Most people are pretty good at communicating their opinions on features. They can share why they do or don’t like an abstract painting or the design of a website for instance, but multiple studies have shown that those explanations are almost completely fictional.

Gut feelings are locked away in a part of the brain that doesn’t have access to language and most attempts to justify or explain them only result in a story spun for ourselves or others to believe.

Plan for success

This presents an obvious problem when optimizing a website: guidance and feedback can be difficult to provide or receive without resorting to opinion, making it very difficult not only to determine the success of a project, but also to plot a course for success in the first place.

By outlining a series of website goals to build on rather than a list of things to build, it’s much easier to determine whether or not an idea will contribute to a project’s success.

How many times have you scheduled a visit to the doctor armed with a well intentioned list of suggestions to solve your problem based on a bit of Googling? That’s not much different than trying to optimize your website and coming in the door with a list of features; in both cases the expert is being asked to fill a prescription without a full understanding of the problem.

Unfortunately, most projects that begin with this foundation don’t end with a sustainable, measurable outcome that justifies the investment required to create them.

Moving from what to why

After years of experiencing various sides of this arrangement, we’ve shifted our approach from planning the “what” to understanding the “why”, from the features of a project to the website goals behind it.

We’ve found that by first outlining a series of website goals to build on rather than a list of features to build, it is much easier to determine whether or not an idea will contribute to a project’s success.

Outline a series of website goals to build on rather than a list of features to build.
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When a feature has to support a business or behavioral goal in order to make the cut, the inevitably varying opinions guiding a project are also forced to align behind a common standard of qualification.

This makes actively seeking the simplest and most intuitive solutions to the problems we’re being hired to solve a much clearer process, and though it eventually results in a list of components to build, both we and our client can be confident that we’re on the right track.

Another strength offered by shifting from features to goals is the ability to intelligently iterate and optimize an existing website.

Website Launch vs Iteration

While many website projects end with a “post mortem” phase where everyone considers what went well or could have gone better, the last thing we’d call the launch of any digital project would be its death.

Unlike a magazine or poster, digital work can be measured and adapted for the better after it’s launched based on real data.

Even after establishing website goals and building only the features that support them, the launch of a website is still essentially a best guess at what will succeed.

If proper care is taken to set the right website goals and build around them, the launch of a project is the first opportunity to take actual usage data and further align the features behind the goals.

For instance, if users are frequently searching for a certain type of content, that’s an opportunity to address the site’s content structure. If a certain product or workflow isn’t converting to sales, there’s an opportunity to run some A/B tests to increase conversions.

Figuring any of that out and making the necessary changes requires a solid foundation of clear goals at the outset and follow through after launch. This may seem like common sense, but it’s not so common in the web design and marketing industry.

It’s time for that to change.

The post Why Website Goals Are Key To Effective Growth appeared first on The Good.

A great ecommerce site actually provides retailer partners with a lot of support. For example, if the site has a great user experience and helpful content, it’s a positive touchpoint in the multi-screen research process most consumers go through before making a purchase.

There are some things, however, that brands do with ecommerce that can frustrate relationships with retail partners. Here are our top seven:

1. Selling below MSRP
2. Not providing a store locator
3. Making a site that works for the brand, not the customer
4. Not coordinating promotions with retailers
5. Only selling a select portion of available products
6. Not offering replacement parts online
7. Not providing online retailers with marketing support beyond an AdWords budget

If ecommerce brands aren’t supporting their retailers by sending ready buyers into their stores, they’re missing a huge opportunity to boost sales across the board.

1. Selling below MSRP

The highest margin sale a brand can make is direct to consumer through their website. If a brand offers competitive pricing on their site along with other incentives, the (perceived) likelihood they’ll cut into their partner sales goes way up.

For the benefit of their retail partners, ecommerce brands can afford to close fewer sales online by sticking to MSRP pricing for current season and marquee products.

2. Not providing a store locator

Consumer brand sites see about a 40% conversion rate for their online store locators. If a customer searches for a brand, the dot com will typically be the top result.

When they’re looking for a place to buy that brand’s products, it is critical that task can be completed from the brand site.

If ecommerce brands aren’t supporting their retailers by sending ready buyers into their stores, they’re missing a huge opportunity to boost sales across the board.

