What is interesting is to look at the key differentiators between our SME clients and our other much larger, well known clients.

• Budgets - of course budgets vary significantly, from a few thousand pounds to ten thousand pounds and upwards
• Expectations - SME clients tend to feel like online can’t always play an integral role in their sales and marketing activities, but bigger brands expect much more from the online channel
• Traffic versus conversions – SME’s will rely mainly on traffic generation techniques to increase enquiries and sales, where bigger brands look at both traffic generation and visitor conversion (to varying degrees I must add!)
• Are all visitors potential customers? – SME’s will tend to treat all site visitors as ‘potential customers’, especially when viewing web analytics, whereas bigger brands focus on segmenting their traffic information to identify which visitors are more likely to convert into an enquiry or sale

What Usability Doesn’t Mean for SME’s

There are a wide variety of services within the ‘usability’ field which, realistically, aren’t going to be used often by SME’s due to budget constraints. These services include:

• user testing in labs
• field studies
• focus groups
• expert evaluations
• card sorting
• in-house usability consultancy
• full user-centered design processes
• information architecture planning and development

What Usability Does Mean for SME’s

This isn’t to say that SME’s can’t benefit from the principles of ‘good usability’ to help them improve the effectiveness of their website and online marketing activities.

Primary ways for SME’s to embrace and benefit from usability include:

• using the free web analytics tool Google Analytics to track and monitor visitor activity
• carrying out guerilla style usability testing (more on this explained in this presentation on improving online performance)
• consider how your website currently caters for your key target customer (messages, information, services, useful tools, easy contact methods)
• use another free tool Google Website Optimiser to test a different version of your primary action page on your site
• calculating the potential sales and profit improvement you can expect to get using a ROI calculator (either for lead generation websites or for e-commerce websites)
• treating your website not just as a complimentary promotion of your business but with the potential to become an intregal part of your sales and marketing activities

Masterclasses for SME’s and Micro Businesses

I am delighted to not only be taking part in the first official LEAD programme (a leadership and business development programme) delivered by TMI with 17 other managing directors of micro businesses, but I am also delivering a masterclass to these business owners on ways in which they can start to improve their websites to generate more business. The first masterclass I am delivering is on Monday 15th March 2010, and it is open to non LEAD business owners by prior arrangement.

What SME’s Can Learn About Usability To Increase Profits

For the masterclass which is delivered over two and half hours, the outline of what I will speaking about is below:

• Google Analytics – how you can use this free tool quickly and efficiently to understand whether your website is performing well
• Online enquiries – how you can encourage more visitors to make an enquiry
• E-commerce – best practice advice if you are selling online to encourage more people to buy from you
• Case studies – how to improve online enquiries
• Making the move from offline to online sales/marketing strategy – myths, considerations, opportunities

Masterclass Plans and Objectives

My plan is certainly to make the masterclass sessions very engaging with lots of participation from the SME business owners who will attend. I would say the three main objectives for this masterclass are:

1. Generate genuine awareness of what tools and techniques SME’s can use to improve their websites
2. Demonstrating that ‘usability’ isn’t just for big businesses, and that any size business can benefit from better measurement and usability led improvements
3. Planting the seed for business owners to consider making online a much more integral part of their sales and marketing strategy

Summary

As this article points out although there are many usability led activities which aren’t feasible for many SME’s, there is absolutely no doubt that micro businesses and SME’s can benefit from improved usability of their website and online marketing. If you are in this position or have friends and colleagues who run small businesses, feel free to give us a call to see how PRWD can help increase your sales and leads from the online channel.

New features that have recently gone live are expanded and more intelligent conversion goal tracking, and new Intelligence reporting and alerts.

You’ll see the videos below which give a great overview of both of these new features:

Expanded and More Intelligent Conversion Goal Tracking

Intelligence Reporting and Alerts

Looks like we’ll have to make our Advanced Google Analytics Training Course a bit longer to squeeze these new features in!

Take a look at the Speedy Hire and VoucherSeeker case studies.

