Month: December 2009

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Keep tweaking your website

Its way to easy to ‘set it and forget it’ when it comes to your website. But constantly tweaking it can make for sizable gains in effectiveness. Here are two tools to help you:

1. Browser size visualization tool

Google just released a screen overlay tool that shows you what percentage of average users can see what parts of your website. What’s visible to you may be ‘below the fold’ for half your site’s visitors. Also, it can serve as a handy tool to drag your browser window to the view that 90 or 95% of your customers have.

Me, I’ve got a right-hand side menu to worry about, but luckily the site is flexible-width so 90% of visitors can see the whole thing.

2. Web-form validation technology

Validation choices
Validation choices

What’s more important to a B2B marketer than the web-form that all your leads come from? Well, after looking at this review of web-form validation technology from Smashing Magazine, I feel like my site is only doing the minimum standard. At the end of the article is a number of resources to add form validation tricks to your site. Your visitors are already getting use to these techniques at other sites, and will be expecting similar technology at your site.

Keep on tweaking

We all want to redo our website all the time. But going back and tweaking details can make significant improvements in user experience and response. Don’t believe me? Start following Anne Holland’s new blog Which Test Won? where her A/B test examples can show dramatic gains from tweaking websites.

What are you tweaking?

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Snail-mail blows away email for lead-gen

Would you email to a mailing list for lead-gen, or snail-mail it?

We marketers of limited means (time and staff, as much as money) love the email tools out there. Fire up SurveyMonkey and/or MailChimp, and bam!–leads and responses.

But we should reconsider our actions based on split-testing reported at B2BMarketingSmarts: Email lead generation — perception vs. reality.

“Primarily using their in-house list… we mailed 100,000 surveys directing the recipient to a pURL (personalized URL)…We also emailed 30,000 surveys with the exact same messages.”

“The result: The postal mail pulled 3.1% (3,100 leads); the email pulled less than .25% (75 leads)… An interesting side note: of the 3,100 responses from the postal mail, 800 sent in the paper survey.”

So of course it depends on how much this was a survey, and how much it was a marketing piece. It always depends on details like that. But the differences in response rates are pretty definitive, that should influence your strategic choice.

I don’t usually blog about direct marketing, but I want us to know that if you are embarking in slamming out an email looking for response, “you’re doin’ it wrong”.