WebPeel - Customer Loyalty and Online User Experience

Are You Making It Easy To Evangelize Your Site?

One of the most powerful means to extending your brand is through social media. There are numerous accounts of things going viral after one person shares a link on Twitter or Facebook and within hours several hundred people if not thousands know about it.

While your company’s site may not be the type of content that spreads like wildfire, it is critical that you offer some type of sharing on your site. The usual approach is for people to go with the Big 2: Facebook and Twitter. This usually involves your web developer going out to each of those sites to get javascript that is installed on your pages.

This method works well; but makes it hard to keep up with all the new sites gaining traction every month - should I allow sharing on FB and Twitter only, or add in Stumbleupon? ShareThis solves this problem.

ShareThis allows you to pick and choose a multitude of options for sharing your content on a variety of social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Reddit and more. They even allow a person on your site to share the content via email. Instead of keeping up with all the latest code snippets and networks, these guys take care of that for you.

In less than 5 minutes, and with one line of code, I had buttons for my favorite social network sites on my homepage. Now anyone visiting can quickly share my content and become an instant evangelist. The options that ShareThis provides and the ease at which a novice web developer can implement their code is truly impressive. And for now, it’s FREE.

 

Does Your Name Help Customers Engage With You?

I have always been interested in the science and often art of naming companies and products. There is a great article today on TechFlash on why a company had to change its name from Untitled Startup. Innocent decisions often lead to problems later on.

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/01/why-we-changed-our-name.html

TypePad vs. WordPress - Why Switch Blogging Platforms?

In  today's 24x7 world, many consumers are making judgments about your business around the clock. Picture some influential small business owner sitting in his underwear 2 o'clock in the morning deciding if he wants to use your web service for his company or your competitor's. At that time of night he is looking to make a decision and there is no sales rep sitting next to him in his underwear giving him the value proposition on why he should choose your company. It is at this moment that your web site needs to provide a compelling story that speaks to what you can provide over your competitors. 

Switching costs for web services can be very, very low and I recently found out from TypePad that my credit card had expired. I had heard so much about WordPress, that I decided to investigate switching to their blogging platform. After all, if I had to get my credit card out, I might as well sign up with the best service if it was easy to transfer my posts - It was; almost too easy. Both TypePad and WordPress allow you to import/export to other blogging platforms. In less than 15 minutes I had an entire replica of this site (WebPeel.com) on WordPress, complete with images, comments, etc. But after 2 days I killed the site and decided to stay with TypePad. Why? 

To be fair, WordPress has an impressive suite of tools, especially if you want to self-host the application and truly customize it. I spend too much time coding my own sites, so the last thing I wanted to do is start being a code master for my blog as well. My evaluation was very, very quick - 4 hours over 2 days, but I think that is reasonable considering how fast people make decisions today just based on how the homepage looks. Here is what I found: 

• Themes are a key to a good looking blog, and there weren't enough of Wow themes on WordPress to say it is worth me switching just for the design. 
• Certain themes didn't offer me the most important feature (which by the way is not offered by TypePad at all) - the ability to arbitrarily flag more than one post to be featured in a side bar at the top of the page (i.e. a list of post titles with excerpts and thumbnail images). 
• Lastly, WordPress mentioned on the site being able to bring in your blog from TypePad, but there was not enough story to say why it would be so much better. 

Lessons: 

1. Watch your competition like a hawk and don't be shy about publicizing your benefits over theirs on your site; this is seen all the time on television ads (think Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Google). 
2. Make the switching costs loooowwwww... press a button and your done is what people want. 
3. And if you already have the customer, don't automatically assume they will always auto-renew, make sure your website or email reminders show the benefits of staying with your company. 

All in all I am very happy with TypePad, now if they would just feature my blog that would be great ;-) 

 

Old Navy and Time Zone Discrimination

Old Navy uses a good tactic to call you to action - they send out coupon codes via email that have a decreasing savings percentage with each passing day. On Monday it may be 30% off your total online order, but if you wait until Wednesday it may only be 20%. Last week was the first time I ever took them up on this offer. 