Client Testimonials

Both case studies feature client testimonials, some of which are below:

VoucherSeeker

Within 30 minutes of our 3 hours session we were sure it’d paid for itself.

Neil Ainsworth, Director

The training course on analytics provided by PRWD was excellent. It gave our team a good insight of analytics and the useful tools available. We’re more equipped with tools to analyse visitor behaviour than we were before

Duke Tanson, Director

PRWD helped me to realise the power behind Google Analytics whilst, at the same time, enabling us to understand and simplify the way we use it. Up until the course, we had all had a go at using certain parts but, mostly, without success. With the help of PWRD we will now be able to better assess and improve our sites and, in turn, their conversion rates.

Mark Dunne, Senior Affiliate Marketing Executive

Speedy Hire

I have been consistently impressed with Paul’s very practical approach to helping us improve our online offering. In the Google Analytics training session, Paul kept the training to the key areas which he felt we should focus on initially, according to our level of understanding and having taken the time to understand the needs of our business.

Shelley Kemp, Head of Marketing

Well delivered, thought provoking, providing us with useful tools.
As we develop our campaigns, web content, digital marketing programmes etc it will be good to use what has been learnt to ensure we are going out at the right times, to the right people, using the correct words and then being able to report back to the business.

Leanne Ferry, Marketing Communications Manager

The post (and subsequent comments) is titled Conversion Optimisation and Site Performance Consultants – please step forward!.

The reason I posted about this is if you read through the comments you will see an interesting mix of responses, and by the end of the responses you will certainly have a better understanding of which suppliers and consultants are out there and how their services are either a dedicated specialism or part of a wider portfolio of digital services.

Naturally I provided PRWD’s response to Ashley’s request, and below is an excert from the response:

Alongside ourselves featuring in the Econsultancy 2009 User Experience Buyers Guide, I’m so far surprised not to see more of the other 25 usability specialists that are profiled putting themselves forward. In this buyers guide I was also pleasantly surprised that almost all of my industry insights that I provided as part of our profile submission are featured.

Echoing comments you made in your post and what others have shared in their responses, my insights are very much centered around the definite shift in client focus, investment and expectations.

The shift in investment is from:

• new technology
• more features
• more functionality
• more acquisition spend

to:

• genuine customer centricity (not just the company statement)
• conversion optimisation
• advanced web analytics (segmentation, purchase/process funnels and simply using analytics to make real commercial decisions)
• testing

Analytics and Conversion Optimisation – Career Advice Too!

Towards the end of the comments you will see a request for career advice from Peter over in Australia.

Peter asked:

Hi everyone,
What advice do you have for a young professional looking to get into this field?

I’m fresh out of university and have started my career as a junior web analyst at one of Australia’s largest online publishers. I have a background in SEO/PPC, but conversion rate/landing page optimisation is something I’ve always been interested in and would like to specialise in the future.

Thank you Ashley for starting this thread and thank you to all that have posted.

I was pleased to be able to provide Peter with some advice from my 1st hand experiences in the fields of analytics, usability and conversion optimisation.

To save you a click my advice to Peter was as follows:

Hi Peter,

My advice would be to learn as much as you can hands-on in a commercial environment, and your current role certainly appears to tick this box. This is the approach I took and you can’t put a value on building expertise in this way.

You should aim to become the analytics/conversion optimisation evangelist within your organisation, continually providing key insights and presenting the business case for investing in on-going conversion improvement.

If you haven’t already I also strongly recommend you ‘get in to bed’ with testing, both A/B and multivariate. Having an understanding and appreciation of what to test and what tools are available will become invaluable for you, especially with you already having a good understanding of analytics.

Good luck with your career development in conversion improvement and optimisation, and message me if you would like some more advice.

Why Google Analytics Training?

Google Analytics is a free tool which is generally very simple to be installed on a website. There is an ever increasing number of websites using Google Analytics as their analytics tool of choice, but that isn’t to say businesses understand how to set-up Google Analytics correctly and how to get the most commercial value out of the statistics and reports available.