3. Making a site that works for the company not the customer

Too many brand sites feature content that is focused on the company rather than the products (the history, the founders, the brand story, etc.) While it may seem like this focus keeps the site from competing with retailers, it is actually just hurting everyone.

Customers are looking to the brand site for detailed and helpful product information, and if ecommerce brands are too busy talking about themselves, nobody wins.

4. Not coordinating promotions with retailers

There’s a huge opportunity for ecommerce brands and retailers to offer the same discounts rather than competing with each other. If a brand is offering a new product at a 10% discount online, they can work with retail partners to offer the same (or an increased) discount for in store pickup.

Retailers could offer exclusive online coupons to their customers, and receive a portion of the sale. The opportunities are endless, and few companies are coordinating efforts in this way.

This is also a great use case for retailer promotion coordination. Offering retailers a discount coupon for their customers and a kickback for the referral to an online sale.

5. Only selling a select portion of available products

Retailers feature the most current season of products, with last season’s are available on clearance. Customers aren’t always looking for the most current version of something, and may even be seeking products or parts that are difficult to track down at a retail location nearby. This provides an opportunity for ecommerce brands to support both retailers and customers by offering their complete product catalog and replacement parts for sale online.

6. Not offering replacement parts online

Another key way that ecommerce brands support their customers and their retailers is by offering an expanded catalog of service and support for their products. When replacement parts or extended warranties are available for purchase directly from the brand site it makes life easier on customers and retailers. This is also a great opportunity to point customers toward updated versions of a product or product line.

7. Not providing online retailers with marketing support beyond an AdWords budget

There are many ways a brand can support their online retail partners beyond marketing co-op dollars for cost per click campaigns, unfortunately most ecommerce brands don’t pursue them. It is up to those brands to provide their partners with high quality product images and videos for use in the partner’s marketing efforts.

Offering unique product descriptions (not the same ones found on the brand site or in the print catalog) would maintain better control of the customer experience while increasing SEO for all parties.

Overcoming retailer fears about direct sales competition with the brand starts with the willingness to acknowledge and then fix those things that are unnecessarily frustrating the relationship.

Following up with coordination and communication will enable retail to partners start to realize what a huge support component and ecommerce site truly can be — for both of you.

The post 7 Simple Ways Ecommerce Brands Can Frustrate Retailers appeared first on The Good.

The same principles required of an app designer to create successful mobile apps apply to designing websites that convert. Unfortunately for everyone, most websites don’t leverage those principles.

The principles behind successful mobile apps apply to designing websites that convert.
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Mobile apps are designed intentionally to help people accomplish a few specific things. Ecommerce sites should be designed to help people research, purchase, and get support on products from a brand. Lead generation sites should be designed to provide so much value to a potential lead that they become one.

An app designer asks, “who is it for?”

Since the only real way to increase your conversion rate is to increase the number of people who find your site relevant to what they are trying to do, it makes sense to align around those people and their goals.

Understanding who your customers are and what is important to them is step one. You can read all about how to pull that off in our book Stop Marketing, Start Selling. From there, your only task is to ensure your website and its content are designed to help your customers get what they came for.

Great apps are great at doing one thing well

Whatever goal an app is designed to accomplish, it is intentionally designed around the associated tasks required to accomplish that goal. Its success can be judged objectively. While it’s fine to win design awards and have people impressed with how cool your site looks, it’s way better to have a growing list of happy customers (and the revenue they bring) because your site helps them with their goals.

Content is prioritized by use, and grouped by task

If you open the Amazon app, you’ll see exactly what you are looking for: the search box. Next to it are two more ways to search (scan a barcode, speak to it). They have one promotion of their own, and the rest is personalized based on my past behavior.

The key thing to note here is Amazon is massive, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like it will be really easy to find whatever I’m looking for. All the stuff I don’t need to see is neatly tucked away somewhere intuitive (for example, in case I decide I’d like to browse by department, there’s a menu for that). They don’t cater to every edge case, they cater to the most important goal. Everything else is personalization.

The brand experience is woven into every interaction

There aren’t many apps I’d keep using if I had to navigate through endless rotating image banners and email capture popups. Unfortunately, that’s many websites. Let’s learn from an app designer and stop all that nonsense.

