Blog posts by Maria Wasing

Five steps for managing social media

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:49:43 GMT

As the social media space matures, more and more businesses are looking to social networks as a way to better engage with and understand their customers. Increasingly therefore, companies need to focus on how best to invest in the right staff and processes so they can build future-proofed, socially active businesses.

We’ve noted over the last year or so that more and more of our customers have been employing full-time social media or community managers to help with this changing marketing focus. And so, to investigate this, we decided to undertake some research into this trend by surveying 250 marketing decision makers to get their thoughts and opinions.

The research findings show that social media is indeed becoming a bigger priority for companies, with almost three quarters (73%) now running online communities. It also shows that as many as 69% of UK businesses have appointed or plan to appoint a social media or community manager in next 12 months. So, it is clear that social media is quickly becoming an important focus for businesses and this means establishing new processes and ways of working in order to take full advantage of the emerging channel.

Here are five key steps for brands looking to improve the way they manage social media and online communities:

Step 1 – Get senior buy-in for your social media strategy

Support from the top is crucial to ensure social media really has mindshare in a company, otherwise it will never be something that is taken seriously by the wider business or receive the investment and attention it needs. The key to securing buy-in from senior management is articulating your social media goals upfront, along with tangible benefits. If you can demonstrate an effective strategy that will deliver tangible results, you’re more likely to succeed in gaining support.

The fact is that social media is a relatively new trend; as much as 57% of those surveyed who were running an online community only started doing so in the last 12 months and 28% in the last three months.So to get buy-in from senior management you have to be clear about your goals and explain the need to participate in this new medium. Referencing what other organisations are doing can, in most cases, strengthen your case.

Fig 1. What social channels are you using?

Step 2 – Allocate proper resource

It’s really time to kill the myth that social media is a free or low-cost channel. As with any marketing strategy, success is in part down to the amount of resource dedicated.For social media, this usually means people. Allocating a dedicated person to manage social media and community management is vital. Social media will also require investment in terms of time, training and various monitoring or management tools. Planning is key to success here so that each business will need some time to get goals and strategy in place before a launch.

Step 3 – Get the right people for the job

Asking someone to just spend a few hours every week on social media and/or tagging it onto an existing job function won’t always cut it. You don’t necessarily need to hire someone dedicated straightaway, but look at who the best people might be currently within your organisation to manage social media activity. Don’t forget this might extend outside the marketing department or mean pulling in people from other areas of the business, and often requires an individual with a very specific skill-set.

Step 4 – Put proper processes in place

From guidelines and responsibilities, to monitoring and crisis management, making sure that everyone involved in your brand’s social media activity knows what they have to do will ensure your strategy has the best chance of succeeding. Marketers should also concentrate on integrating social media with their existing activity – and should avoid separating campaigns – this will give your activity a more united front and will allow for greater audience participation.

This may mean that you need your customer service department to change or your inside sales processes updated to encompass the new processes – but the rewards, more often than not, far outweigh the efforts involved.

Step 5 – Review, review and review

This last point is particularly important. As social media continues to grow and evolve, so businesses will need to keep evolving the way they use it. It’s also important to set up KPIs that can be tested and reviewed before the social media activity kicks off. It’s also essential to monitor the success of any activity to see whether it is achieving the results you were expecting.The good news for those just starting out in social media is that implementing many of these steps can be done easily without a full-time resource in place. What it comes down to is having the right strategy and the right skills development plan in place. This way businesses of all sizes can make the most of the social media opportunity.

The future is mobile, but is your site ready?

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:39:22 GMT

The adoption rate of smartphones and tablets has soared in the last 12 months. This trend has ushered in a whole new generation of mobile workers (and users) that are turning to the web on their internet-enabled mobile devices to acquire information that helps them make decisions on the move. So how is your company catering for them?

The majority of websites just aren’t probably optimised for this mobile onslaught. And that really is a problem, because the mobile workforce consumes information in a very different way than people sitting at their desks staring at a computer screen. Mobile apps, while popular at present, don’t seem to represent a short or long-term solution and it’s been suggested as many as 72 per cent of mobile web users don’t download applications at all. So what can you do to ensure your website is working for mobile users?

Like any website, the cornerstone of success for mobile sites is a definite and clear focus on how your mobile strategy will meet overall business objectives. So you need to determine what these business goals are and then how your mobile site will fit in and help accomplish these. For many companies, this focus will begin with a consideration of the mobile visitor. Why would they want to come to your site? Will their needs be different than your main website? You have to be sure what your audience is after when looking at your site on a mobile device.

An example of this is an airline company, where there are many elements to consider. Its customers are probably aiming to do something very specific such as checking in, changing a ticket, finding out the flight status as well as checking ticket prices. Show them what is relevant and optimize the navigation so that it is easy to understand and navigate. So be clear about what people want from your mobile site and adapt your content to match. Remember to consider things like localisation and location-based marketing to help personalise the experience. For example, if you’re a retailer, then in-store offers could help drive sales and add value to the customer experience, more so than merely rendering a copy of the main site; the user needs will be different. Your mobile strategy will provide an opportunity to offer services you could not offer in any other way.

Think about the delivery

Once you know why you want to go mobile, you need to think about how you’re going to deliver the content. The question here isn’t whether you’re going to develop a mobile app or a mobile version of your site, but focus instead on the customer and how, when or why they will access your site on a mobile device. If they interact mainly with your content, then a mobile version of the site may be enough, with images and text optimised appropriately. But if users are likely to want to interact with the site and get a truly personalised mobile experience, you need to think differently. Concentrate on how you will best serve the user with the functionality they really require.

Design for mobility

When designing your mobile site, you need to be smart about content. Think about the amount of information a mobile user will be able to take in at any given time. Think about headlines and whether content needs to be shorter. You should also think about functionality such as scrolling and zooming. Get back to basics and cut down your template, using your CMS, to simplify and prioritise the flow of information. But it is about more than just providing clear navigation. Once your visitors are on the site you may want them to following a purchasing ‘flow’, so try to give them a logical path. It’s important that mobile visitors can reach the content they need with as few clicks as possible. Redesign your navigation to be vertical. If you think about your mobile site from the mindset of an app, then it is likely to be easier to use.

Be creative and personal

One of the great things about creating a mobile site is that you can use location-based services. Many of today’s mobile devices have inbuilt GPS technologies to help you identify where your users are. The only minor draw back is that this information has to be obtained via an opt-in: ‘Can we use your current location?’ But once known, you can show your users content relevant to their location and can even personalise the content the user will be able to see based on that. Again, it is about adapting to what the visitor will want from their mobile experience and interaction with you.

Be social!

Facebook users that access the site via their smartphone are twice as active as users that access the site via the desktop. So, use mobility to your advantage and make sure your content can easily be seeded and shared on social media channels and/or that mobile visitors can use their social profile when accessing your site. You should also make it as easy as possible to engage with content on your site. Limit the input the visitor has to make, especially when you already know things about them. Don’t ask them to complete long forms; think like Amazon, and make ‘one click purchasing’ (or converting) a goal.