Google Analytics provides both basic and enterprise class features and functionality, but understanding what is available and what applies to individual businesses and users does not come easy.

This course, delivered in-house to ensure key stakeholders from the same company can benefit simultaneously, aims to help you and your business colleagues begin using Google Analytics effectively.

Objective

The course aims to provide you with the knowledge of how best to use Google Analytics on an on-going basis to gain the most valuable visitor insights and commercial value

What you will learn

• Personalisation – how to personalise your experience to enable you to access the most important areas for you in your specific role
• Goals and Funnels – how you should use these essential features to enable you to to track vital visitor behaviour and potential site issues
• Segmentation – how you can use segmentation to monitor specific visitor behaviour from highly targeted segments of your visitors
• Reporting – how you can create and manage reports most relevant to you and your business to help make genuine commercial decisions
• Marketing Activity Accountability – how you can best use Google Analytics to track all your marketing campaigns for full accountability
• Tips and Best Practice – essential tips and best practice on how to use your new found knowledge and expertise on an on-going basis

PLUS – Google Website Optimiser

An introduction to this essential tool and how you can use it to make continual improvements to your on-site conversion rates

Who is the training suitable for

• Offline Marketing Managers
• Online Marketing Managers
• Marketing Directors
• E-commerce Managers
• IT Managers
• Project Managers
• Marketing Assistants
• Business Analysts

Duration, delivery, location and cost

• Duration: 3 hours
• Delivery: training provided in-house for 1-10 employees
• Location: UK wide, and in particular Manchester and London
• Cost: £400 + vat (excludes reasonable expenses)

How to book

Easy, simply call us on 0161 918 6729

PRWD training clients

We have been privileged to train people working at the likes of Speedy Hire, The Scout Association, Mencap, Abbey, Yell and Pod1.

Further reading

• Case Study: In-house training for The Scout Association
• Econsultancy training course by Paul Rouke: E-commerce Usability and Best Practice

The point of my post is that its vital for businesses not to take a top down, one-size fits all approach when they (or their agency) are analysing site traffic and conversions.

We’ve recently started working with translation services business The Translation People to help them improve their online conversion rate. As with almost all businesses who have analytics installed, although there was no advanced traffic segmentation in place (apart from the standard paid/non-paid traffic sources and a few other) in order to get a realistic view of which visitors they should be looking to convert.

Cutting to the chase, as I describe in my Econsultancy post, by creating and applying an advanced segment which identified which visitors are likely to be good prospects, we were able to see that only 10% of all traffic where good prospects for thie business.

Testing Testing 1, 2 3

We’ve been busy working with some of our existing clients such as Contact Packaging (selling printed tape) and new clients such as The Translation People (providing document translation services) in optimising their conversion rates through analysis and testing (split and mutli-variate).

Event Speaking

Following on from my successful and rewarding presentation at the recent How Do conference in Liverpool, Rob Knight (PRWD’s lead technical architect) has spoken at an event titled Developing With Adobe AIR, which had a keynote from Adobe. Rob’s presentation was titled Business Systems With Adobe AIR and it featured the work we’ve done with a manufacturing company to deliver a user-centered designed business system for them. We have also developed a micro-site detailing our business systems and e-commerce services for manufacturers.

Case Studies

We’ve also released a couple more case studies of some of the work we have been doing and the results we’ve had, in particular on improving online sales by 400% for one of our clients and a technical case study on using Adobe AIR for business systems.

Twittering

I’ve been twittering over the past few weeks (not consistently I hasten to add!) and along the way picking up quite a few new followers, some of which I would put in the spam category. We have also been updating the PRWD twitter account although you tell its alot younger than my personal twitter account!

Featured Supplier In Econsultancy’s User Experience Buyers Guide 2009

We were delighted to be asked to feature as one of the 26 agencies who specialise in user experience and usability in Econsultancy’s annual guide on this topic. I also spent time providing feedback on a number of questions relating to the industry, and if you download the full version you will see various quotes from myself.