 

While I did save some money, I was a little peeved that I lost 5% because the day for me apparently ends at 8:59pm not midnight. I was shopping on their site for a good 45 minutes before checking out. When I entered the coupon code, it gave me a discount of 5% less than I thought I should be getting. I quickly went back to the original email only to "read the fine print." 

 

To get the savings for that  day, you had to make the purchase by 11:59 ET. Since I live on the west coast, this translated to 8:59pm for me. I quickly looked at my computer screen and the bottom right clock said 9:40 - Ugghhh!! Old Navy was perfectly in the right, but it just irked me that I had been rushing around all day knowing I was going to make the purchase later that evening. By the time dinner was fixed, kid was in bed, etc. I had missed my window. In the grand scheme of things 5% may not seem like a lot, but when you factor in taxes and the fact that I didn't get free shipping, this would have paid at least for the shipping. 

I have programmed a couple of web apps that send reminders to people at various times in the day. So I know first hand that dealing with time zones can be a pain in the butt. However, as companies do more and more business online, it will be important to make these disclaimers a little more prominent. In a sense, Old Navy is cheating me by 3 hours. If the average person starts their day in New York at 7am, it doesn't mean the average person in L.A. starts their day at 4am (unless you’re a stock broker). If my day ends at 5pm like most people, I have 4 hours to make the cutoff where someone in New York has a whole 7 hours. 

Now, Old Navy has customers all across America, so maybe this is not a big deal, but it would be interesting to know what percentage of their customers lose the 3 hours. If 50% of your customers were negatively impacted would you change the expiration to 3am or solve it with technology and use the person's zip to determine the local time? Or would you do nothing?

 

IHOP Likes Gmail

Many of my posts have a small business slant, because I empathize with these companies that have to stretch every marketing dollar they can spare. They usually don't have the big budgets to do a huge branding and awareness campaign and projecting a certain level of professionalism is key to instilling confidence in potential clients. When the Web first took off, many small businesses signed up with these massive ASPs to get a free web page to promote their business. Companies like GeoCities  would give businesses a domain name like (http://www.geocities.com/bakery/mycupcakeshop/) to host their homepage. As people got more sophisticated, the rules of branding said that you must have your own top level domain name (http://www.mybusiness.com) and your email address had to have the same domain name (service@mybusiness.com). This branding needed to extend to your business cards, letterhead and the list went on and on. These ideas were sound then and still make sense today. I cringe when I see a business with a homepage hosted under someone else's domain. Web hosting and purchasing a domain name is so cheap there is almost no excuse.  And for big companies, there is absolutely no excuse. 

So I was a little surprised when I took my son to IHOP for their Kids Eat Free promotion to get a receipt with a "Gmail" email address. I applaud them for providing an email address to let them know how they did, but why the "IHOPSERVICE@GMAIL.COM" address. IHOP already owns the domain name IHOP.com, so why not have a dedicated IHOP.com address for feedback. I cannot verify if this is just the restaurant near my location or nationwide. IHOP is a franchise so it could be this franchisee is just being proactive about collecting feedback and is not able to get an email account on the IHOP.com domain. If that is the case, then I can cut the franchisee some slack, but maybe IHOP should develop a company wide strategy to ensure all franchisees can have a dedicated email address for feedback on their restaurant. A common form where all submitters had to select their restaurant would also work too. 

But what do I know, this is a minor inconvenience if my son gets to eat FREE! 

Discover Card - They Keep Pulling Me Back In

 

 

As Al Pacino once said, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." If you have been around digital advertising as long as I have, you may remember those annoying pop-under ads that would sometimes appear when you closed your browser window. They would usually be advertising for some type of spy camera or the latest Netflix offer. Thankfully, many people don't see too many of those ads today. There were a number of reasons why those ads were bad in my opinion, but the most obvious one was that the ad usually had nothing to do with the site you were leaving. As major sites have become more sophisticated they have started pitching their own offers on their logout or exit screens. I think this a great idea when executed well, especially when most people like to check that they have actually logged out before proceeding to their next site or closing their browser window. 

