Does this scenario sound familiar? It’s sometimes hard to believe, but given the rapid speed of Internet growth, the cutting edge technology that companies worked so hard to implement just a few years ago is now outdated and insufficient.  I’ve been working with many companies that are coming to this realization, and an unfortunate trend has appeared. These companies, sadly are completely determined to keep using their 3rd party vendors and service providers.

Services and vendor offerings I am referring to include web hosting, email, e-commerce and payment systems, surveys, content management systems and video and photo services.  Reasons that companies don’t want to change vendors vary – they don’t want to make the effort required to change, they feel entrenched, they’re nervous of possible ramifications, etc.  Although these can sometimes be valid reasons, more often than not this short-sightedness ends up being more expensive, provides customers a sub-par user experience and limits the company in serveral other ways. Read on to learn why.

1. Cost
   Cost is the most straightforward reason to consider a vendor switch. In the last five years, the number of internet service vendors has exploded – which has driven down overall costs. More products are based on open standards and existing frameworks and more are sold as a service and hosted in the cloud. Contrast this to what it took to install something like a shopping cart several years ago – then it was proprietary and customized – at a high cost. Often clients are still paying monthly fees for these outdated services – and drastically overpaying at that. Now they can consider new options and opportunities that improve what they offer their customers, at a much lower cost over the life of the website.
2. Ease of Implementation
   Companies remember the hassles and time required to add that shopping cart or add that video to their site years ago and are hesitant to go through the same ordeal again. The small vendors they selected from limited options years ago took forever to respond and had poor documentation.  However, much has changed – many current providers are bigger with much larger customer bases. They’ve greatly improved the implementation process, with excellent documentation and sample code and robust APIs that give more flexibility for implementations. There are many customers that share sample code and have documented their implementations. Forums and responsive users abound to discuss and help in using the products. Current vendors offer more services that are easier to add and maintain than before, at a reasonable cost.
3. More Available Options
   Today’s established vendors have a more dedicated focus and larger teams working to support their products. They are working to make their products as useful as possible and offer many new features and options. These new features make your website more useful to your own customers.
4. Better Customer Support
   Along with some of the reasons these products are easier to implement is the improved customer support – the vendors are larger or more specialized and have knowledgeable dedicated staff to help your company use their products. And through forums and development websites, more customers are active in the discussions as well – making it much easier to implement the products than in the past.
5. Growth Opportunities
   Finally, the way the product will grow and improve is important to consider. Many of the vendors that have been around for many years have all but given up on keeping their products current. Reasons vary – perhaps their customer base is small and the product isn’t worth upgrading. Perhaps the vendors don’t have the right staff to keep the product current. If your vendor’s offering is the same now as it was five years ago – chances are they aren’t looking for ways to improve their product and your business – switching to a dedicated vendor will better ensure that your website will grow with more and better functionality in the future.

With these reasons in hand, consider your current vendors and if they’re really meeting your needs. If you’re not sure, start researching their competition. Check the services provided and pricing. You may be surprised at what’s possible out of the box now, and how reasonably it can be priced. Good resources, aside from just Googling, include TechCrunch and Mashable.

Let me know your thoughts. Have you found a new vendor that drastically improved your website?

If these analysts are correct, in a few years, 4 out of 5 people will be using the internet on their phones. What does this mean for you? Well, there will be a significant change in users’ internet usage behavior.

Source: Opera

Currently, your existing and potential customers use the internet when they are stationary – at home or at the office. They surf haphazardly, often finding your website through links or basic searches.   Only when they use a mapping service and search around a central point does the location of your business really come into play.

In this web enabled, mobile future, users’ behavior will be different. With a web browser constantly at their fingertips, the information they look for will be different. They will have new ideas and questions:

• What is the closest type of place I am looking for, based on where I am right now?
• What are the details and reviews of this product I am looking at right now?
• What is the reputation of  the business I am standing by?
• Should I go in or is there a similar establishment nearby that is better?
• Are the prices I am looking at right now competitive?
• What does your company offer based on where I am now?
• .. And countless others…

Smartphones are being built now with GPS functionality, meaning the phones can know where the user is.  Many phone applications can already use this information when returning data to you – giving results based on the city you’re in.  The practice of geotagging, or defining data with an associated location is increasingly popular, gaining prevalence with photo services like Flickr, and now shifting into micro-blogging services like Twitter.  Soon many more services will be targeting the data they return based on your location.