The experience your customer has with your brand is your brand experience. It isn’t necessary to separate the two into “brand storytelling” and “customer experience”.

Recognize that every touchpoint a customer interacts with your brand through is telling them the story of how much you care about them as a customer. If your site sucks, your brand sucks.

Success is determined by how useful it is

Good app designers track usage of the features they create. They remove the ones that people aren’t using. They increase the ease of use on everything else. They spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep people coming back. Their success is judged on their ability to do these things.

If your website was an app, you’d hide the content and functionality people didn’t need. It would be designed from the start with people in mind. It would be judged on its ability to keep people coming back because they get so much value from it.

Take the time to simplify your site content and intentionally design every interaction.
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Take the time to simplify your site content and intentionally design every interaction to help your visitors accomplish their goals, and they’ll keep coming back.

The post How Thinking Like An App Designer Can Boost Conversions appeared first on The Good.

That sounds like a goal, right? It is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Strategies and tactics could be tested to achieve it. The only problem is it is pointless. There is no quantifiable value to the business if it is achieved.

Goals like these (including Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and other near meaningless ecommerce goal metrics) are extremely common in the world of ecommerce. Often they are either handed down from a brand’s marketing management, or chosen because they’re easy to track and appear important. This is completely backward.

Brands that truly want to increase online revenue and help their customers easily research and purchase products from the brand site must consider the following:

Don’t Get Stuck Watching Your Conversion Rate

It’s true, what gets measured gets improved. But if your goal is to grow ecommerce sales, improving conversions means measuring the right things.

The easiest metrics to grab from Google Analytics are not always the most helpful. Even conversion rate is too simplistic (and often misleading) a measure to be useful. It is too far down the chain of customer-driven events to indicate how to improve it.

For example, let’s say your conversion rate went up from 0.9% to 1.2% – that’s great! Why did it go up? Did you change something? Were you testing a new product detail page layout or navigation structure? Is it currently the holiday season?

Instead of focusing on the end result like conversion rate and page views, track and assess the causes for those increases. Looking at lagging indicators like the conversion rate will only continue to set up roadblocks to success rather than smoothing road to increased revenue.

From Roadblocks to Speedbumps

Removing the roadblocks in your site requires a willingness to put down the brand story flag for a minute and focus on the actual experience your customers are having while they experience your brand.

Seriously, take five minutes and force yourself to watch what it’s like for someone to use your site. There’s a good chance the roadblocks will be glaringly obvious (and perhaps make that new microsite seem less important).

Driving more traffic to a site that is inadvertently set up to slow customers down in the name of branding isn’t an efficient way to spend your digital budget. Once you’ve addressed all the major roadblocks preventing your customers from easily making a confident purchase on your site, you can focus on the speed bumps like dialing in a landing page, and A/B testing your way to the best call to action for an email sign up form.

Focus on 98%

Conventional wisdom states that the holy grail of conversion rates is one north of 2%, but even a site with a 2% conversion rate has a 98% failure rate. Is that acceptable?

While working towards a 2% conversion rate may seem like a better goal than achieving 50,000 page views this month, don’t lose focus on the 98% failure rate occurring, in real time, on your site. That 2% conversion panacea is actually a lagging indicator.

Focusing on the leading indicators (user flows, drop off rates, etc.) is where the real opportunities lie for brands that want to turn an unacceptable failure rate into unprecedented opportunities.

The post 50k Pageviews and Other Misguided Ecommerce Goals appeared first on The Good.

Unfortunately, the customer service department is usually overlooked when it comes to discovering areas to improve on the website or in a company’s online content.

Customer service is usually overlooked when it comes to discovering areas to improve on the website.
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So where do you start? It begins with asking the right questions of your customer service staff in order to pinpoint the most problematic areas.

We’ve developed nine simple interview questions that you can ask your customer service team to learn more about your customer experience.

From customer service to customer experience

The goal in interviewing customer service staff is to understand the most common issues, complaints, problems, hassles, and struggles that they have listened to customers talk about with your brand and website. Their insights into customer pain points can direct your focus toward improvements that can produce immediate positive results.

[x_icon type=”external-link” icon_color=”hsl(203, 97%, 38%)” bg_color=”” icon_size=”” bg_size=”” bg_border_radius=””] Resource: Score your site to discover growth opportunities.