The latest one I saw was from Discover. I had to call to renew my card and during the process they asked, "What would it take to make it easier for me to use their card." I said a lower rate and they obliged. The customer experience was so good, that after I hung up I decided to checkout their site which I rarely visit. After perusing for a bit, I logged out to see this lovely gem on the logout confirmation screen. I thought it was worth a post because it's a great example of pulling your users back into the site to engage some more. It is tastefully done and is presented at just the right time. Because of the great phone experience and site experience I will be using my card more.

 

 

Amazon Cancels Referrals from Paid Search – Party Over

In the last sign that the days of “easy money on the Internet are over,” I received an email today from Amazon.com stating that they would no longer pay referrals fee to affiliates in the United States sending traffic to their web properties from paid search. While I have never made a lot of money from Amazon’s program, which I think is one of the better ones out there, the concept of being a middle man to send traffic to the sites of well-known brands always seemed too easy. And when something is too easy, everyone comes in droves until it has to get shut down.

It used to be so simple - people would setup a web site, find a few well-known companies and register for their affiliate programs. Then head over to Google, sign-up for an AdWords account and buy trademarked terms and other keywords closely affiliated (pun intended) to the company they were representing. After all, this is the only way for a small guy’s site to ever get found, especially if you had no brand awareness or content that would drive people to your property. And guess what? It worked, it worked really well for some. People were even able to quit their real jobs and do affiliate marketing full-time. There are more than a few stories on the Net of people making several thousand dollars per month.

I can personally attest to the fact that I was making close to $1,000 per month when I was a Progressive affiliate. I bought domains like HoustonCarInsurance.com, CarInsuranceQuote.net  and others and just placed the progressive quote widget right on the homepage of those sites. The checks just rolled in each month with little effort on my part to go to the search engines and update bids and keywords a couple times a month. In a busy month, maybe I spent all of 4 hours doing this. The first nail in the coffin came when many programs started cracking down on affiliates buying trademarked words and words of their competitors. This worked for a time, but the lines kept getting blurred. Eventually, so many people caught on that when you did a search for car insurance, the first 5 results would be affiliate sites and not the actual insurance provider. I started spending so much money on bids ($3.00-$4.00 per click) that it became unprofitable. Luckily, I hadn’t quit my job.

My guess is that with the down economy, the amount of money that Amazon was paying out, and the hassle of regulating people trying to beat the system, it just wasn’t worth it to Amazon. I think affiliates programs are great for small companies especially in retail who are trying to get their name out in the market, but Amazon is so AMAZON!! They get enough traffic from their own efforts. I really can’t blame them. Unfortunately, this makes it even harder for the small time web publisher to make a buck. This blog serves as a warning that you must find ways to create value for yourself without depending on the programs offered by others. Every affiliate agreement contains some language that says they can cancel the program at anytime, and that sucks if you decide to quit your job and don’t have any other revenue coming from your site. The game has changed again; there are simply too many useless sites on the Internet that do nothing more than redirect you to another place. It was a great party, sorry to see it go in some ways, but kinda glad too.

My Commission Junction Password

For web publishers looking to monetize their site with fancy banner ads like the big boys at Yahoo and MSN, Commission Junction is an awesome service - You sign-up for a free publisher account and then choose ads from over 2,000 advertisers to feature on your site. The advertiser ultimately decides if they want to appear on your site, so unless your generating thousands of hits per day, don’t bother completing the ad application agreement for well known companies like Discover Card, HP, H&R Block, etc. Plus, your site needs to be super specific for those companies to want their ads appearing on your pages.

Nonetheless, the program is a win-win for everyone. CJ creates a market to match buyers (advertisers) and sellers (publishers) and collects a handsome commission in the process. You get to make a little money (or a lot) on the side.