Manage your mobile communication

While designing for a mobile site may be somewhat different, your mobile focus should still remain part of your overall online strategy, because your customer will just see your brand, not your delivery channel. Make sure your channels connect and support each other, even though you are using different delivery methods. As mobile devices and tablet computers continue to gain ground, and the world’s mobile workforce (and users) increases, a mobile website is going to become an increasingly important feature for many companies. So work out whether your company can benefit from a mobile strategy, and if so, how you’re going to ensure it is user friendly in order to reap the rewards.

How UK retailers are falling short in meeting consumer demands online

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 09:15:05 GMT

Top retailers are increasingly turning to the web to grow revenues and acquire more customers. But are these online retailers delivering the experience that consumers now expect, particularly given the increasingly social nature of the web?

At EPiServer we decided to put this to the test by surveying 2,000 consumers about their attitudes towards a good ecommerce experience. We then benchmarked these expectations against the performance of the UK’s top 25 retailers. The research findings were very interesting indeed and show that many leading retailers are falling short of meeting consumers’, often high, expectations.

Falling short in social commerce

In light of develops in social commerce and the rising popularity of social networks, we found it surprising that the main area where retailers lost marks was around value-added and social features.

This was particularly evident with features such as user reviews, where 88% of consumers said these were vital or important to their e-commerce experience, but only 42% of retailers provided them. Only 20% of retailers included elements such as product recommendations, like ‘other shoppers also bought’, despite the fact that 80% of consumers stated these were important. In addition, only one in five retailers provided the option to share links or products via social networks and just 32% of retailers featured blogs or articles. Social commerce is a broad term and there are many interesting developments in the market where the purchase opportunity is embedded in a social context, but even so, retailers in our study were not even doing the basics.

Social media is no longer a new emerging channel but retailers don’t seem to be embracing social commerce to fully enable their customers to involve their peers in the shopping process. They risk losing out on business by failing to sustain a strong online relationship with their customers and they need to build strategies that encompass what they do both on their own site as well as in public social networks.

What retailers are doing well

Despite areas that needed work, most retailers were getting the basics right when it came to the two elements that were ranked top by UK consumers, with 97% having a site that was easy to navigate and 96% having an effective search function.

Most retailers also performed well in providing high quality images (96%), sending immediate email confirmations (96%) and delivering products quickly (96%). Even though these are almost a given for any modern website, it goes to show that getting the basics right can be the first step to winning consumer confidence, as 94% of consumers said these were important.

So what can we learn?

The overall score of 63% indicates that retailers are faring reasonably well in their ecommerce efforts, but it also shows there is still work to be done to meet the high expectations of consumers.

There were a few really great websites – some highlighted in our report – but for the most part, it was clear that many retailers could develop their websites much more to provide consumers with the type of web experience they are looking for.

In today’s competitive market, not keeping up with consumer expectations is a precarious position, for a number of reasons:

Consumers are becoming savvier – Today’s consumers spend a lot more time online, shopping or researching items they wish to purchase. They view e-commerce sites as more convenient, quicker and easier to deal with than trekking to the high street. Unfortunately, this means that when they have a poor experience they are more likely to go elsewhere, quick. Online, where Google is only a click away, the competition is fierce. Retailers need to up their game and ensure that they meet and exceed expectations.
Websites are more than shop windows – As the research shows, consumers expect more from retailers than just products and offers. In our socially connected web, consumers are spending more time on sites like Twitter and Facebook and are increasingly likely to expect this type of functionality elsewhere. They want to engage with a brand and also see the views and opinions of their peers. Retailers need to embrace the adoption of value-added content and other social aspects of the web such as blogs, user reviews and link sharing.
Consumers are people – While online shoppers ultimately visit e-commerce sites to buy, delivering an overall experience that is personal and rewarding is paramount. It’s about the after sales service and other brand interactions, from email and SMS, to social interaction through tweets and blogs. As consumers, we want to be reassured at all times that when we are interacting with an online brand, it understands us and cares about our experience on its website.

The good news for retailers is that implementing many of the features that will enhance the browsing, buying and after sales experience is relatively easy. With the right strategy, website design and development, and social elements, retailers of all sizes can make their websites more engaging and interactive places.

Getting back to basics online

Tue, 17 May 2011 14:42:59 GMT

Websites should always be designed to deliver an engaging user experience. To succeed, marketers need an understanding of how online communication works and they need to be clear about how a business can serve the needs of its customers on the web. The websites that are succeeding online are the ones that concentrate on the delivery of quality user experience, functionality and added value elements such as personalization to really engage with visitors. Savvy marketers are starting to concentrate on the 4Cs of web marketing (content, community, commerce and communication) and this is enabling businesses to deliver exactly what web visitors are after and realise some of the following key benefits:

1. Rapid go to market – in a controlled fashion

The great thing about a website is that you can tweak content and design whenever you want, at a relatively low cost compared to more traditional media. This means that your company can launch a webpage for a product or service which has the right content and basic functionality and ensure this delivers results by refining over time through testing and further development. Define which issues are development and which are maintenance and try to get rapidly to the maintenance stage for a well-defined project. Marketers have the freedom to move content around, test new ways of using images and video and go with the options that work best once the site is up.

2. Better integration with wider business processes

In this day and age, marketers are trying their best to make their websites emulate what consumers want. But they have to be careful not to lose sight of how the website will integrate with wider business processes and existing systems. This is especially important in cases where there is an existing CRM tool. Integrate your site with the CRM solution (which we have done at EPiServer) and you can benefit from improved effeciency and better reuse of data for campaigns and communication with your target audience. Or it might be that the site needs to connect up to outbound mailing systems so that marketers do not have to re-enter the same information in multiple places. Finally, seeding information on social channels should also be considered. Reducing the number of times you need to login to publish your information is a key efficiency driver, allowing you to easily maintain all your channels.

3. Clear return on investment

Analytics provide marketers with the tools to assess how successful an online campaign has been and, most importantly, how they can improve results in real-time and for future activities. By analysing certain aspects of a website, marketers can quickly personalise pages to better suit customer needs, for example tweaking a page that is experiencing high drop off. A little change can often make a big difference.

4. Making campaign microsites generate long-term value

As mentioned earlier, a site doesn’t need to be perfect when a product or service is launched; it just needs to have all the right content and basic functionality to be effective. This thinking can be transferred to campaign microsites too. These are a common marketing tactic for many companies, but rather than creating a temporary resource that has a very limited shelf-life, smart marketers are realising that these pages can be absorbed into wider, lasting online strategies that add value to visitors and gain important search visibility.

5. Prioritising accessibility to bring improved usability and better search visibility

Accessibility is a fundamental part of any website these days. If you incorporate this into your strategy at the start of the project, then you will benefit from it in the end. It is much more expensive to go back and change at a later stage. The deployment of accessibility standards and technologies can bring new benefits and opportunities for business advantage. Accessibility can also benefit a broader audience and improve website performance for users. Improved access and usability in turn broadens your website appeal and actively improves your users’ experience online. It can also help you with search too as Google is increasingly favouring websites that have put the work in when it comes to accessibility. So not only will it help visitors to your site, it will help them find you in the first place.