Start your interview by simply asking your customer service staff to describe a typical day for them, including the most common issues they help resolve for customers. In almost every interview of a customer service team we have conducted, new and unexpected areas of pain have been exposed and old issues that continue to plague customers have resurfaced.

Here is a foundational interview script of questions for your customer service staff:

1. Can you [customer service staff] walk me [interviewer] through a typical day for you?
2. What are the most common requests or issues that you get?
   • Can you break down the requests by volume?
   • Per product?
   • Per content type?
   • What are the main categories you would put customer service requests into?
   • What are the most common questions or complaints you get about the website?
   • Can you think of a time when individuals had trouble using the site or could not find what they were looking for?
3. What are the biggest challenges customers face when buying online?
4. If you could change the website to help make your job easier, what would you change?
5. Have people called after visiting the site being unable to find answers to their questions?
6. Do people ever say “I wish you guys / the website would ___”?
7. Do you have a customer-service-specific “guiding star” that you follow?
8. What are some of the ways that you explain product features to customers?
9. What does _____ as a brand mean to you? What is your company all about?

Customer service interviews, which can be very informal, should become a regular part of the ongoing maintenance of your site. We call this opening the customer service feedback loop.

Opening the customer service feedback loop to improve customer experience

To open the customer service feedback loop, initiate a dialogue between your brand’s customer service and sales and marketing departments with a call log. Set up a Google Form or some other simple data capture tool so your customer service team can log a portion of their call data.

The call log should be very simple to complete (radio buttons, dropdowns with preconfigured options, etc.), capturing the following information from each caller to customer service:

• Customer segment
• Product categories of interest
• Key issues prompting customer to call for help (purchasing, product info, sizing, warranty, return, shipment tracking, account log in, team purchase, etc.)
• Open text box to summarize key issues and any related notes

We have found that this simple tool is responsible for some of the most dramatic improvements in customer experience and the content of brand sites.

Some of the most common digital failures reported on call logs include:

• Technical jargon disguised as marketing copy
• Confusion caused by email failures
• Lack of useful sizing and fitting tools
• Complicated account registration or login requirements
• Poor warranty, replacement parts, and shipment tracking information

Applying the customer service feedback loop

The list of customer experience issues you and your customer service team uncover may look daunting, but do not panic. It’s important to organize the issues you find into natural groups so you can handle related issues together. Prioritize your roadmap for making site changes based on your data and start with the top 20% of your commonly reported issues list. There will always be outliers that may require a large investment but the majority of changes that you will find will be relatively simple user interface matters and site content updates.

Once you’ve initially used these nine questions to discover where your customer experience is today, don’t stop. If you allow these questions to become part of a regular check-in with your customer service team, it will allow you to continually be improving your customer experience. This will not only help your customer service team and your customers, but your brand as well.

To discover other ways to improve your customer experience, score your site. It can help you quickly find out where your consumers are getting stuck along the customer journey for your website.

The post 9 Great Questions that Will Improve Your Customer Experience appeared first on The Good.

If your website can help people do what they already want to do, they will convert. If it does anything else, they will leave.

The problem with cleverness

It is tempting to try and design interactions that will persuade someone to do something. With a lot of time and effort invested, you may even convince yourself that it’s working. But when an average of 98% of all visitors leave without converting, it’s easy to get stuck thinking that what is required is more convincing content and more persuasive interactions. Essentially, a better mousetrap.

The problem is, you’re not trying to catch mice (or mouse clicks), you shouldn’t even be trying to catch people’s attention because once a person is on your site, you have their attention.

Anything on your site that doesn’t align with a person’s original intent for visiting the site only distracts from that intent, often causing them to forget why they bothered to visit and leave.

“If someone comes to your site through an entertainment portal, what right do you have to try to switch them into commerce mode? Same goes for research, you’d be crazy to shove an athlete video in front of them and lose the sale.”

—Chris Harges, Director of Global Marketing at Mountain Hardwear

You are not very convincing

It is easy to imagine that through some combination of sheer marketing genius and A/B testing, you can convince someone you don’t know to do something that you want them to do. In reality you can only do the opposite: help someone who you understand to get what they already want.

The only productive use of time for anyone involved in improving a website’s user experience, content, technology, and conversion rate, is to understand what people are already trying to do, and make those things as simple as possible to do.