PRTMobile.com, as written up in CrunchGear.com is a perfect example. They offer mobile-web friendly property listings, that customers easily access from their phones through simple URLs.  The chances of passerbys looking up property listings later from home is minuscule, but through PRTMobile’s service, these listings get immediate, interested customer response.

There are three aspects of this mobile future that are important to consider for your own site.

1. Make sure your websites can handle mobile visitors. Visit your website from an iPhone and BlackBerry and make sure that users can find what they need – make changes if they can’t.  To take it a step further, consider a separate mobile based website entirely like eBay and Facebook currently offer, that streamlines the UI to be mobile friendly.
2. The good strategy is to prepare your content for this mobile future. The right steps for your company depend on your industry.  Start your analysis by considering how your customers might interact with your firm or products while away from their desks.If you are a location based business, search for your products and services through mapping websites and query search engines for them with your city included. If you don’t show up where you want to be, work on associating your location with your web presence. Ideas here include geocoding photos, updating your content to be more location specific and utilizing review services like Yelp. If you have a budget for advertising, consider location based online ads, that will pop up when users are searching in your area.
3. Finally, again depending on your product and services, consider creating a web portal that returns data based on the user’s location.  Users will know they can visit your website from their phone anywhere and get just what they need, right away. If your site focuses instead on a global product or service, instead analyze how accessible your key information is from mobile devices – make sure the requests your customers have can be easily met using their phones.

The changes and advances you make today will help your business grow along with the smartphone market.

Instead, I suggest thinking about your customers first and how you can use the internet and technology to make their lives easier.  Sure, a blog or twitter stream lets your customers hear from you more readily, and this communication has tremendous value.  However, this added communication doesn’t necessarily make you any less dispensable to the customer. Rather, to become truly indispensable, you need to offer them new services and features that they come to depend on.

Examples of companies creating new value for their customers:

I use USAA for my personal checking account. They now allow me to deposit checks online using my scanner for free, with their Deposit@Home service. This technology saves a trip to the bank and is incredibly valuable to me.  Meanwhile, Wachovia, my prior bank, does not offer a comparable service. I value USAA much more than Wachovia now, and have no desire to find a different bank.  Additionally, I now believe that USAA will continue to add functionality to make my life even easier, as they’ve set the precedent. Trusting their dedication to their customers makes me value them and want to stick with them as well.

As mobile computing becomes more widespread, new opportunities to help your customers abound. Companies that have created successful iPhone applications and mobile sites for their customers have received great publicity through word of mouth and commentary, often lowered administrative costs and certainly better established their brand.  FedEx has made it simple to track packages away from your computer. ESPN makes checking scores easier than ever before. In turn, their customers now use these companies’ total basket of services more and are more likely to ship FedEx and go to ESPN.com at home because of these applications.  Read overviews of several other company’s mobile application ideas.  Although a full fledged iPhone application may be overkill for your business, definitely consider how accessible and useful your website is to your customers when they’re away from their desktops.

How to create customer value yourself:

These two examples are just a sliver of the possibilities – there are so many ways to add value for your customers online. Step back and consider all the various interactions your customers have with you. Are you in a business that is appointment driven? Provide updates and reminders about appointments through the internet. Are you constantly mailing invoices and requiring mailed checks?  Consider online billing or automated payments.  Do you provide information that your customers call to inquire about? Push this content to them in more accessible ways.  Any way your customers contact you is an area to explore.

Online possibilities and prospects  are constantly evolving. As you consider all the customer interactions you have, there are inevitably services you can create that will save time and effort. When you give your customers these abilities, they will come to rely on it, and become even more devoted to you. If you do not, your competitor will first, and you will lose your customers. Take time now to talk to online strategists about your firm’s operations and logistics, brainstorm great new ideas, and make your firm truly indispensable.

Paul Reilly is a partner and co-founder of Unitz LLC, a web development and internet strategy firm based in Arlington, VA and Trumbull, CT.

Quite common in larger organizations with enviable budgets, but frequently absent with smaller operations is this analysis of the project’s success.  What return on investment (ROI) did the campaign provide?  How could it have been better? Can changes be made now to improve it moving forward?