Four tips for improving website personalization

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:45:51 GMT

Today’s savvy web visitors are increasingly looking for that ‘little something special’. To keep your content fresh, engaging and relevant to ensure a visitor returns time and time again, investment in an effective personalization strategy can take you one step closer to delivering on your goals.

I previously blogged about the 5 principles to consider for online personalization, which covered the basics of what you need to know before you get started. This post moves on to discuss the practical steps you should take before getting stuck into the execution phase.

1) Develop personalisation personas

Personas are detailed descriptions of a typical kind of website visitor. Most web developers use them when designing websites to improve navigation and usability. But personas are also very useful when planning personalization, as they will force you to really define your typical audience groups.

Think about different visitors that are likely to visit your site, for example, existing customers, prospects, partners, job-seekers or even the press, and consider what each visitor group will be looking for on your website.

A good first step to ensure that you have the right knowledge about each group is to work with persona maps and then begin building some personalization rules. Persona maps are a way of identifying a particular type of person and the individual needs they will have. Once you understand who you’re speaking to it’s much easier to start crafting a much more targeted and effective site. And it will be enable everyone in the organization to have a similar view of what your target audience is. Guaranteed to spur some discussion when you create these!

The form below is an example of a simple persona map that can be used to identify a specific user group:

2) Use what you know

Once you know your different audience groups, you need to work out how you can identify them when they visit your website. To do this, you need to use any insight or piece of data you can associate with a visitor.

This may seem challenging at first, but you probably know more than you think. The challenge is to use the right piece of data that will drive your content targeting decisions. For example:

· From their profile on your site you may know their gender, age, birthday

· From their previous interactions you know what pages they’ve viewed, what emails they’ve opened and what links they’ve clicked

· From their community activities like comments on blogs, which may give insight into their interests, level of engagement and sentiment

· From their behaviour and clickstream you can build a good idea of their intent, for example which products they have browsed

· From their IP address you can determine their location, or, in B2B, their company or industry (A note of caution: give your visitor the opportunity to change the personalization decisions you have made about them. For example, they may be in London, but could be interested in finding your stores in other parts of the UK.)

The next question to ask is: if I had data or insights on any of the above for specific personas, what content would I want this visitor to see? Or, more importantly, what content would they want to see? If you can answer these questions, a personalisation rule is born.

Clearly this is an organic process that needs to be tested. You might find that certain personalisation rules are more effective than others at driving conversions. It’s therefore important to test visitor behaviour on an ongoing basis.

3) Map content to the purchase journey

Remember, your visitors will need different things at different stages of their buying cycle, for example:

· A ‘Who We Are’ video may be perfect to engage early stage visitors

· Case studies will help convince visitors to move along the purchase funnel

· A detailed whitepaper will be of interest for those about to make a decision

Establishing where a visitor is in their relationship with your company is a useful way to personalize the information you give to them.

So, how do you know what stage they’re at?

You can ask them in forms
Track their forum activity
See which web pages they’re visiting
Observe how regularly they visit
Establish whether they’ve responded to recent offers
Integrate the insights with your CRM system

4) Measure success

It is only through measurement that you will be able to determine the success of your personalization strategy. To do this effectively, you need to:

· Determine tangible business value metrics, like sales and ROI

· Identify and record real-time or long-term shifts in customer behaviour

· Build teams capable of monitoring the results constantly and responding rapidly to emerging information or customer insights

Personalization programs can fizzle out quickly if your web analytics team can’t evaluate the results. So keep your personalization approach simple, quantifiable and measurable.

And remember, an effective personalization strategy is always evolving, so continuously benchmark and improve your personalization rules to increase ROI. In contrast, while you’re busily working behind the scenes, your efforts should be barely noticeable to your visitors - except in their delight in getting the information they want in the way they want it.

Are you prepared for unexpected website outages?

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 09:06:42 GMT

For many companies, the web has become a cornerstone, if not the heart, of their business. Even if you never want this to happen, have you considered what would happen if your site went down for a significant length of time? Or even for just a few minutes? If you consider and prepare for this this before it happens the first time, there are substantial benefits to gain if it should happen.

For a company with a static page it may not mean much, but for an online retailer trading in the run up to Christmas , the effects on the bottom line could be catastrophic. Are you prepared for the unexpected? There are many potential reasons for a website to go down. It could be that something happens to drive a lot of unexpected traffic to your site. For example, Heathrow airport’s website had some problems just before Christmas when the weather caused havoc for flights and holidaymakers flocked to the site to find out more. The airlines also experienced this when the ash cloud swept across Europe last year and travellers were looking for flight information. It might be that your web host has problems and this has taken your site down. Perhaps it is a technical problem with a new version of the site you just uploaded. Or your site might be targeted by hackers who try and send so much traffic to the site that it goes down. Regardless of the reasons, the repercussions could be significant. There are some actions you can take now to make sure your website is prepared for the unexpected:

Predict worst-case scenarios

While it is impossible to predict every eventuality, there are some scenarios that you will be able to envisage and prepare for. Make a list of these and discuss how you would react were they to happen. Record your conclusions and put a plan that can be checked quickly if needed. This should include a contingency plan that will ensure downtime is minimized. Get buy-in for the plan from your hosting partner.

Invest in monitoring technology

If your site does go down, you want to make sure you are the first to know about it, so deploy an early warning system that will notify key individuals in the business as quickly as possible so action can be taken before too much damage is done. (Make sure that you update the contact details on a regular basis, you will not have time for that in a crisis situation.)

Talk to your web host

Get in touch and see what they can do to help. Understand how they would cope with sudden traffic surges and what their contingency plans are if their network goes down. They should be able to help you. For a business critical site, you will want to investigate the possibility of having your site distributed across separate servers that are independent of each other.

Create an emergency website or landing page

If you do suddenly get an influx of traffic, one of the ways to counteract this is to drop your normal site and put up a temporary landing page in its place that has as small a page size as possible. This could give important information about the outage and alternative contact information. Another option is to have the emergency webpage display the most important information that you know most of the visitors are looking for, to take the pressure of the call center.

Sort out internal communication plans

If your site goes down, it will likely impact other parts of your business too. For example, will your contact or support center suddenly get more calls or emails? Communicating what has happened to the rest of the business and what they should do about it is an important first step. Keep key stakeholders in the loop as things develop and set expectations.

Work out how to contact your customers or clients

Your customers or clients will also want to know why your site is down, especially if it is a site they depend on to access information or conduct business. Think about the other channels you could use, from email and phone to social media and have a contingency plan so that the channels are always accessible.

Back up your site on a regular basis

It might be an obvious one, but don’t forget to back up your site. If everything goes wrong and you lose your site, make sure you have another copy somewhere safe!

Hopefully this will never happen to your business but, just in case it does, these tips will hopefully save you from what could be an embarrassing and potentially damaging situation!