“Understand what people are already trying to do, and make those things as simple as possible to do”

The key to your success is theirs

Rethinking who your website is for is the first step to improving conversion. Design the features, content, and interactions in a way that helps customers do what they came to the site to do.

The only way to make your website successful is to make the people who visit your website successful (at doing something they already want to do). Stop trying to convert your visitors, and start trying to understand what they’re visiting your site to accomplish. Help them accomplish their goal or task and your conversion rates will rise on their own.

The post What Does Your Audience Already Want? appeared first on The Good.

For every bounce, page view, and conversion there is a person completing those actions. Often, in the course of a busy day/week/season, it’s easy to forget that when a bounce rate increases or conversion slips, your company’s website is failing a real person.

The numbers in analytics are a lagging indicator of how well your site is helping people get what they want. Instead of getting stuck reporting on numbers, start reporting on customers and how well your website serves them.

It is hard to empathize with a number. Many decisions made about websites are based solely on the analysis of numbers. This is a mistake. If you realize that those numbers represent people (and potential customers) that understanding paves the way to really improve any key performance indicator. By judging the success of your site on how well it helps your customers get what they want, you can work in a way that leads to sustainable revenue growth.

Using empathy to drive sales begins with personal experience and customer service. You can’t get that by looking at numbers. To get there, you’ll have to actually empathize with the customer experience you’re providing through your brand site.

Create a personal experience

When you check out at a retail store, a cashier typically asks if you found everything you were looking for. That doesn’t happen online. That personal connection is missing, and it is hard to replicate. To close this gap, we need a way to see our customers for who they are—people who are trying to do something important to them on our websites.

To begin creating a more personal experience on your site, focus on how you can help one person do something on your site. It’s a lot easier to think about helping one person find what they’re looking for than helping ten thousand. By focusing on only one person, it’s easier to see where sites fail, succeed, or just cruises along.

Improve your customer service

The experience you create for your customers is equivalent to the level of service you offer them. A customer will rate your site’s experience as good, neutral, or bad. By empathizing with the customer’s experience on your site, you’ll have a much more complete picture of how your site is performing than your site stats could ever provide. This change in mindset paves the way for better sites, improved customer experience, and increased brand revenues.

Customer service is a process that extends beyond someone answering calls from upset customers. It is a mindset. Serve your customers by thinking about them as people who are visiting your site with some goal in mind, and help them accomplish it. Stop thinking of your site as a project on a 2-3 year redesign cycle, and to start thinking of your site as a platform for customer service. The site is a way to connect with your customers by understanding and empathizing with them. That empathy is an ongoing process that leads to revenue growth by finding new ways to improve your site to better serve your customers.

Getting help

To help our clients make this shift, we’ve designed the Conversion Growth Program. It is an ongoing and iterative program that is focused on aligning your customer’s experience and expectations with your brand, and continuing to raise the bar from that baseline.

The post Get Personal: How Empathy Drives Sales appeared first on The Good.

Brand websites are often redesigned every few years as a digital facelift for the brand, rather than as a means of capitalizing on customer-driven learnings.

While visual design upgrades to a site are fine, too many brands count on a redesign to deliver strong sales increases, the usual result is only a nicer looking site.

Every time a redesign happens, an opportunity is lost. The lost opportunity to carry forward the lessons of the past, and improve on them for a better future.

Instead of relying on the blind faith of an expensive redesign to deliver revenues from heaven, use small design changes that test hypotheses to arrive at an improved site that delivers for customers and your bottom line.

Redesign, re-platform, repeat

The redesign, re-platform merry-go-round often leaves the customer experience behind, but no matter how many times the front end look of a site is updated, or the back end technology is upgraded, the customer experience won’t improve unless they’re involved in the process.

So how do you involve your customer in this process?

Your customers (should) have no idea what platform your site runs on. But the platform your site runs on may impact the experience they have while on your site. If you run on a legacy platform that requires seven layers of development just to add a new image, video, or text, your platform is killing your chances of improving and providing a great customer experience.

Implementing a SaaS solution will eliminate these layers of dysfunction and provide an always up-to-date experience. SaaS ecommerce platforms also have the added benefit of making site content changes easy to implement. These changes are key to keeping your customers involved in the process.

