ElementsDaily

Our good friends at Systems & Marketing Solutions (SMS) have published a wonderful article on landing page design: Ten Ideas to Improve Landing Page Design.

Bob and the team at SMS are experts in results-driven search engine marketing (SEM).

Thank you to Bob and his team at SMS for these SEM and landing page tips.

There is a general consensus that 80 percent of results are produced from 20 percent of the work. Think about this statement for a second. What this is really saying is that 80 percent of the work you do only contributes to a small amount of the results you produce. It also means that 20 percent of your customers or clients are responsible for 80 percent of your revenue. How much time do you spend each week working with the 80 percent of your clients who don’t buy from you?

I remember when I discovered the 80/20 Rule (Pareto Principle) – I was plugging away at a development project which looked like it was about to go over schedule and over budget. I looked at what I was doing and realized I was using a lot of time answering phone calls, emails, and building modules that didn’t need to be built to get the project out the door. I turned off the phone and email and focused completely on the required parts of the project. I finished the project in two hours!

After this experience I realized that I could apply this to many areas of my life and ended up developing a simple set of rules for getting through the work day:

1. Batch process as much as possible: This means taking common, repetitive tasks and grouping them to a specific time of day. For me, this means I read and respond to email only twice per day. This was hard at first; people would come by my desk (and still do) to see if I received their email. I setup an auto-response message letting people know when I am available to answer their email and if they needed me immediately they could send a message to my cell phone. This one step saved me at least three hours every day.

2. Get rid of the distractions: Turn off the email program and disable any audible notices that sound when a new message arrives. Turn off the ringer and all phone calls go immediately to voice mail. I have an out-going message stating that callers can email my cell phone for emergencies, otherwise I returns calls at a specific time. This saved me another hour each day.

3. Automate as much of the work as possible: ElementsConnect and ElementsLocal are built on this principle. We create a template or templates (we can provide this service) that websites will use and choose a default for new pages that need to be created. We also built a set of page layouts (we provide several of these upon install) that can be inserted into content pages once they are created, again with the ability to select a default.

This covers 20 percent of the effort needed for getting a site up and running, and 80 percent of the work is done! Hiring a copywriter is a good way to produce your site content. I had an excellent experience with elance.com (craigslist.org also has a lot of freelance listings). The copywriter I hired from elance.com gave me a very affordable rate and produced some of the best content I have ever read. Once your copy is ready, copy and paste it into your pages and your site is nearly done. The navigation builds itself, as do the sitemap.xml and robots.txt files. You may want to add a few extra features here and there (slide shows, a blog, etc.) but your site is effectively complete. Automation is your friend!

4. Duplicate relationships that bring you the most benefit. For example: if you have two clients who responsible for 80 percent of your orders, and twenty that you are always talking to but never buy anything from you, stop calling those twenty people. Concentrate on finding more clients like your two high volume customers. For me this was finding more people who I could have interesting discussions with, which eventually lead me to meeting my wife.

There you have it, 4 simple rules to make your life easier to manage. The hard part about all of this is getting everything in place – and having the strength to put down the Blackberry.

Excellent customer service practices can help a good business become great and keep your company in the forefront of people’s minds. I’d like to share some tips that have helped make Elements successful.

Everyone in the world has dealt with someone from the a customer service department. However, not everyone is satisfied at the end of the interaction.

Two statements come to mind when I think of this topic:
“The customer is always right,” and “You can’t satisfy everyone.”

The biggest problem for customer service departments is that these two statements contradict each other. So, if your business follows these beliefs, throw them away.

Instead, keep this thought in mind;

“How may I help you?”

The customer is not always right, but they are justified in needing assistance, which is why they have contacted you. That being said, you cannot always make everyone happy, but you can try to help reach that goal, by keeping “How may I help you?” in mind when ever dealing with clients or potential clients.

In some cases, your company may be too big, or too small, to assist the client, but you can always give them a reference, or some tips, or just be there to listen to their complaint.

By striving to ‘Help’ a client or potential client you will accomplish two things.

One: you will potentially win a life-long client or at least have good word-of-mouth from their interaction with your company.

Two: you have neutralized a client’s attitude and allowed yourself to become part of their solution, rather than their problem.

You may not fully satisfy the client’s issue, but by offering anything to move them closer to their goal, you will move further and further away from an upset or angry client. You’ll turn clients into happy individuals who are confident in seeking your assistance, opinion or tips because of your professionalism and desire to ‘Help’.

For example:

I deal with two communication companies:
One lacks general service areas, but excels at customer service, while the other has incredible service areas, but I cannot reach a representative when I need to resolve an issue.

I’ll give you one guess as to which company I refer, look forward to working with and will renew my contracts with. Need a hint? It is not the company I have trouble reaching.

My point is, follow these easy tips and you will find an increase in customer satisfaction and a decrease in customers leaving your company for your competitor.

1. Be honest!

• If you don’t have the answer, but promise to provide one … follow through and do what you say you’re going to do.

2. Be Realistic

• Nobody wants something they are not looking for. If a customer comes to you with a email issue or product issue, don’t try to sell them a product or service that doesn’t solve the issue they came to you with.

3. Create relationships with other companies

• If a company can highlight your services with their own and you can with theirs, create an open dialogue with them on how you want to refer them and have them refer your company.

Elements did just that with two companies: Digitalwest & Mind Body Online. Both are great companies, with great customer service that share the same values as we do. It was a ‘no-brainer’ to become partners and because of this relationship all parties have benefited.

Take some simple steps to ‘Help’ your clients and you will see BIG retuns in the long run.

Whether you have a website aimed at generating leads or selling products, you should be unlocking your businesses’ key performance indicators (KPI). By focusing on your KPIs you will begin to understand what makes your website and online marketing initiatives successful. KPIs will reveal trends that can point to toward measuring your success/failure based on real metrics and will help you make educated decisions concerning future changes to your website.

Over the next few months you’ll be able to pick up and apply some easy strategies while we tackle some of the basics of website optimization using KPIs and web analytics.

Start by reviewing your website statistics or analytics. If you don’t know how to view your website statistics STOP READING THIS NOW and call your website design/interactive/development agency. Ask them to show you how to view your website stats. If for some reason, you cannot get this information with your agency, call us at (805) 547-1160 x201 and we will help you setup website stats for your future use.

Once you have access to your website stats, you will notice statistics such as number of Unique Visitors and many other critical web metrics. These stats are referred to as indicators. Many of these statistics are not relevant to our focus, so we have to choose a few “key” indicators that will help you improve your business. The indicators that you should pay attention to are:

• Average Page Views Per Visit
• Average Time Per Visit
• Average Bounce Rate

The Bounce Rate is the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

For a lead generation websites these three indicators (average page views per visit, average time per visit and average bounce rate) should be your initial KPIs. KPIs should always be tracked using comparative time-frames that will communicate a some sort of trend upward or downward.

Next week, we’ll discuss these initial KPIs (average page views per visit, average time per visit and average bounce rate) in detail and provide best practices surrounding the decisions you can make from each of these three KPIs.

I remember clearly when it happened. It was my junior year in college studying Art and Design. I was driving, when, I recall looking out onto the landscape before me, everything suddenly popped into place. The world before me had become a composition. The billboard in front of me and to my left juxtaposed with the trees in front and to the right, the road itself balanced the equation. The clouds above added just the visual texture needed against an otherwise blanket of eternally light blue sky.

This was a somewhat profound moment for me, and I’ve been able to see this “real-life still-life” situation time and time again. If you look at the world with a clinical artistic eye, you’ll be able to see it too.