5 Principles to consider for online personalization

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 07:37:27 GMT

Web personalization is about delivering targeted content and adaptive web experiences based on what you know about each visitor. For ambitious web marketers looking for the next leap in returns, this is a massive opportunity. Of course, it’s not without risks. Get it wrong, and you’ll confuse visitors, waste resources and depress conversions. But get it right and you’ll surprise and delight your web visitors while driving your website to new levels of effectiveness.

This includes any or all of the following sources of insight:

Their profile and preferences – everything they’ve told you about themselves (if you already know them).

Their history with you – what they’ve done on your site, in your community, in response to your emails, etc.

The way they found you – including the search terms or pay-per-click ads that delivered them, or a tagged URL that they clicked on.

Their immediate behaviors – what they’re doing in the current session (clickstreams, site searches, etc).

The context – including time of day, day of the week, geography and your own strategic agenda (targeted offers, surveys…).

The dynamic environment – real-time factors like the weather and commodity pricing. When the rain falls, you can show ads for umbrellas or raincoats, and when the snow lands, skis and goggles.

Your own personalization efforts can use as much or as little of this kind of insight as you need to drive the content you choose to present in each session.

The point is not to make every session perfectly targeted from day one – just to improve the relevance of each session so the visit is more compelling. As the project proves itself, you can grow your ambition and sophistication.

I have previously blogged on this topic, but have since then expanded my research into the area and have come up with 5 principles that I think are important to consider if you want to get started and succeed with personalization.

1) Start with clear goals and objectives. The best goals are quantifiable, so write them down! Things like demonstrate clear return on investment (ROI) of 50% within six months, increase monthly new lead supply by 30% for nurturing campaigns,boost quarterly campaign quality index (conversions / visits) by 40% and the classic measure personalization impact in Customer Satisfaction Index. Do people feel the “personal” touch is providing a better service?

2) Assemble the right team! The web editors will have day-to-day control of the content and should also contribute to the personalization strategy and execution, your development team will have to know what’s going on at every stage. Consider community owners or your social media team – if you run a forum or social feature, the people who run the community are valuable assets. Product management will have a view on how to personalize the product pages. Sales may want to personalize the key stages of the web funnel and customer may want to personalize the experience for VIP customers. Involvement from the right people is a key factor in your success.

3) Simplicity - Early web personalization efforts stalled because they forced people to use a disconnected series of software platforms, including analytics, CRM, data warehousing, digital asset management, web recommendations engines and content management systems. Use as few software systems as you can

4) Make the workflow simple and move rapidly! Here’s what your workflow needs to do

a. Think about your segments

b. Identify opportunities to personalize

c. Create a rule

d. Test it

e. Go live

f. Analyse the results

g. Tweak

h. Repeat

All this needs to take place in days instead of weeks, so you need to get your people, processes and technology in sync.

5) Start small. Personalization projects die because they try to do too much too soon. Pick one or two of your low-hanging fruit and make them work before moving on to trickier stuff.

a. Returning customers should always be treated like returning customers. Even the smallest acknowledgement that you know who they are goes a long way.

b. Geography can be a simple start to targeting. One hotel chain improved bookings by serving up different offers to visitors from different countries.

c. For B2B marketers, starting with vertical industry targeting is a no-brainer. If you don’t yet know the visitor’s market, you can use an IP-lookup plug-in to find out, in real time.

The guiding principles are speed and iteration. If you consider these 5 steps, then you have a plan that you can execute against. In coming posts, I will look further into the some principles to consider in the actual execution phase. Any comments, feedback and experiences that you can share are most welcome!

Five steps to getting your website content right

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:34:37 GMT

A while back, I wrote a blog post for Econsultancy’s #JUMPchallenge, looking at the four Cs of multichannel marketing. This time, I’m following up on that theme and drilling down into one of the most important Cs: content.

From ecommerce and promotions, to SEO, social media and blogging, so much of what brands do online revolves around content. Marketers need to ensure they have an effective content strategy in place so they are well equipped to make the most of this opportunity.

Here are my five steps that marketers should take to ensure their content strategy delivers results:

1) Define your target audience – The content you create has to be geared towards the audience you are trying to reach so that they immediately identify with the content. So it is important to identify your audience and the type of information they are likely to want, but be aware that you might have multiple audiences, all with quite different needs.

One you’ve identified your different audience groups, consider using dynamic personalization to really boost your conversion rates. This will also allow you to become more efficient when actually creating content. Think about whether your audience will appreciate localised information, if they are likely to be a first time visitor or what pages will be most relevant to them. Also consider their user behaviour and where they are coming to your site from. Personalization used right will have a positive impact on conversion rates and a negative impact on bounce rates.

2) Define strategy and goals – Be as bold and specific as possible when setting your goals and make sure they are tied to real revenue targets. Consider which metrics you will use so that you can define exactly what ‘good content’ is. Avoid quantitative metrics such as page views or followers on Twitter as these won’t give you the insight and information you need to assess if your content strategy is delivering results; they are potential revenue generators, but not actual revenue generators.

You need a content strategy! And when it comes to your strategy, there are a number of questions that need to be asked:

What will your content creation plan look like?

Which collaborators need to be involved - internal and external - and how will you ensure deadlines are met?

How often will you review your strategy against your goals to see if changes need to be made? Can you use social media and user generated content?

Can you get the audience to actually help you improve your content by giving them influence? Do you have external resource you can use or that you should consider employing? Which metrics will you use so that you can define what good content is for your organization? Can you develop a content quality scorecard and use it as one of your KPI’s?

3) Do your research – Don’t be afraid to check out the competition! Look at what other companies are doing, within your sector but also those in other industries. Which sites do you admire? Which companies have content that mirrors the approach that you think will work for your audience? Learn from their mistakes too and try to improve on the other examples you see out there. If you do your research right, you’ll save valuable time further down the line.

4) Test – Once you have your content in place, test it. Run A/B tests of various pages to see if content changes have a positive or negative effect on conversion. (EPiServer Marketing Arena is an option for that). Any moment that you are not testing different content variations is wasted time! Don’t expect to get it right the first time or even the hundredth time.

5) Appoint and train your content creators – Deciding who is actually going to create your content is something many companies overlook, but it’s a crucial step in any content strategy. Do you have external resource you can use or that you should consider employing? Make sure the content contributors are aware of the goals that you defined in the strategy! And be careful not to underestimate the amount of time that content generation will take.

Your comments on additional strategies and tips are most welcome!

Study reveals Australian businesses missing valuable opportunities to connect online

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 09:39:38 GMT

Nielsen’s 2010 Internet & Technology Report found that the average Australian Internet user spent 17.6 hours per week online last year, up from 16.1 hours in 2008. When it comes to social interaction, the report also revealed that the internet is now the preferred method to communicate with friends – overtaking the mobile phone – as 44% of Internet users favour online for communication (up 11%).

