Does your website make you money?

How profitable is your website? When people visit the site, do they take action? Do you even know what you want them to do? Unfortunately, too many organizations fail to ask these questions, and thus fail to understand their website's ROI (return on investment). ROI is a fundamental business concept, but it's too often neglected in this specific area.

According to the book Web Design for ROI, there are 3 key figures to ponder when considering a new website project or redesign:

• 43% of retail sales will either be influenced by or complete on the Internet by 2012
• 83% of businesses now use the Internet to research potential vendors
• 75% of users admit to making judgments about a company's credibility based on the design of its website

The bottom line is that a large number of people will make business decisions based on the form and function of your website. How appealing is yours?

Even small details such as updated content and appealing visuals can make a crucial difference in keeping people on your site. Imagine a business owner who spent a lot of time, effort and money remodeling the interior of a store, but left the outside looking like an old, crumbling ruin. Customers would quickly assess the credibility of the business and pass it by.

The average home page abandonment rate (the rate at which visitors leave a site within a short period of time) is between 40% and 60% in general. Why? Because visitors decide almost immediately if they've found what they're looking for. What the site actually offers is secondary to what a customer thinks the site offers. What if a small change to the wording or placement of elements on your homepage reduced the abandonment rate by just 10%?

E-Commerce ROI

Nowhere is ROI more critical than on websites that directly sell a product or service. Unfortunately, some studies show that 60% of customers drop their purchase during the checkout process -- after they've made a buying decision! Imagine a restaurant where 6 out of every 10 customers ordered lunch and left before it was served. Any rational business owner would consider this unacceptable.

E-commerce site owners should constantly monitor the usability of their systems. Does the checkout process makes sense? Is it simple and free of distractions? Think about it... before you lose another customer.

Converting Traffic Into Sales

More traffic does not automatically mean more sales. If the website does not effectively convert customers into sales then the traffic is not useful. Keeping visitors on the site long enough to perform a critical task is what counts. The longer the visitor stays and learns what he/she needs, the more likely he/she is to convert.

How do you track conversion rates? Measure actions -- filling out a form, requesting a free sample, ordering a product, or contacting you. Track your conversion rate on a daily basis and see if you can improve the numbers. A simple formula would be the number of people who completed the desired action divided by the total number of visitors. You can even set up Google Analytics to do this automatically and email regular reports to you.

For a consultation on website ROI, please contact us a support (at) cws (dot) net.

RapidNewsletter Gets New Features

This morning we pushed out some enhancements and fixes to our RapidNewsletter service. In case you haven't heard, RapidNewsletter is our full-circle email marketing solution. It allows you to effectively reach those who matter the most to your business -- your customers. Research has shown that a quality email newsletter can be one of the most effective ways to maintain customer relationships.

With RapidNewsletter, you can design and execute an email marketing campaign from beginning to end -- build and edit email lists, create newsletters with articles and images, run detailed tracking reports, and much more! We designed RapidNewsletter to drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, solidify customer retention, and strengthen customer relations.

Here are the changes we released today:

Better management of the address groups within your mailing list. When adding new addresses or editing existing ones, it's much easier to designate which groups the subscriber belongs to.

Any subscriber can now be marked to receive "Text Only" messages. Most RapidNewsletter mailings are sent in HTML (for formatted text and images), but for a variety of reasons, people prefer to receive all their email in plain text. For a long time, you've been able to send a RapidNewsletter mailing in text instead of HTML, but now you can manage this preference on a user-by-user basis as well.

New ways to edit the content of existing newsletters. It's much faster to make changes to your existing mailings. You can reorder articles by dragging and dropping, and click titles to edit in place. It's also easier now to remove an image from an article after you've loaded it.

Improved statistics displays. For large mailings, the statistics tables could get unwieldy. We've added paging and better handling of long URLs to make these charts easier to read.

You'll see these improvements immediately the next time you log into your account. If you haven't tried RapidNewsletter yet, now is the perfect time to set up a free account and give it a try! We're working on a number of other new features that you can expect to see in the near future as well. If you have any suggestions on features, improvements, or enhancements to RapidNewsletter be sure to let us know.

A little D.I.Y. SEO

A recent marketing research study lists SEO as the tool with the second highest return on investment, just behind an in-house mailing list. So putting in even a little elbow grease can go a long way towards improving your online marketing plan. Here are a few quick and easy SEO tips that you can use to get better results from your website.

1. Find the right keywords for your website. Pick a small list of words that are relevant to your business. If your market is a local one, include the town and state. In particular, think about the words that people would normally type into search engines to find a business like yours. Pick a few of these phrases and include them throughout your website.

2. Put the keyword or phrase in your page title. Don't put just a list of keywords as your webpage title. Combine your search phrases and business in a way that makes sense. For example: "Plumber Business - fixing and repairing your plumbing in Rochester, MN" Keep it short and make it descriptive.

3. Put the keywords in your meta tags. Web pages generally have extra information (metadata) in their headers that's intended to describe the page contents to other software, like search engines. If you have the ability to edit this area of site, updating this content is a must. Keep this short as well. Focus on your main keywords.