As good as this service is they are one of the few web sites I know, that do not allow you to choose your password during registration – Instead, it’s assigned. Not only does this make it difficult to login the first time (usually doing a copy/paste from the email you receive), but even worse, they created a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) entry for people to learn how to change the system generated password – because, it’s not obvious from the main screen.

If I need a FAQ to change my password, that’s a problem! Now granted this site and its service is not meant for the casual web surfer, but it still poses an unusual usability problem. I’m sure in an effort or following guidance from their security guys, they thought system generated passwords were the way to go, but sending the password through unsecured email kind of defeats the purpose. If my password is exposed in email, then I am going to want to immediately change it, without reading a FAQ.

To get an idea of the steps involved, I have posted a snippet of the change password instructions. I have blacked some parts out in case this falls into the wrong hands and someone jacks your account. After all, it was hard for me to find, let the hackers read the FAQ too.

Bring on the Dancing Girls, or Not

It is said that many top actors do not watch the films they perform in unless they are dragged to a premier movie night where they smile for the flashing lights before staring at themselves on the big screen for 2-hours. I hate seeing myself in pictures so I can imagine this being somewhat unnerving, but then again, maybe that is why I worked in digital advertising instead of taking acting lessons.

Advertising for those who work in the industry can have a similar effect. I have talked to numerous peers and friends in the industry who try to avoid advertising at all costs and never click on ads when surfing the Web. In fact, I am firmly convinced that if it were up to those in the industry to drive click thru rates, we would all be out of a job in less than a month. But somehow, somewhere around the globe there are enough people who click on the “dancing girls” to keep the industry growing.

Every month, insurance brokers, mortgage brokers, and those pushing miracle diets spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on homepage advertisements at the top web portals featuring what many consider in the industry to be the most annoying, distasteful and obtrusive ads on the Web.

Why do these companies keep pushing these banner ads? Surely they know they’re ugly. Well, the reason is very simple – these ads work!! You don’t keep throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars out the door, if you’re not getting the return you want. But somehow, the reality is that these companies generate a staggering amount of click thrus to their web sites. So my question is always, not why do they put these ads out there, but rather who the hell is clicking on them? I can’t find a single person that has clicked on one of these types of ads. So as I shake my head in disbelief I must constantly remind myself of one important lesson; know your audience and know them well. Regardless of my taste, these companies and their creative agencies know exactly what type of ads their potential customers will click on. You only get away with what works, and it is working really well for these advertisers.

However, there is a down side. What do you want your company to be known for and do you care? If money is your only goal then a do-what-it-takes approach may be fine. But, if you don’t want to be known as the company that has nothing but dancing girls in their ads, then you may have to work a little harder at driving the same click thru rates with something more acceptable to mom. Even if you’re more liberal with your advertising, you still have to think of the brand in the long run. Will your ads negatively impact your brand? I think GoDaddy is a great domain registrar but I wonder if many non-web developers think it’s a porn site from watching their Super Bowl commercials each year.

The art of balancing your brand and attracting people to your site is not easy. At the end of the day, you just have to research to know if your target audience is in enough numbers on the Web to make it worth your while. And once you know they are online, what ads will make them click. Can you live with those types of ads? Marketing can be a very personal thing, so sometimes you have to detach yourself to make your business grow. Sometimes you have to bring on the dancing girls…

Do Your Customers Know Your Emails?

So it’s become painfully obvious to me that I am now subscribed to too many email newsletters and other daily alerts that fill my inbox each week. A few months ago I subscribed to the Houston Business Journal since I like to keep a pulse on business at a local level. To BizJournal’s credit, they do an excellent job at covering business stories in most major cities that would never get coverage at a national level. While I don’t live in Houston anymore, I still like to read about the progress of certain companies and the general economy in the Bayou City.

My first complaint with HBJ was that in order to receive their news brief, you had to register for an account. You have to work a little harder than just entering an email in a text field and hitting submit. However, I like the content so it was worth my time and effort to register. Side Note: the more valuable your content/service, the more information you can require during your registration process.