Now we have taken the temperature on online communication in Australia. A new study has revealed that many online brands are failing to maximise opportunities to engage with website visitors by not effectively integrating social media components, online communities, blogging or ‘sticky’ and personalised content.

Highligts in the study show that:
Sports and Telecoms companies like to engage, but Retail and Utilities are failing to maximise their interaction with site visitors
Only 18 % of companies feature a community on their website
44 % of companies advertise their Twitter account directly on their homepage
Just 20 % have a blog that is updated on a regular basis
According to the study, which was made public today, only 18% of the 80 leading companies investigated feature a community on their website and regularly updated blogs feature on only 20% of sites. This is a lost opportunity to the organization, since company blogs are great for a number of reasons, as outlined by E-Consultancy.

Ironically, two of the most consumer-focused sectors whose websites are largely revenue-generating – Retail and Utilities – were the worst performers in the study, failing to effectively integrate content, community, commerce and communication to engage visitors and potential customers.

The Engaged Web report analysed 80 leading companies, many ranked by Hitwise as being the most visited in Australia, spanning eight vertical sectors - Telecoms, Charity, Retail, Sport, Travel, Public Sector, Finance and Utilities - and scored them against a matrix of criteria for an in-depth assessment of their online engagement strategies. The criteria assessed a wide range of different components that make up an engaging website including engaging content, multimedia content, personalisation, social media and communities.

The study revealed some steady themes across the various industries. Telecoms and Sport fair well when it comes to featuring online communities and blogs, however Retail is the weakest sector in both categories. While across the board 98% of sites use rich media content, sporting sites again lead the pack - though supporting text isn’t as impressive with just five per cent of all sites presenting copy that is engaging and easy to read for website visitors.

Australian companies appear to be embracing social media with 44% of companies advertising their Twitter account directly on the homepage and 34% drawing attention to their Facebook fan page. Telecoms and Travel are strong in encouraging online interaction with their visitors and customers by participating in discussions and answering questions, while Retail and Utilities disappoint on this front. Across all companies in the study, just half of a per cent regularly upload information and news to share with the community.

In terms of more traditional engagement methods, the vast majority of sites don’t make it easy for site visitors to contact them or get help with contact details that are hard to find. When looking at engagement channels being promoted on the website, a phone number was the most commonly advertised (90%), followed by an email address (64%) and a web form (58%). But a mere 1% of the brands offer a much more interactive experience through live chat.

Comparing the results to the study on UK websites, companies in Australia clearly push their social media activity more on their websites. In the UK, only 15% of the companies advertise their Twitter account directly on the homepage.

C is for…joined-up marketing excellence

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:03:27 GMT

Our friends at Econsultancy have been running a blogging competition calling for contributions around the subject of joined-up marketing and PR. So, we thought it was a great opportunity to jot down a few of our thoughts on the matter. Very quickly a pattern emerged or, more accurately, a letter. The letter C…

C is for… Customer

It’s vital to understand that while joined-up marketing is about bringing channels together, the real focus needs to be on the customer. That is to say, it’s only by understanding your customers properly and the way they react that you can align your channels effectively and balance their different roles within your marketing strategy.

For example, in the retail sector, it might be as simple as understanding that the use of video on your website will generally increase conversions, by as much as 134% in the case of eBags, or for Zappos between 6-30 %. However, such content won’t be appropriate for all channels and again it comes down to understanding what the customer expects – or wants.

It’s all about another C: context. By being contextually aware, you ensure that the right content shows up in the right locations, presented in the right format to the right customer. This way, you can contextualise centralised content for maximum effectiveness across various channels, meeting the very specific needs of individual customers. Having a ‘joined up’ view is therefore going to be incredibly beneficial.

C is for… Content

This C is often described as a K – content is king! You need to think very carefully about how your content is going to be used in different places and on different channels. Can you reuse content in different ways to get maximum benefit? Customisation is another key C in this area and one which is relatively simple once you incorporate the right tools. Customising or personalising your content will help you engage with visitors, no matter what the channel. Information, content and stories have to flow across platforms – described as Transmedia storytelling by Henrik Jenkins.

Taking the idea a step further, content also has to also be tailored for factors like search and locality. By being creative and clever with content, businesses can cultivate a truly captivating joined-up strategy. Creating compelling content is key to capturing audience attention.

C is for… Community

In the last few years, the world has woken up to the fact that customers are social creatures. Concentrating on a coherent multi-channel community strategy can create extra stickiness and act as a gel that joins channels together. This will become an increasingly important element of a joined-up marketing strategy as firms continue to see the value communities can bring in enabling an understanding their customers and their identity across various touchpoints.

The biggest question when it comes to community is whether it’s better to create your own and gain the extra opportunities from such control or try to unite the disparate networks already out there. Ultimately, there are many factors that to be considered depending on the nature of your organisation, so it’s worth spending time to choose the right approach; a joined-up viewpoint will certainly help.

If you have a brand which truly engages with target audiences by creating and taking control of an arena where people can interact, there are few more powerful techniques for growing an maintaining relationships for mutual benefit. Have a look at this post for some more advice on how you can build a social website that invites participation by publicly sharing thoughts, feedback, opinions, links and content.

C is for… Conversion

This may seem like a simple one but actually the lessons to be learnt from ecommerce can be applied even to those businesses without a clear transaction point. The important element to remember here is to establish points of conversion that can be measured across channels.

These conversions could be donations, sales, downloads or whatever is applicable to your business. Either way, without goals, there can’t be measurability and without measurability, there can be no learning and improvement of performance. It also makes it very difficult to assess at a strategic level which channels are proving more effective. Having a central conversion metric that spans your joined-up strategy also makes it easier to measure and manage the role of each channel through a shared currency and objective.

C is for… Communication

Act smart rather than loud. Co-ordination and communication between channels is another way to make sure they’re truly joined-up and co-operative. Adapting the communication to the audience through personalisation helps to increase engagement. Another element of communication is to ensure those responsible for each area are in touch with each other and provide constant feedback in order to try to keep everything moving in the same direction.

As you can C (see!), there’s a lot to bear in mind but ultimately, we see it as a matter of ‘keep up or get left behind’. Joined-up marketing is the future but it’s also a very real possibility today. Next time you’re working on co-ordinating your efforts, keep in mind the letter C, it might just show you the way forward…

This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed to raise awareness of how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy's JUMP event.

UK Companies could do much more to engage with web visitors

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:48:29 GMT

Recent research from the Online Measurement company (UKOM) finds that British web users are now spending 65% more time online than they were three years ago; and the lion's share of that time is spent on social networks or blogs, accounting for nearly a quarter of time online. But how good are the leading websites in the UK in providing their visitors with an engaging experience? We decided to find out and conducted a research study on 80 companies, ranked by Hitwise as being the most visited in the UK, spanning eight vertical sectors - Telecoms, Charity, Retail, Sport, Travel, Public Sector, Finance and Utilities - and scored them against a matrix of criteria for an in-depth assessment of their online engagement strategies. The criteria assessed a wide range of different components that make up an engaged website including communities, multimedia content, personalisation and social media.

