The 3 stages of data

The web is a glorious place that lets us collect data on almost everything a visitor does.  All this data is fun to look at and analyze with various dashboards and graphs, but it doesn't stop there.  Once you have found meaning in the data, you still have to use that knowledge.

These are the 3 stages of data: Collect, Analyze, and Implement.

Some data in easy to interpret and use.  If, in a split test, your visitors purchase more when exposed to version A vs B, the implementation is easy.  Show version A to all your visitors.

Most data insights are not as straight forward.  Consider the insight that people don't feel comfortable giving out their date of birth on your signup page.  Does this mean they don't trust your site enough to share personal info?  Should you not ask for a birth date or should you explain why you want to know?  Maybe the issue is unrelated and this is just a symptom.

When you don't have a clear path forward, you have to collect more data either through advanced collection techniques or testing, analyze the results, and try again to implement a solution.  It becomes apparent that even valuable data insights can take months to fully implement and realize.

It seems that while there are 3 stages of data, there is only 1 overarching goal:  Minimize the delay from collection to implementation.

If you're just collecting data and viewing it in a dashboard, your data isn't able to achieve its goal.

What do you do with your data?

The downside of automation

It seems that everyone reveres automation as the holy grail.  You can automate your marketing, your email campaigns, and even your coffee maker.  Automation is great because it ensures consistency and frees up valuable man hours to do more mentally intense tasks.  But, automation isn't always good.

Automation reduces personalization and requires extensive maintenance to keep up with variable change.

Personalization is important because it not only adds a layer of attention, but re-enforces social ties to your customers.  I'm not talking about the kind of personalization that your bulk email service provider offers, Hi [First Name].  I'm talking about true personalization that would take terabytes of data to be able to program into an automated system.  The digital equivalent of my coffee pot being able to recognize that I'm dragging more than normal this morning and responding by making me stronger coffee.

I'm not saying that personalization of this level is impossible to program, just that it isn't practical for most applications.  You could easily blend a little automation with a likable account rep and still benefit from automated processes while paying personalized attention to your customers.

Maintenance is another concern when looking to automate anything.  As humans, when we learn something new, we automatically integrate it into our process.  For a computer program, a change in the outside world may require a minor adjustment or a complete rewrite of the original automation.  

My personal belief is that if you can't afford to replace something, it's outside of your reach.  If you can't afford to replace your automation (based on the time and monetary investment), you're not getting enough out of having the process automated.  

Start manually and document each step and decision point of your process.  Just having the process scripted on paper should increase the consistency of your results and will help you determine if automating it is worth the effort.

I know a guy who took a 4 month process and made it a 1 day process through automation.  He didn't completely remove the human element from the decision points, just automated the basic steps (reason why it still takes a whole day).  The program would take weeks to re-write or make a major update, but that's still a huge savings over doing it manually, even once.

Is your automation working for you or just creating extra work?

Second Chance: Appeal the Bounce

A bounce is when a visitor lands on your website and promptly leaves without doing anything.  You work hard to get visitors to your website.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content Marketing, Email Campaigns, and Pay Per Click (PPC) ads all cost time and money to maintain.  If it costs an average of $1 to get each visitor to your site, each bounce is a wasted buck.

They came, they saw, they left... you lost a dollar.  What can you do?

Why not make one last appeal to your bouncing visitor to get them to hang around?  These "Are you sure you want to leave?" messages can be super annoying, but if you only show it to visitors that you've already lost, what will it hurt?  Even if you get just one of those bouncers to stay, you're ahead of the game.

I suggest limiting the message to those who are not engaged.  

Depending on the site, engagement could be as simple as scrolling or clicking (blogs tend to get lots of bounces because they are just 1 page.)  You could also limit it new visitors.  

Here is some sample javascript code.

<script type="text/javascript">
    //attach the exit confirmation to the onBeforeUnload that fires just before the page closes.
    window.onbeforeunload = confirmExit;

    //set a global variable to be able to turn on/off the exit confirmation
    var confirmLeave = true;

    //if the user clicks anywhere on the page, don't show the exit confirmation
    document.onclick = function() {
        confirmLeave = false;
    }

    //if the user scrolls at all, don't show the exit confirmation
    window.onscroll = function() {
        confirmLeave = false;
    }

    //function that displays your exit confirmation
    function confirmExit()
    {
        //only if our global variable is true, Appeal to the Bouncer to get them to hang around.

        if(confirmLeave===true)        {
            return "96% of our clients would recommend ContourThis to a friend! Are you sure you don't want to check us out?";
        }
    }
</script>

You have to use the browser's built in popup box to display your message.  Not all browsers will let you display a custom message (FireFox), and some browsers won't keep the page from closing (Opera), but the point is, in the case of a would be bouncer, anything is better than nothing.

