” “leave,” and other list removal phrases

- using font sizes that are 2 + or bigger

- background in an HTML email that isn’t white

- HTML font color is gray, red, yellow, green, blue, magenta or “unknown to us”

- claims compliance with spam regulations or with US Senate Bill 1618 or House Bill 4176

- urges you to call now or claims you can be removed from the list

- the phrases: what are you waiting for, while supplies last, while you sleep

- asks you to click below

- uses a Nigerian scam key phrase such as “million dollars”

- money back guarantee

Eegads...

How can you avoid all of these? The answer is you don’t have to. SpamAssassin uses a rules-based system to filter mail headers and body text.

Basically, it’s a point system that assigns positive (it’s spam) or negative (it’s not spam) scores to a long list of trigger words, phrases and message headers. You have to reach a certain total before your email message is classified as spam and diverted.

If you’re accumulating negative as well as positive points, you may be under the threshold. For example, using the phrase “if only it were that easy” assigns you +2.0 points. “Free preview” gives you +1.7 points while “free trial” gives you only +0.1.