The Engaged Web report reveals that many online brands are not seizing the opportunity to engage with visitors to their website by not integrating with social media channels, running online communities, blogging or providing ‘sticky’ and personalised content. At the same time, we also found some brands who have an on-line presence that stands out in the crowd and we hope can inspire others.

Some key findings are that Sports and telecoms companies like to engage, but financial services and local government struggling to connect with web visitors. Only a third (34%) of the companies we investigated feature a community on their website, with telecoms brands coming out on top, followed by charities. When we drill down into how the companies with communities are actually using them, the results are more positive, with 44% initiating discussions with users and 70% actively engaging and contributing to discussions that are already in progress.

15% of the companies advertise their Twitter account directly on the homepage. Another recent study show that 26 % of 100 retailers in the UK have a twitter account, and if that is a representation of the market, then it is very low that 15 % of the companies that we surveyed actually show this on their homepage.

Furthermore, while blogs feature on 40% of sites, only 19% clearly promote it to site visitors. Just 39% update their blog on a regular basis, a finding that surprised me and definitely is a lost opportunity for the organization. Company blogs are great for a number of reasons, as outlined by E-Consultancy.

The Engaged Web report is also a guide for businesses who want to make their online presence more engaging, offering practical steps and real-world examples. If you have feedback on the report, please feel free to provide it here.

E-commerce trends in Denmark

Mon, 31 May 2010 15:58:50 GMT

Danes shop online as never before. However, there are still major differences on how the young and older use the Internet as a marketplace. In a recent study by EPiServer in April of this year, with a selection of respondents that represents the Danish population, we found that two-thirds of Danes have never bought so much online as they do now. Some of the other key findings:

37 percent use discussion forums (blogs, chat, ratings, reviews) as a research before purchasing anything online. Of the age group 15-22 year, the figure is as high as 64 percent.

Nearly a third state that they have never used discussion forums as much as they do now.

40 percent value that they get to shop with a Danish shop. 52 percent states that prompt delivery is important. Four out of five said that price is important. One out of ten would like to have online chat service.

Not surprisingly, the younger generationspend a lot of time online before they decide to buy a new TV, theater tickets, clothes or other consumer products. The study shows that two thirds of the population between 15 and 22 years are increasingly using social media such as communities, reviews, ratings and blogs to test a product before the order is placed. The group between 23-35 follow close behind with 50 percent, while only a quarter of the group above 35 years use social media in support of their purchasing decision.

One fifth of the youngest consumers also want to engage in dialogue with companies in the form of an online chat service. The same is true for only 7 percent of those over 35 years.

Global market, but local needs
However, both younger and older people who shop on the Internet. The Danes are in the top compared with other European countries, surpassed only by Norway and Britain.
The study also shows that over 40 percent only shop if the online store is in Danish. I guess it means that despite the fact that consumers are becoming more global, providing localized information in the mother tounge is crucial for a successful online sales channel. This is also supported by a report from the European Commission, which shows that 120 million Europeans shopping online, but only 7 percent of trade takes place across borders.

Based on the findings in the survey, what are some of the things that are required of a successful e-commerce initiative?

Ability to review, assess and / or comment on the products

Online Chat Service

localization and 'cross border' support

Easy, fast check-out process

Good presentation opportunities

Support for social commerce and good connections for social media support

Personalised content is automatically adjusted target

This is just a starting point, the list should probably be longer, so please feel free to share your thoughts.

About the study: 1,074 people aged 18-65 years, answered the questions. Respondents represent age and geographically representative sample of the Danish population.

Adding social features to your website

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:29:23 GMT

In my view, a social website is any site that invites people to participate by publicly sharing their thoughts, feedback, opinions, links and any content they’ve created. It also encourages them to share their experiences with friends or colleagues – whether on the site or beyond – and makes it easy to do so.

Almost every website today has at least some degree of sociability. If you website doesn’t have that and you want to get started, now is the time. You can rest assured that your brand is being discussed anyway, so why not take the benefits that comes if you bring it back to your site. A good place to get started is to ask yourself where you fall on the Social Spectrum:

Blog with commenting - A brand without a blog is a brand with nothing to say. If you’re just starting out on your social web journey, start here. That’s where we started at EPiServer.
Walls/Bulletin boards - If you believe in your products and your marketing, you’ve got nothing to fear and everything to gain. If you don’t believe in them, you’ve got bigger problems than just your website (go fix those first).
Social bookmarking – make sure that what you say can be seeded easily
Share with friends- If you make it easy for them to bookmark your pages, you’re also making it easy for them to promote your site and boost its search engine rankings. We use Add this on the EPiServer sites. Other tools are Share this and Meebo
Favorites - make it easy for the reader to bookmark and return to your page. Friendly URLs is a must
Contests/Polls/Voting – an audience loves to engage and this is the lowest threshold. Move the viewers to “lurkers” by this easy step.
Rating/Tagging – an easy thing to add, but so powerful. Providing this is also the easiest way to get your audience to interact with you.
Chat/Messaging - More and more social sites let users see who else is online so they can initiate a chat session -- or leave a message for someone who’s not online. Some companies take this a step further, making it easy to contact or chat with their experts, business partners or even their customers whenever they’re online. But think about where you put the chat functionality and that you have it on a page where it is logical for the visitor to potentially want to engage in a dialogue. It could be the start page, but it could also be somewhere else on the site. We are working to improve this on episerver.com
Expert Panels – which will provide the ability to feed great content and start up discussions. Don’t limit yourself to thinking that the experts have to be within our organization, think about your eco-system as well!
Forums - it’s a way to serve a community that’s already there, eager to link up and share their thoughts.
User-Generated Content - Contests, polls and voting are an easy way to get visitors involved without necessarily asking them to identify themselves (though you can do that if you like).
Community with profiles & groups – if this is the level that you aspire to, then here are some good tips on how to jump start your on-line community.

Wherever your sites are along the spectrum, you’re probably experiencing an inexorable pull towards the items that are on the bottom of the list. Don’t fight it. Go with the flow…

EPiServer 2009 in restrospect

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:25:00 GMT

The New Year has started. Before too much time passes, I’ve taken some time to summarize what happened at EPiServer during 2009. It was a fun (and busy) year. The financial crisis did not slow down the market demand for creating websites that engages their visitor and turns them into users. Websites continue to becomes more strategic, enabling organisations to deliver on the business goals and impact bottom-line results. Why? Our customers tell us that the website is the key place for doing business and interacting with customers. So a basic information site is not enough. During the past year we continued the expansion of our product portfolio to make it broader to meet those needs. From our growing eco-system of both customers and partners, we get invaluable input on what you want you want our platforms, modules and services to do enable you to do. So thank you for all your input during the year! But back to 2009 ;it was not easy to pick and choose which items to include in this post, but here is my collection with quick insight into highlights, large and small, for EPiServer 2009.
Highlights Q1 2009

» More than 7,000 downloaded developer licenses by March 31, 2009, a sign early on that our community is growing faster and faster.
» EPiServer acquires product line from Dropit, with the major product being X3, later renamed EPiServer Composer.
» EPiServer launches EPiServer Relate+ and combines CMS and social media into one platform.
» 29 new partners in Q1 2009.
» When I woke up early on March 10^th and saw the snow, I could hardly believe my eyes. But in spite of the weather, we held EPiServer Day, a biennial user and partner event, with 1,200 participants and 49 exhibitors in Stockholm. If you were not able to be there, the material is available on our site. EPiServer Awards were presented during the event. The winners were selected from 118 nominations. You can also get a “feel” for the event by reading How do you say WCM in Swedish by Tim Walters, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, who was our keynote speaker at the event.
» New customers in Q1 include DSB in Denmark and RBi in the UK.