4. When updating any page on your site, think about including keywords. Always make the text readable for human beings first, but when you can do so naturally, include a keyword or search phrase. This will help communicate to search engines that the page is really relevant to those specific topics.

Remember that you must give search engines time to find your site and pick up changes when you make them. It may take a while, but each change can help boost your ranking little by little. These are just a few simple ways to help improve your online marketing. If you're interested in learning more about your website's ranking with search engines, let us know.

From Garage Business to Household Name in 5 Years

You probably use it every day, but did you know Google is now a word in the dictionary? How can a search engine be so popular that it influences how nearly all businesses market themselves on the Internet? Google's secret was the development of a unique algorithm to not just index the contents of a page, but to help ensure that you get the most relevant results for a particular search. From this starting point, Google has evolved to become a household name and sets the standard for all search engines.

Google was started by Larry Sage and Sergey Brin in 1996. Initially named "Back rub," their search engine started to gain popularity on the Stanford University campus. In 1998, the founder of Sun Microsystems gave the two a check for $100,000 after a quick demo. Sage and Brin leased office space in a friend's garage and started Google.com. 1999 brought dramatic change and growth to Google as the company moved twice and got bigger.

By 2000, 18 million user queries every day were being answered by Google. By 2002, Google had expanded to advertising, search appliances, Google News and Froogle. In 2004, Google had indexed 6 billion items (plus 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages). Google has continued to grow and expand its technology, now offering PDFs of public domain books for download, for example.

Google has made vast amounts of data accessible to the public, such as: years of historical film footage, U.S. Patents, Maps (Earth, Moon and Mars), pictures, video, music, and of course their staple: websites. Google ranks in the top 3 sites for internet traffic, so most internet marketers give serious thought to how Google will see their site.

Google is a big part of the Internet. The public uses it to search, and companies use Google to advertise, or to analyse the competition. Optimizing a site for Google to help your company show up higher in search results can have a big impact on your bottom line, and the effect can carry over to other search engines as well. This has become a fact of life in the web development industry and will continue to be so in the future.

Search Engine Optimization - SEO

Have you ever wondered how, when you search for something on Google or Yahoo!, that some websites are listed above others? Search engines list the results by examing their databases of website content to find the sites they consider most relevant to the search term. There are ways to help a website move up the list for a particular term, and that is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play.

Websites can use many different methods to get a search engine to notice them and list them higher. As more site administrators are becoming aware of this, of course, it is getting harder for a site to move up. It takes research and effort to get results.

Corporate Web Services (CWS) has a new program that allows our team to do this kind of research more quickly and make improvements. When using search engines, many people never go past the second page of results. With this new program, CWS can review a current website, advise and make changes to help a site stay high on the list and reach those crucial first two pages of results.

A second factor that influences the ranking of search engines results is the way that other websites links to yours. By analyzing how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about (by comparing its content to the context of the original page) and how "important" the page is (if many other popular pages link to it) -- and thus deserving of a boost in ranking.

SEO can help get your website noticed -- by ensuring the site is relevant to your subject, includes key phrases, and is connected to related sites. There many other factors that can help your site's ranking; these are only a few. Contact us today for a detailed consultation.

CVB Wins Award for CD Produced by CWS

One of our clients - the Rochester Convention & Visitors Bureau - recently received a Travel Marketing Award of Merit from Explore Minnesota Tourism at their annual conference. The award was given to the RCVB for a series of multimedia CD presentations which are produced by CWS and customized for conventions, sporting events, and other bids. Each custom disc typically features a personal introduction by Rochester Mayor Ardell Brede, often with a bit of offbeat humor and highlights of all that Rochester has to offer.

Travel Marketing Awards are given annually to note creative, successful tourism marketing programs by Minnesota communities. The RCVB entered the multimedia disc as an example of an electronic marketing tool that goes "above and beyond" typical sales presentations.

The CD gives meeting planners a sense of connection with the Rochester community, especially with the guided tour from Mayor Brede. Custom discs have been produced for 13 amateur sports organizations and meeting planners, in addition to a general purpose disc that is used for other presentations. In many cases, the CDs are also left with events attendees to boost participation and with travel writers requesting information.

These multimedia CDs have generated six confirmed pieces of new business for the city of Rochester, representing 13,450 visitors, 16,850 hotel rooms and an economic impact of more than $3.8 million. Two additional bids are still under consideration.

CWS is proud to work with the CVB and other organizations to promote the great city of Rochester!

Top 5 Super Bowl Ads (of all time)

It's that time of year where advertisers shell out $85,000 per second for an advertisement during the Super Bowl. Many experts now agree that this hefty price tag makes it hard to achieve any sort of return on your investment. Nevertheless, millions are eager to see new advertisements produced by companies with huge advertising budgets.

So we have to ask, "Which SuperBowl ads have secured their place in history as memorable classics"? Do you remember these 5 ads?

5. Apple "1984" (1984)

A jogger representing Apple throws a sledgehammer into a giant Big Brother image representing IBM - promising a populist shift in the future of personal computers.