In the article I’ve taken a look at the following high street and pureplay retailers from a usability perspective…

The pureplay fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• ASOS
• Net-a-porter
• My Wardrobe
• The Outnet
• Koodos

The high street fashion retailers I’ve taken a look at are:

• Harvey Nichols
• Miss Selfridge
• Topshop
• Next
• New Look

The five questions I posed to each of these retailers are:

1. How seriously are they taking cross-selling and up-selling in order to encourage higher average order values?
2. Do they make standard delivery costs clear before you get into the actual checkout process?
3. Are payment options and cards accepted clear prior to checking out?
4. Have they enclosed their checkout as a way of potentially reducing checkout process abandonments?
5. Do they provide clear customer service contact details during the checkout process?

Take a look at the article and see how these retailers stack up!

If you are a fashion retailer you might also like to read about the Online Fashion 100 event on the 17th June in London, organised by Leon Bailey-Green.

Online Fashion 100, in the words of Leon Bailey-Green, is:

a collection of inspirational, interesting and influential people in the online fashion industry

Just some of the names and brands that are on the list include:

• MIRIAM LAHAGE of Koodos.com
• NATALIE MASSENET of Net-A-Porter and theOutnet.com
• ANDREW CURRAN & SARAH CURRAN of My-Wardrobe.com
• DAN WAGNER of Venda and OSOYOU.com
• NICK ROBERTSON & HASH LADHA of ASOS
• ROB JONES of Harvey Nichols
• DAVID WALMSLEY of John Lewis
• RICHARD BRASHER of Tesco
• NANCY CRUICKSHANK of http://www.videojug.com/ and TMG
• JULIA REYNOLDS of Figleaves.com

Download a pdf of the complete Online Fashion 100 rundown

It’s safe to say that the event should have a real buzz about it and I’m looking forward to meeting up with some of the Online Fashion 100 select plus other movers and shakers in the fashion retail business.

How much focus do the retailers place on a good user experience?

Following my recent usability and benchmarking article on Econsultancy I’ve published another article looking at some of the pureplay and high street fashion retailers when it comes to key areas of the online customer experience and usability best practice.

Pureplay fashion brands that feature include ASOS, my-wardrobe, Net-a-porter, Koodos and The Outnet.

High street fashion brands that feature include Harvey Nichols, Miss Selfridge, Topshop, Next and New Look.

Take a look at the article and feel free to get in touch if you would like more information.

Most recently I provided a full day of in-house training for The Scout Association. What was most interesting with this work was that they where embedding usability at the very start of their new e-commerce and ERP platform development project, rather than putting a focus on usability and customer experience at the latter end of the project, which is often the case.

In the words of E-commerce and ERP Project Manager Mark Selwyn,

In order to deliver the system within budget, my objective was to build “usability” into the design of the new web stores, using industry best practices, rather than have to rework at a later stage as a result of usability testing

E-commerce Areas Covered

The areas that I provide training on for the in-house e-commerce training are as follows:

• Homepage
• Search
• Navigation
• Category page
• Product page
• Persuasion architecture
• Cross-selling and up-selling
• Shopping basket
• Checkout process
• Web forms

Case Study For In-house Training

We have recently published a case study for the training course I delivered for The Scout Association which provides plenty of detail in the following areas:

• Background to The Scout Association
• Objectives for The Scout Association
• What I Delivered
• The Benefits and Impact for The Scout Association
• Testimonials
• Training Course Feedback Ratings

I must say I was delighted to receive the feedback that I received and its great to see how they are progressing with the project since I delivered the training course.

Are You Looking To Up-skill Your Internal Team?

If so then please give me a call and I will be delighted to provide a quote for delivering training and consultancy for you and your business. Typically one day of in-house training costs around £1000 plus expenses, and if a bespoke training course is required then planning time will also be charged. Please note prices exclude VAT @ 15%.