Highlights Q2 2009

» EPiServer opens US office to service growing demand for cutting edge,cost-effective CMS. We are expanding our global footprint with a North American headquarters based in Chicago.
» We are a commercial software company, but also see the benefit of making select solutions available as open source. In May 2009, one of the initial solutions was released when EventX was made public - EPiServer issues open source meeting and event module for its CMS.
» 27 new partners in Q2 2009.
» New customers in Q2 include: Toshiba Consumer Products, Suunto, P & O Cruises, Nationwide Autocenters, Cazenove Capital Management and The World Climate Community, the world’s first climate community.
» EPiServer was included in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management.
» By end of Q2, we provided advanced hosting for more than 900 websites.

HIGHLIGHTS Q3 2009

» We passed 7000 members on EPiServer World.
» Launch of EPiServer Extras, a market exchange with more than 100 add-on modules for our core platforms EPiServer CMS and EPiServer Community. Over 130 add-on modules and growing.
» More than 9697 downloaded developer licenses by September 30, 2009.
» EPiServer Marketing Arena is launched. The powerful new release of integrated marketing modules and services lets users quickly create, manage, monitor and optimize web campaigns, and as a result generate relevant traffic and sales leads.
» Held customer and partner day in London in October for the second year in a row. Doubled the number of attendees to more than 300. A selection of presentations is available. We thought it was a great event, but more important is the feedback that we got from some of our attendees who blogged about it - Reflections on EPiServerday by Jon Marks from LBi and Heard more than expected at EPiServerday UK by James Hoskins.
» 26 new partners in Q3 2009 making a grand total of 346 EPiServer partners. Great momentum in the UK during the quarter.
» EPiServer included in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for social software in the workplace.
» Move our European headquarters to Regeringsgatan in Stockholm.
» Among the new customers and websites are: Mohive, Trafikanten, Mazda and 911 Day of Service.

Highlights Q4

» Sign our 100^th partner of the year, approaching 400 partners worldwide. Many of the new partners are in the US.
» Australian office opens and 5000th license sold to SPARC in New Zealand
» We passed 8000 members on EPiServer World
» E-commerce, community and content is combined through a strategic partnership with Mediachase, which integrates an e-commerce platform into our CMS and community platforms.
» Expand our hosting services through the addition of a fourth data center.
» EPiServer day in Olso, Norway with 400 attendees and a user meeting in Stockholm with 200 attendees. EPiServer CMS 6 a core topic on the agenda. These two days demonstrate that interaction with customers and partners is extremely valuable (and fun).
» Econtent magazine lists EPiServer as one of the 100 companies that matter the most in the digital industry.
» Run Gadget competition for EPiServer CMS 6, with great involvement from the developer community. Read the interview with the overall winner and get inspiration from all the winners. Next time maybe you’ll be a winner?
»1247 attended EPiServer education during the year, split on 271 days when we conducted training.
» Customers and new websites include: National Friendly, Salus Ansvar (in Swedish) and Swedish Football Association.
» We frequently get request for inspiration from other customers, and to that end, we redesigned our customer reference section and have opened a new customer reference showroom where you can get inspiration from 2953 customers and 9130 websites!

That was the year for EPiServer. I am sure that you have memories to share as well and please feel free to add them. Now I look forward to 2010.

What do I as a marketer need to know about search marketing?

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:42:15 GMT

There is only one answer to that question – a lot. The existence of search engines and how our customers use them have radically changed the communications landscape; there is no doubt about it. We have to have an understanding of what it means to us. Take a look at some facts around the topic:

1) Global search markets draws more than 100 billion searches per month, an increase of 41 % year on year. Europe is the market that accounts for the highest share and Google is the top search engine, which is maybe not that surprising.

2) Number of words in Google search queries continues to inrease. The average in the US is 3, in Scandinavia 2,2

3) Research from the UK market shows that 40 % of the visitors to UK e-commerce sites start with search. Of those, 90 % access the site from the organic search result, 10 % from sponsored links.

Search is the fastest way to find relevant information for the consumer. We use it all the time. The figures are staggering, in Europe in July 2009, more than 36 billion searches were conducted. For me as a marketer and Web site owner, it means that I have to think about how my potential customers and existing customers act when they are starting their purchasing cycle, i.e. the key words that they use, to capture that search traffic and drive them to my site. You may be in the business of providing low cost airfares but it’s most likely that people will search for cheap flights. You need to optimize your Web site so that the search engines actually match the search with your site. If the search engines can’t “understand” the content and what you are presenting on the site, your digital visibility will be poor. And of course we all want to end up on the first page when the results are presented, since a staggering number never visits page 2. In fact many don’t scroll down beyond the fourth in the list. Yes, it is a cruel online world!

But the challenge for many organizations is getting there. Where to start? How to gather the knowledge? Your SEO is influenced by many factors. The quality of the content, how it is created, technology (the quality of the code) and site design, how many other Web sites compete with you as well as their ranking, links to your site, the technology and how the Web site is coded. You need to look at all of these to ensure that your ranking is good. An excellent blog post about this is the SEO Hierarchy. It gives good guidelines into how you can approach SEO. The basic thing here is that you can accomplish a lot with what you already have and that you need to incorporate this into your daily management and development of your Web site. An important aspect here is the understanding how it will impact your technical development team, whether it is a in-house team or an external partner, as well as taking into consideration your content contributors and of course the business owners that are dependent on the results your Web site can deliver.

I am running this project on EPiServer.com to improve our results in organic search results and improve our page rank. Here is what we are doing:

1) We started off with a thorough analysis of which keywords are important to us and what we know our customers search on. Google was our main priority being the most used search engine in the regions that are important to us. We used their key word search tool, which has worked well for us.

2) We ar workgin our way through the site, page by page, to ensure that the key words are reflected

3) We are improving our site architecture, both from a technology perspective and from a content perspective, ensuring that title tags are in order, our headlines are good, in the right structure and that the site is search friendly from a technology perspective. We still have lots of work to do here but we have the information on what we need to do and that is a good starting point.

4) We are improving the Web site design and navigation for our key processes. Constantly working with the pages where we have high bounce rates to make them stickier and testing different pages against each other.

5) We have a created a link strategy which is still in the development phase, but we are making good progress.

