When optimizing your website for search engines, it’s essential to consider both on-page content and PDF content. While PDFs can offer certain advantages, such as offline accessibility and in-depth content, HTML pages often provide a better user experience and can be more SEO-friendly.
Getting a web visitor to take action is the main objective of any web page. Unfortunately, many businesses see still a website as a brochure and do not take into account the way that web usage has changed and what the real purpose is. They spend all their time on design and not enough on usability and website conversion optimization. Pretty is good but conversion grows a business.
Images need to have a purpose not just be decoration. Derek Halpen at Social Triggers put together a great article on the effective use of images.
He pointed out the following potential reasons for using images.
Derek points out how genius the image of Apple Air in the envelope is. Apple is selling the “thinness” feature and nail it with the image. If you are selling a service, a good graphic can explain your offer.
Images can be used to direct the web visitor’s attention. Images of people looking at or pointing can emphasize a key headline or call-to-action like a sign up form.
Using pictures of real people involved in the business whether they are customers or team members builds trust. Derek points out that people want to deal with real people. Stock images just don’t cut it. Customer testimonials have a lot more credibility if they have an image of the customer with them.
Another key page element is the headline. Copyblogger found 8 out of 10 people read only the headline. The promise of the headline must be compelling enough to turn a browser into a reader and then a sign up. Copyblogger offer a 11 part course to help with this. You won’t get the headline right first time. Optimizely lets you to test different headlines (and images) with no coding required. Testing should be an ongoing process.
The big movement right now is towards responsive design. This means that a web site will reconfigure to be usable for any device from laptop ti smart phone. Website builders from Virb to Wix and Squarespace now offer responsive solutions. Excellent responsive themes are available for WordPress.
Despite this, only 6% of small business websites are mobile ready according to a recent survey. The same study calculated that the lack of mobile readiness is costing US small businesses $1T each year. Mobile is now 28% of all web traffic. 4 out of 5 of these visitors will leave a site if it is not mobile optimized.
Make sure your emails are mobile optimized also. 70% of users will delete an email if it does display well on their smartphone. 75% of users open emails on smart phones.
Looking for help with improving conversion. Contact us at Revenue Architects.
For more ideas, go to Revenizer for 400+ more tips on optimizing digital + real time stats on your marketing performance.
The article summary is below.
A lot of businesses who use Constant Contact or Mailchimp or a similar app for email marketing are now recognizing limitations for expand digital and email marketing and more automated inbound programs. To address the selection of a new email service provider (ESP) or marketing automation solution is not easy. It is critical to understand business needs especially when there are different business areas involved. Some business areas may want to run their own campaigns from sales using a CRM like salesforce or MS dynamics or SugarCRM. Others may expect marketing to run campaigns and hand over qualified leads or flow them directly into the CRM. Without considering longer term strategic direction and the needs of each business group, the choices are not fully clear and this makes a confident selection more challenging.
A further challenge is that today’s revenue technologies are evolving rapidly, and solutions range from email marketing point solutions to integrated marketing automation. As the industry consolidates and new entrants emerge, there is increased importance on ensuring that any solution will fit into a longer term ‘revenue technology ecosystem’.
We are often asked us whether a Marketing Automation solution should be considered over an ESP. While many of the capabilities of a marketing automation system can be found in ESP, Web analytics, and website CMS solutions, marketing automation systems offer additional levels of integration by combining features in a single product. This brings additional capability, including:
To address these questions and ensure that the process fully considers business and technical requirements, you can use a selection process that reflects both short term and longer term business needs. An objective solution selection process uses an iterative and traceable process to move from requirements through to final selection:
Want to learn more and get a selection checklist for Marketing Automation? Sign up here.
There are an incredible number of CRM Apps out there. I have looked at several and wanted to mention Pipedrive as a great option for companies looking to focus on sales. It does a great job at pipeline management – with a nimble sales ready focus and good integrations using Zapier.
Companies like it because:
1. The visual pipeline is powerful. The pipeline view is fantastic- visual drag and drop pipeline
2. Sales always needs an orchestrated next step. You can easily set that up and when an action is completed, it prompts you for the next step.