Different versions of design and copy can have a surprising impact towards enticing potential customers. Before a large company like Coca-Cola opts for a big advertising buy, they do market testing to see how effective their new ads are. They run focus groups, take surveys, even perform eye tracking and pupil dilation tests.  After the ad is run, they analyze the response to see how effective it was. They take this analysis into consideration, make improvements to future ads and update the existing one. These practices assure that Coke gets the best return on their marketing dollar.

Smaller businesses though, can’t afford to conduct these types of metric tests for their relatively small campaigns. Commonly the budget is completely spent after the initial design and development. Fortunately though there are many techniques and simple steps that allow businesses to generate the best campaigns they can with the budgets they have. More than anything, just getting into the measuring mindset puts your campaign on the right track.

Here are some ideas to get the analytical juices flowing.

Sample Email Metrics

1) When creating a new email marketing campaign, consider doing several variations.  Take the best design ideas and copy and instead of picking one version to send to your entire distribution list, create multiple versions and send these each to a different small random subset of your audience.  After giving the recipients a day or two to process the emails, review the analysis metrics of the initial mailing.

A sample of metrics from a Constant Contact mailing shows several simple statistics that can be used to judge the success of a mailing.  The percentage of ‘Opens’ that your email received shows how many were enticed enough by the subject line to open the message. Comparing this rate among all of your initial sent versions will tell you which one was most successful subject line.

The same logic can be applied to the click-through numbers. First, which email has the highest percentage of clicks – this one has the most appealing design to your target audience. If you use different copy to link to the same outbound destinations, which email had the most successful click-through percentage?  That’s the one that described the link the best. In our sample, landing3’s copy was the most successful.

Once you’ve analyzed these numbers, revisit your email ideas and create a new version using the best subject line, design and content. Send this email to the remainder of your distribution list. This extra legwork will assure that you’re sending the best email you can.  Never forget that you’re marketing to your customers, not to yourself.  What they find most intriguing often isn’t what you’d expect them to. Marketing research will tell you what’s really most important and interesting to them.

If you’d like to learn more about these metrics, there are many great resources available.  Large email campaign management services often offer lots of suggestions and ideas.  MailChimp offers a nice article about understanding email campaign reports. Vertical Response offers webinars about many useful topics such as writing good marketing copy.

2) When it comes to your actual website, hands down, the most robust, documented and affordable (free!) metrics tool is Google Analytics. A full overview of Google Analytics’ features is beyond the scope of this post, but even a basic knowledge of the tool can really help you to make subtle changes that significantly improve your site’s appeal.

Google Analytics Dashboard

After installing the Google Analytics code to your site and allowing a few days for data to gather, the dashboard is your starting point to begin mining through your newfound data.  Clicking through from this point you can view where your visitors are coming from, both in terms of geography and referring websites. You can see how long your visitors stay, where they click and what page they were viewing when they lost interest. These available metrics are just the tip of the iceberg.

A simple tactic to visualize your page’s link success is the ‘Site Overlay’ feature. This is accessible under the Content menu and shows you the percentage of users that click on each specific link on a page. Is the prominent text link in the top left of your homepage getting as high a percentage of the clicks as you’d prefer?  Now you can know for sure and tweak the copy or imagery if necessary to see if other approaches are more successful. Frequent review of the click trends can help you judge the success of all of your site’s elements.  Mindful tweaks over time assure you better success.

Google Analytics Site Overaly

3) The last idea is a combination of the two ideas discussed so far. This approach is most practical for single website pages as opposed to complete websites, as multiple versions of the page need to be developed. Instead of deciding on and creating just one page when multiple versions of copy and design are debated, create them all, and then set the actual landing page to randomly load one of the page concepts (your web developer can accomplish this with some simple JavaScript).  Review the Google Analytics for each version of the page to see which one was most “sticky” (kept the most users interested) and find which elements of the pages were most clicked. Use this information to craft an ultimate page that combines the most successful elements.

These simple ideas are within just about any web campaign budget and hopefully can get you and your staff thinking of other ways to measure your ROI. Websites are easily changeable. Monitoring their success and making adjustments when necessary helps the site remain viable and interesting. Remember, if you aren’t measuring it, you aren’t managing it!