So far, the results are good. Traffic from the search engines have increased so that it now accounts for close to 50 percent of our total traffic. More important, the conversion rates for our key goals are much higher, with the results for one of the goals more than doubling from one quarter to the next. By starting off with analytics as the foundation and being very clear with what we wanted to achieve, we were able to measure and see that our investment in time and effort has really paid off.

Web Personalization – start now, not later!

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:15:02 GMT

For me Web Personalization is all about serving the right content to the right person at the right time.

In the report “To Succeed With Web Content Personalization, Start Failing now” from November 2008 by Tim Walters, PH.d and Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, Web personalization is defined as:

“Creating experiences on Web sites or through interactive media that are unique to individuals or segments of consumers.”

It is something that every marketer with an interest in online communication wants to achieve. We have many tools at our disposal with social media and Web communication in general, but one of the pieces that I think has been underutilized online is personalization and adaptation. The ability to personalize and adapt a Web site in real time based on visitor demographics is a major piece in the puzzle of delivering the engaged Web. But somewhere along the road, we got stuck with the work that it takes to maintain the Web site and not looked beyond. Maybe that’s why I have not seen that many examples of more advanced personalization in a B2B setting? We run it on EPiServer.com. Started small, but the results are good and I plan to expand the usage.

If you want to think about it in a simple way and using “old-world” marketing thinking, it is like using Direct & Targeted Marketing. When selecting your target audience and the message, you strive to make the target audience as narrow as possible and ensure that the message answers to the needs of the target audience so that they will act and respond. Otherwise you are wasting your time and money. When it comes to Web communication, we solve that through design, navigation and personas. But what if you could add another element and actually choose your top five customer or prospect segments and show information that is specifically targeted to them? The results should show higher conversion rates and improved service to the customer, let me know if you disagree, but what’s really stopping us from using it?

The report from 2003 by Jupiter Research called “The Myth of Personalization research” states that it is four times as expensive to maintain a personalized Web site as operating a comparable dynamic site. It must have been because at the time when the research was done, not many user cases existed and maintaining personalization mainly required manual input. I would strongly argue that this is simply not the case today.

With the cost not being the barrier, what else is stopping marketers from putting this into practice? Inadequate customer data is the key obstacle facing top marketing executives in their adoption of personalized communication techniques, according to findings from "The Power of Personalization" global survey, issued by the CMO Council in 2008. I think this reason is closer to the main cause for the limited use.

Most companies segment their customer groups and target audiences based on demographics into just a few segments. Five to seven seems to be a going rate for many market organizations, which is pretty much what you can grasp and support. And if you know those five to seven, then start with them. Don’t make it too complex in the beginning.

Here is a quick guide into the steps you need to take to get started:

1) Decide where on Web site the campaign information or adapted content should be displayed. Since a major hurdle is that it is perceived as complicated, then start small. Like me, you probably have areas on your site that are drop out pages that you want to improve. You know who is leaving and why. Adapt the information to make it more sticky.

2) Choose demographics that are common for the target audience. Start small.
Stick to your usual way in segmenting your audience and use it on your Web site. Is it country, industry, company size, location or another variable? Anything is possible, but if you are new to personalization, start with just a few variables.

3) Decide what to adapt and don’t overdo it.
There are no limits, but to succeed, you need to have some realistic limitations. You can adapt a banner ad, interactive media, text of any kind or a whole page. Maybe you want to show completely different landing pages depending on where the visitor is located? At a country or zip code level? For example you could adapt the campaign image on the first page to ensure that you show the banner ad for a new product to a buyer from a large retailer in the US, while you show the latest film about new ways of improve mining to the visitor from a mining company in South Africa.

4) Set your goals and how you should measure up front.
Is it conversion rates or can you go further and measure the actual revenue increase? This is where I think you should spend the most time and ensure that you establish clear visibility into the effect it has on your business. As an high-level example, I have goals for how many new customers and partners that we should generate from episerver.com, how much each of those contacts is worth for us and a percentage goal of how much of our revenues we can attribute from this.

5) Think Agile.
Create a project that can be up and running quickly. By keeping the segments and content that you personalize to a realistic level, the time for go-to-market will be quick.

6) Adapt, adapt and adapt.
Establish what works, improve that and abandon the rest.

7) Involve the rest of the organization.
Make sure that you can feed your sales or customer support team with the leads that you generate. Don’t just let it all go to waste in a Web stats report. Also consider if you can feed this information directly into your CRM solution and integrate with your sales process.

It also raises other questions such as can it be obtrusive to the visitor? Well, quite honestly, the visitor will not notice that it has happened. They will just be served content that you as a marketer and site owner think is more relevant to them. But that’s a question that we will look more into.

Time for EPiServer Day 2009!

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:11:04 GMT

When we began the planning process for EPiServer Day 2009, we quickly made the decision that we needed to continue with a tradition that began with the last EPiServer Day in 2007. We want to provide our editors, developers, customers and partners as well as “new additions to the EPiServer family” with the leading Web event in Scandinavia. To provide inspiration, new experiences, additional knowledge and plenty of networking opportunities in the same place and on the same day.

The Engaged Web is the focus for the event. Why? Well, on-line communication has dramatically changed. We are now looking at life beyond Web 2.0. A world wherepassive Web sites have become engaging Web applications and visitors have become users. This new world has three important implications for on-line communication:

1) You’ve got an exciting new universe of opportunities for engaging the new Web user

2) Your users expect richer, more rewarding experiences; anything less is dull

3) If you don't meet these expectations, they'll find someone who does

In addition, social media has entered the scene and content is no longer king. You’ve heard it before, but if you are like me, then you are wondering how can I seize the opportunity and make the Web sites and communications initiatives I work with even more successful? What are the next steps and where do I begin? Our ambition is to provide you with these answers at EPiServer Day 2009 and to inspire you to take the next step. Together with close to 40 of our partners, we will show you how your Web site can deliver the business and communications goals that are important to your organization, for both public and private sectors .

Take the opportunity to meet with many of your EPiServer peers and participate in more than 30 sessions. The parallel sessions cover everything from next generation Intranets, Web strategy, and accessibility to online social communities, mobility and inspiration from other customers. And of course, we will deliver the latest on EPiServer and our products. The sessions will be in both English and Swedish and you can easily find the ones that are of most interest to you.

In the general sessions, we have key note speakers from Forrester, one of the leading industry analysts as well as trend watches and panel debates. When looking at the agenda, I am proud to be able to say it is one of the largest Web conferences in the Nordic countries! The day is jam-packed and we will also have some fun in the evening at the EPiServer Awards dinner!

On March 11, the second day of the event, we take a more in-depth look at selected areas. These seminars are intended for those with a special interest and who want more detailed information on a certain topic. In the morning, we have sessions on, for example, developing with scrum, search, how to develop a community, and Search Engine Optimization. Find the in-depth session which is most relevant for you!. After lunch, we have in-depth EPiServer sessions on for example EPiServer Create+, our open source module Wikix and developing in X3.

I hope I have convinced you to attend! If you have any questions about the event, I will be glad to answer them.