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What worked: With "Blade Runner" director Ridley Scott in charge, the ad generated more hype - and post-game water cooler talk - than any television commercial in history. Do you even remember who played in the Super Bowl in 1984? (L.A. Raiders and Washington.) You almost certainly remember the biggest Super Bowl ad of the year.

The results: The most storied Super Bowl ad of all time might have boosted sales of George Orwell books, hot red running shorts and sledgehammers. But it didn't do much for the Macintosh - Apple continues to be the Reform Party of computer manufacturers. Maybe there was a storage locker filled with iPods behind that huge video screen?

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4. Monster.com- When I grow up (1999)


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A group of kids stare at the camera and declare their desire to "have a brown nose," "be a yes man" and "claw my way up to middle management."

What worked: Kids are cute, and even cuter when reciting lines such as, "When I grow up... I want to be forced into early retirement." It was great brand recognition for the new company.

The results: Monster survived the dot-com implosion and despite a stock controversy in 2006 has become a prosperous company that employs close to 5,000 people worldwide.

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3. Terry Tate- Office Linebacker (2003)


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To boost productivity, a CEO recruits a linebacker from Reebok to slam into a series of "Office Space"-style cubicle drones.

What worked: A series of brutal hits, punctuated by lines such as, "Break was over 15 minutes ago, Mitch!" made this the best Super Bowl ad of the last five years.

The results: Terry Tate got people talking about Reebok for something other than sweatshop controversies. The company provides shoes for all the major sports and hosts clothing lines for rappers Jay-Z and 50 Cent.

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2. McDonald's "The Showdown" (1993)

Michael Jordan and Larry Bird engage in a physics-defying hoops-shooting contest for a Big Mac and fries.


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What worked: Every basketball fan knows that Bird would win this contest 10 out of 10 times, but it was still a clever idea with a catchphrase that continues to pop up in "Horse" games. ("Over the second rafter, off the floor... nothing but net.")

The results: This commercial seems to have blessed everyone involved. Jordan won three more championships and Bird transitioned into a solid career as a coach. And while salads and chicken products have been killing off the rest of the menu, the cholesterol-heavy Big Mac value meal remains an untouchable fast-food staple.

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1. Budweiser "Frogs" (1995)

Three frogs, perched on a log outside a bar, croaking, "Bud... Weis... Errrrrr."


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What worked: The fact that Budweiser milks every commercial concept to death - does anyone doubt there will be a "Magic Fridge 2" this year? - makes it easy to forget how cool this ad was when you first heard it. The buildup was great, with an oddly infectious catchphrase.

The results: For better or worse, the frog ads and the spin-off lizard commercials made Budweiser, which was starting to become an old-guy drink, cool again for younger partiers.

There are many more that could have made this list and also deserve recognition. For example, do you remember the E-Trade Monkey from 1999? What are you favorite all-time ads?

3 Tips for Viral Marketing

You may have noticed that we received a large quantity of comments on the "Digg Hooligans Take Over Website" post earlier this week. This was the result of the article being "Dugg" by thousands of users on digg.com. Our story hit the digg.com homepage just after 11pm on Monday. This lead to over 2400 visitors in a matter of hours.


This was all made possible through "Viral Marketing".

Viral marketing is based on the idea that if someone finds something interesting, they are likely to pass it on to their friends. Sometimes what is being passed does not appear to be advertising at all. In this case, as users "dugg" the story they were in fact telling others that they should read it too.

Viral marketing gets its name from its similarity to a virus. The point of viral marketing is to "infect" one person with your marketing idea, who will then spread the news to someone else, thereby "infecting" them.

The earliest use of viral marketing is usually attributed to Hotmail, a web based email provider. When Hotmail was first starting out, they would attach advertising to the bottom of emails that were sent from their users. The idea was to have people sign up for Hotmail because they got the message from their friends.

Viral marketing is very successful because it works to create a buzz about the product and then subtly encourages people to tell someone else. Because of this, the advertising doesn't have to reach the secondary user directly. The person initially "infected" by the viral marketing can "infect" many others with no additional work required on the part of the advertisers.

As an email user, you have probably contributed to viral marketing campaigns without even realizing it. Remember that interactive game or funny video that you forwarded to all of your friends? Most likely, somewhere within the "message" was a link or logo of the company who created it. When you passed the video on, you gave them free publicity and brand recognition.

"This is cool... I want some viral marketing traffic", you say.

No problem... here are three very important tips to get you started with your own viral marketing campaign:

1. Make people feel something
The most important thing is to create a very strong emotion. You need to have an opinion and express an idea with commitment and dedication. You want people to:

• be filled with love or hate.

• be very happy or insanely angry

• be an idiot or a genius
  

You want people's blood to be pumping of excitement. Viral marketing is 100% about emotions. Your story must spark an emotion or it will never catch on.

2. Forget about you, your product or your company.

Focus exclusively in creating a good and interesting story. Sure, you can add your product into the mix, but it must not be the most important thing. Nobody cares about you, viral marketing is all about a good story.

3. Make it easy to share.

The whole purpose is for others to share your story, so make it easy. Everything you do to make sharing easier is going to improve your chances of success. That means that you need allow people to easily play your file, send it to friends, link to you, etc.