I got an email the other day that shocked me.  In retrospect it shouldn’t have but when I first read the subject line I was a little taken aback: “Have we lost your interest?” That in and of itself isn’t all that unnerving, but the first line of copy in the body was: “We have noticed that you have not opened any of our email offers in the past 3 months and were wondering what we can do to keep you interested in our offerings.”

I don’t say this to alarm you but I’d like to remind you of one simple fact.  No matter how good you are at hiding your tracks, when it comes to being online… You Are Being Watched.

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The most common question I get from clients new to site optimization is one that’s taken a while to clearly articulate. It’s easy to visualize and provide examples of different types of experiments and it may even be easy to point out the difference between the two types, but how do you express this in words for a coworker or boss that has finally understood that going off a gut instinct just won’t work anymore?

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We recently participated on a panel at an excellent MITX event focused on getting relevant website content to your audiences.  I think we could have spent the entire day on the topic and the speakers were very knowledgeable and passionate which always makes for a good seminar.

I hoped the audience would be able to take away a tangible list of action items and at least a starting point for thinking about content personalization.  So I thought I would jot those down here for everyone.  While some folks may be well beyond the basics, I still believe these principals work for everyone.

1) Define your audience segments (understand what their intent is and what message/interaction works best).

2) Create content, imagery, messaging, branding (i.e., overall user experience) per segment.  Don’t get too granular to begin with as your website is a marathon not a sprint.  If you start too granular, you have significant risk of missing the target completely.

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As more and more M&A activity continues to hit the content management and analytics industries it is obvious industry consolidation is amongst us and gaining steam.

CMS M&A

Over the past year we have seen content management providers like Red Dot, Vignette, XY and Interwoven find new owners. And now we see Adobe make a big leap in the analytics space with its acquisition of Omniture. Just like the Carpenters sang, something tells me we’ve only just begun…or have we?

Content Management and Analytics are two very vibrant technologies. Together they are growing and have a profound impact on the future of online marketing, communications and commerce.

There are a ton of CMS and Analytics packages on the market. Will there be more M&A activity in the next 12 months as serious long-term providers seek to gain market share?

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Website Analysis is generally completed by people with fancy titles like: “Senior Interactive Account Strategist” or “Interactive Business Consultant.” They spend hours – even weeks – looking at a website’s analytics software, providing 50-slide PowerPoints talking about “user behavior path analysis” and “referrer segmentation.”

This is all good and well – but not all that worthwhile if you can’t understand the analysis or act on the recommended strategy. Ultimately, analyzing your Website can be a fairly straightforward exercise. Here’s how.

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We recently hosted a webinar on the topic of The Top Ten Benefits of Integrated Analytics and I was amazed and excited to see the number of questions coming in that showed people’s enthusiasm and embracing of this method.  We didn’t get a chance to answer all of the questions, so I thought I would provide some more details here.

Everyone wants better conversion and an improved ROI.  If I had a nickel every time someone promised that I would be off to a tropical island somewhere.   The promise is out there, but the problem is how do you get it in the most economical way (features, time and cost). Those three concepts are VERY important so keep them in mind.

Think about the barriers you may have experienced to successfully driving persuasive content or conversions to your call to actions (e.g., make a purchase or submit contact info).  I have heard everything from “we employ two full-time people to manage our analytics and I still don’t know what to do with it” to “can’t the system just do this for me” to “I don’t want to do this because it takes my IT department forever and costs an arm and a leg”.  Sound familiar?

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