When it comes to visual redesign, keeping your customer in mind is critical since they are the primary user and supporter of the website. Sadly this typically isn’t the case.

The usual redesign follows a familiar lifecycle—everyone at the brand loves the new redesign, they slowly grow apathetic, and finally criticize it to the point where another redesign seems like the only option.

Nowhere in this lifecycle is customer input or data influential or considered. Does this site that everyone at the brand now hates work? Are there elements, pages, or content that convert? What lessons can be learned from the existing (now loathed) site that can be carried forward or implemented site-wide to improve the experience for the customer?

In both phases (redesign and re-platform), there is a finality to the process. It begins with “We Love It!” and degrades to “Our Site Sucks!” This degradation does not create great sites, it creates business for web design and marketing agencies.

If the redesign, re-platform process had involved customers the whole time and adopted a mindset of constant evolution and iteration, the site that is now loathed could have been a site that is still loved (and consistently earning more revenue).

What is the goal?

The ultimate potential for a brand’s website, whether lead generation or ecommerce, is to turn potential customers into customers. This means designing a useful site, not just a pretty one. That is a process, not a project.

The process of continually improving a site’s performance begins by understanding the person on the other side of the screen who is investing their time to get something they want from your company.

It has very little to do with how the site looks, though that can play a role in making their lives easier.

It has very little to do with better technology, though that can make things work faster and better for your visitors.

It has everything to do with being committed to helping the visitors to your site find what they want quickly and easily, and to do so in an increasingly efficient manner.

The source of all positive change

No platform feature list or brand-perfect visual design can capture what your visitors are constantly offering you: direct feedback about their goals (and struggles accomplishing them) on your site.

The only way to get at this information is to deliberately collect it, and build a case for investing in improvement.

By focusing on the look of a site or the technology behind it, brands miss the key element to improvement of either aspect: the needs of their customers.

The Good has developed a process for consistently improving conversion rates on B2C ecommerce sites and B2B lead generation sites alike. At the heart of that process is a deep understanding of the end consumer, and a focus on continual learning and improvement rather than drastic changes to design or technology.

Design and technology may be the pillars of a highly performing site, but the true foundation is empathy for the customer and a process to constantly improve their experience with both the way your site looks and the way that it works.

The post Your Customer: The Source of All Positive Change appeared first on The Good.

This is a real and constant battle within every organization. Whether it’s a B2B site whose goal is lead generation, or a B2C site trying to sell products online, the only metric that matters is customer success.

Ask yourself, can your customers quickly and easily accomplish what they came to your site to do?

Businesses exist because of their customers, and yet the executive teams that manage them are the furthest removed from the customers. That distance prevents meaningful digital projects from being invested in because higher level executive teams can’t see the bottom line impact of digital efforts. Most executives are so far from the front lines that they not only lack a clear understanding of their customer, they clearly lack empathy for the (typically awful) experience their brand site provides.

As of Q2 2015, just 52% of the Fortune 500 companies have mobile-friendly websites. This is pathetic and will cost many times more in lost revenue than it would have to build a mobile-friendly site. The opportunity cost for a lack of customer empathy is where massive losses occur. Especially since about 60% of all web traffic now occurs on a mobile phone or tablet, and Google is actively penalizing non-mobile sites.

Having a site that displays properly is only half the battle. To make a site truly relevant to customers and the bottom line, it’s got to have more than just the right technology in place. A successful site is designed with the goal of helping a company’s customers accomplish something specific.

Unless everyone at a company understands what it’s like to be a customer, they will never be able to improve that experience.

Customers use a company website every day. Company managers probably don’t. In fact, it’s unlikely that anyone at an executive level has ever used their own website to find product information or complete a purchase. They run the company, so they should they be in touch with what it’s like to buy from the company online. Unless everyone at a company understands what it’s like to be a customer, they’ll never be able to improve that experience.

Fortunately, it’s not just lost revenue or reduced search rankings that will speak to executive teams. Getting buy-in can be as simple as building empathy. It’s easy to forget that behind all the metrics and reporting and spreadsheets are real people that are relying on the web to solve their real-life problems. Showing management what it’s actually like for a real customer to try and do something simple on the company’s site can instantly shift their perspective.