3. Managing contacts and companies is always a difficult challenge. the contact and company data management and synchronization is easy and tailored.
4. You need to track pipeline health and hygiene performance to meet goals. You can set up pipeline velocity metrics and track performance
5. Most CRMs are so cumbersome, they don’t get used. Pipedrive is built for the sales person.
6. If you are an Apps user, this is a no brainer. Pipedrive syncs with Google Apps.
7. Not expensive.
Website assessments are nothing new, yet today, we need to take a comprehensive view that includes a look at your websites, apps, media, and social media presence. So, when you do your next check-up, instead of thinking “website assessment,” you should be thinking “digital assessment.” Given how rapidly things are changing in digital strategy and systems, you should be conducting a self-assessment at least each year. When we do this for clients, we call it a “DXI” – Digital Experience Index. The benefits are clear.
Over the last six months, we have had a number of small businesses come to us with website security and management issues. These were mostly WordPress websites that had not been maintained effectively. In one case, the business had experienced a website outage for 10 days! While this business was able to function, many businesses could not operate without a website functioning properly. If your site went down for an extended period, what would the impact be for your business?
Schwab is investing millions of dollars in the RIA Stands for You online campaign. It is an opportunity for clients of Schwab Advisor Services to put the marketing muscle of Schwab to work for their own firms.
By focusing the campaign online, Schwab is validating the power and growing importance of digital and social media channels and marketing programs to attract new clients and referrals. The beauty of the web: it is measurable and trackable.
One of the major challenges of attracting the attention of prospects online is fresh content. And Schwab is providing a great deal of this (educational documents, logo, videos and more), for RIAs to customize and integrate to enhance their own online marketing efforts. Plus there is a dedicated website and a social media presence.
By John Nielsen
Lead scoring is the process of evaluating and assigning points to prospects and leads using marketing automation tools. Points are distributed based on the attributes associated with a qualified lead. It is important to understand whom you are marketing to when managing a campaign, sending irrelevant content to your followers is a quick way to lose. To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, below are a few tips one can easily follow to update your contact lists and help identify priority focus using lead scoring.
There are a range of terrific CRM solutions out there and we have tried several for both client installations and our own team’s use. We settled on Salesforce.com based on the richness of functionality, the level of demand we see with our own clients and some excellent integration opportunities.
In addition to integrating fully with our marketing automation solution to pass through inbound marketing leads and see lead scoring, we have implemented Cirrus Insight as a browser widget for contextual integration with Gmail. We like Cirrus a lot, though until recently, we were a little bit frustrated by how it co-exised with Rapportive – another fantastic solution recently acquired by LinkedIn. That problem has now been solved!!
Check Out Cirrus Here! (this is an affiliate link which would earn us some brownie points with Cirrus and you might get a discount!)
CRM systems are notorious in their complexity and lack of success in many cases. Organizational and cultural dynamics play a big role. CRM systems offer a great deal of promise yet so often don’t deliver. With today’s economic pressures it is as critical as ever that firms increase sales without increasing the cost and complexity of selling.
One area getting more attention now is relationship management technology. Clearly LinkedIn has made a huge impact here and now new tools are emerging to help relationship-intensive businesses take better advantage of their enterprise contact and relationship assets.
New tools like Datahug, Gist and others are helping businesses manage information about the organization’s extended relationships (employee’s and firm’s) with individuals and customer/client organizations. They do this by mining the email database and social networks for connections and relationships. This can dramatically impact deal intelligence, qualification and positioning and drive up win rates.
Yet for many years, CRM deployments have consistently under delivered on the promise. The adoption of any CRM-related technology must be approached with a view of the people, process and technology impacts. Relationship intelligence is part of what we call “Revenue Systems” and selecting the right tools and embedding them effectively in the organization requires careful thought and planning.
Done well, these new relationship intelligence technologies can be a powerful ally in firm-wide deployments – helping to increase win rates, inform bid decisions and enhance the tailoring of winning value propositions.