Since my registration went through successfully, I simply went onto to other web activities and figured I would start receiving my newsletters in a few days. Well, a few days passed and I had long forgotten about my registration. As I was going through my deluge of emails today, I finally stopped on an item that I have seen almost every day for at least a month: “FROM: John C. Beddow, Publisher.” The subject line is always different, but never really compelling, so I just ignored the spam and never setup a filter for this. Today I finally said, “I got to see why this guy John keeps writing me; what does he have to say.” I opened the email since it looked harmless enough and to my surprise and embarrassment, it was my news digest from the Houston Business Journal. For the past month I had been ignoring these emails thinking that HBJ had never got my registration. Now, HBJ may have warned me during registration to look out for “John,” so my bad for that, but there is a lesson here for HBJ as well – Make sure your customers know it’s you every time you communicate with them. If the FROM field was “Houston Business Journal,” or “Business Journals,” I would have instantly opened these emails, but because I never made the connection, I just ignored them.

Oh well, have to run, I have over a month’s worth of Houston business news to catch up on!!

I Just Want To Pay for My Custom T-Shirts

So whenever I am about to launch a site, I like to get fully embedded into the site launch. I want everyone, everywhere to know about the site even if it only will receive a hundred visitors per day. Beyond the standard press release and search engine submission, I like to create t-shirts with the site’s logo. This way, when I am out in the street, standing in line or doing whatever, someone can ask me about my shirt, giving me the opportunity to talk about my business. Yeah, I know, this is probably not an effective marketing effort from a marketing cost perspective, but again, it is just a ritual I have been doing for years. Note to self – maybe my true calling is creating a clothing line.

There are a number of online printing companies that do a good job of automating the printing process. Sites like iPrint and VistaPrint are good for print jobs on paper (i.e. business cards, letterhead). They allow you to choose templates or create your own where you can change colors, fonts and upload your own graphics. But when it comes to quality printing on a t-shirt, I find screen printing is the way to go. While iPrint and VistaPrint do offer t-shirt printing, their specialty is using a heat transfer process that allows for full photo printing on not just t-shirts, but grandma’s mug for Christmas. While the process works fairly well, the end product doesn’t stand the test of time. On the shirts I ordered, the area where the imprinting occurred turns slightly yellow after many washes – similar to those old “iron on” graphics you could buy as a kid to make your own shirts at home.

Somehow I stumbled upon a screen printing company called Broken Arrow. If you have access to or know someone with a vector based graphics package like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator, you can upload your graphic to their servers and get your screen-printed t-shirts in about 2-3 weeks. The quality is amazing. They have a large selection of all types of t-shirts – popular styles come in as many as 70+ different colors. The logo I put on my shirt had deep colors and no bleed-through where you could see the underlying shirt color. I have even tried their embroidery service for a couple of hats (order minimum of 6) which was also top notch.

When you call their customer service you get a real live person in seconds, who can usually help you. So why did I need to call customer service? Well, the only real complaint I have with these guys is the payment process. They use PayPal to receive their payments and that system has crapped out on me several times when trying to pay for a previously placed order. So, I called my credit card number in. If their quality wasn’t so good, I would go elsewhere, simply because getting a cheap, reliable online credit card payment site integrated into your own web site is easy these days. E-commerce sites with a disjointed buying process will usually lose my business, but Broken Arrow’s customer service offline made up for it. Even Google with their checkout product is offering an almost free service to merchants who want to accept credit cards. While PayPal is highly respected and reliable, I still have not figured out why it doesn’t work consistently on BrokenArrowWear’s site. Nonetheless, because of their easy to find toll free number on many of their pages, I got over my laziness and picked up the phone.

Lesson learned here: If you don't have a rock-solid payment process, make sure you have an easy to find customer service number that is available with extended hours. Email is the second best thing, but when it comes to money and the screen goes blank after submitting your credit card, you want a toll free number NOW!!