To accomplish this, try showing them what it’s like to use the site. Record a series of user sessions with real customers attempting to accomplish specific tasks. Watching the site fail customers immediately cuts through the abstract brand vision of the site’s purpose.

You can help your company’s executive teams see the importance of putting the customer first by actually putting the customer experience right in front of them. Here are some generic tasks to run user tests on that will highlight the customer experience on your site:

• Find a product and add it to the cart
  • Use search to locate a particular product
  • Use the product filters to locate a particular product
• Add multiple products to the cart and attempt to check out
• Find support information for a particular product
  • Attempt to make a product return
  • Find answers to common questions about a specific product

You can leverage the lessons from a user test immediately to improve your site, but for now use them to paint a moving picture of what your brand’s customer experience is actually like.

This direct exposure to the customer experience can curb the tendency to get caught up in conversations about digital initiatives, rather than the ongoing results produced by the brand site. It’s easy to get sidetracked thinking about ongoing initiatives rather than ongoing improvements, but ongoing improvements are the only way to really see traction.

Most managers think that if you put the customer first, you’re putting the organization second. As if you can’t achieve your organizational goals if you put the customer first. This is absolutely a false trade off. If you really want to make a lot of profit online, put your customer first.

The post Customer Success: A Perfect Cure for Management’s Blind Spot appeared first on The Good.

To generate any kind of profit, an ecommerce site must have its own dedicated operations budget. Not just for standard development and maintenance, but for continual improvement in the name of customer service and driving conversion to boost your bottom line.

Your ecommerce website is no longer a marketing tool

How did websites end up under the marketing budget in the first place? Because that’s what they used to be used for. Customers, devices, and expectations have evolved. Most brands haven’t.

Why online sales aren’t a priority right now

“But wait,” you say, “we don’t focus on sales online because it upsets our dealers.” I hear you. Channel conflict is an issue, but it’s not as big an issue as you think it is. The most difficult hurdle has already been cleared. You already sell online. No one knows how much you’re selling online, so stop pretending like you need to be terrible at it.

In addition to disappointing your customers, being bad at online sales trickles down to your dealers and your brand.

When your site makes it difficult for your customers to buy directly from you, it reflects poorly upon your brand. Fewer customers will spend their money with you online or in stores as a result.

What your company thinks the site is for

“Our site is a brand tool, and a place for brand storytelling, a way to connect with our customers.” Yes, it is. And no, it’s not.

Your marketing team and your marketing agency keep their jobs by constantly spending on campaigns to drive awareness and traffic, build buzz, and create connection.

When that effort succeeds and potential customers visit your site, marketing has done its job.

But that is where the marketing should stop. If all customers find on your site is more marketing, you lose.

All that money and genius go to complete waste as soon as your email popup takes over the screen with a self serving brand request.

To succeed at ecommerce, your site must serve your customers not market at them. Help them research your products, make their checkout quick and easy, provide them the content they are looking for.

If your content makes the research and purchase process easy, they will buy from you directly. Your margins will rejoice.

What to do if you want to stay in business

Don’t worry so much about upsetting your dealers. Don’t think so much about how to tell your brand story. Realize you are in business because of your customers.

Your customers are connected. They’ve spent more on Apple products in the last 3 years than on your products in the past decade. And now they’re looking through a beautiful glass handheld screen to see your products online. Not a catalog. Not a billboard. Not a commercial. Not a banner ad. Your brand website.

The only way that you can possibly connect with them online is to support your overstretched and understaffed digital department. So invest money in making the site look great, work well, and help people buy from you. Turn your site into an asset that provides an ROI far beyond pageviews and Facebook likes.

The only way to free up your team to generate revenue through your site is to support that effort directly, with a budget devoted to the revenue stream that creates its own positive feedback loop.

The positive feedback loop of investing in ecommerce

The more you invest in your ecommerce website, the more revenue, profit, and commerce will occur. The more you invest in improving your conversion rate, the more you’ll earn and learn from each visitor to your site.

Increasing your site’s sales at higher margins means more free cash flow to invest in driving more relevant traffic. More customers, more conversions, and more revenue create a self-funding cash positive feedback loop.

Start treating your ecommerce website like the self-funding business it really is. Free your website from the neglect it suffers under the marketing budget, and invest directly in the one channel that can pay for itself.

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