How to effectively market with email

In my last post, I covered the difference between advertising, marketing, and sales.  Now, it's time to see how they apply to email.  

Email is the new direct mail.  The format has changed, but the rules haven't.  

If you have a sexy product that people need, or will need after they see it, you can probably get away with mailing out a catalog.  A catalog serves as both advertising, to let you know a product exists, and sales, giving you a price and a number asking you to place the order.

Unfortunately, we can't all have sexy viral products like Chia Pets and Pet Rocks.  For us, the most effective way to use email is for Marketing.  

Email is a direct connection to another human being.  To prove how personal it is, write an email to a friend in ALL CAPS AND SEE HOW LONG THEY THINK YOU ARE PISSED AT THEM.

When you send someone an email, it's like knocking on their front door.  If they open it, you can't just tell them who you are and run away (Advertising).  Also, you can't jump straight into a sales pitch.  It's a one in a million shot they need your product, let alone are willing to listen to you.  You have to engage the person (Marketing).  

If you are sending advertising and/or sales emails to your email subscribers, "We have a new product! Buy Now!" you are probably getting the cold shoulder.  If on the other hand you offer them something of value, "Join us at our next event.  Subscribers get in Free!" you can keep them engaged and create an opportunity to show them your new products or ask for the sale.

Pro-Tip: This works for "cold" emails too.

Email is a personal domain.  No body wants to be interrupted to serve someone else's needs.  I'm much more likely to visit your website if there's something in it for me.  Once I've engaged you on your turf, I won't feel like your sales pitch is an invasion.

What's your email campaign look like?

Advertising, Marketing, and Sales

Whenever a topic is sufficiently complex and there is debate about where the boundaries lie, I prefer to substitute my own "simple" explanation.  The difference, use, and goals of Advertising, Marketing, and Sales is one such topic.

Few people know enough about all three disciplines to try to segregate them (unless your next stop is wikipedia :)  Some believe that one encompasses another or both within the larger umbrella.  But one thing is for sure, they are like atoms (hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon) that when combined create molecules (water, carbon dioxide, peroxide, etc.) that bring money into your business.

I propose the simple definitions:

• Advertising - Increases Awareness
• Marketing - Increases Engagement
• Sales - Increases Revenue

Obviously, the borders of these three things are not black and white.  You can advertise your Guarantee in your marketing and sales material, and you have to sell you marketing to get people to bite.  But the goal is to over simplify.

If you look at my definitions again, you will see that they closely follow the traditional sales cycle: Awareness = Discovery, Engagement = Evaluation, Sales = Purchase.

I over simplify these so that it is easy to see where your company is lacking.  If you have a great product, like the Chia Pet, that you are sure people would buy if they just knew you existed - you are low on advertising.  If you have to resort to cold calls to make sales, you are probably low on Marketing.  And if your site is blowing up but your conversion rate is sub par, you're missing the final piece of the puzzle, sales.

What's your company missing?

Protecting your content on the web

Content is King, or so most marketers say.  It is for good reason that marketers have such high regard for quality content.  The normal sales cycle begins with discovery.  You can't buy something if you don't know it exists.  And thus, most content marketing strategies are aimed at increasing engagement with your potential customers during the discovery phase.

High quality content is informative, captivating, and begs to be shared.  This increases inbound links, visitors, and ultimately sales.  So, content is not only king, it is also gold.  But there's one problem.  High quality content isn't easy to make.

The web is an infinitely large place with far more content than any person could consume.  This leads some companies to believe that stealing content is easier than making it, and hard to catch.  

I once knew of a company that was scraping content (stealing content by means of a computer script) from various websites and reselling it to their customers.  This business model netted over $20MM each month.  (M is the roman numeral for 1000, so 1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000)  

If you are creating original high quality content, you may be feeding companies that make money from stolen content, or worse, your competitors may be using it to drive their sales.

I believe in a free and open world where knowledge is shared, but I also believe credit should be given where due.  The best way to protect your content isn't to lock it up and force people to look at it in a maximum security environment.  The best way to protect your content and grow from it is to share it and get credit.

For images and video, this means putting your logo on them.  If someone is siphoning bandwidth by serving the image from your servers, you can limit access to images or serve up a different image that brings people back to your site.

For ebooks and blogs, it means adding links back to your site and referencing your company and other content.  It also means taking advantage of microdata to let indexing bots like search engines know you are the original author.

You'll never be able to stop all the die hard forgers who go to great lengths to recreate your original work.  But, the further your content spreads, the more people it will touch, even if it is stolen.  If you give those readers a clear path back to you, getting your content stolen is almost a strategy.

Understanding digital security

Over the years, many people have asked me about digital security.  How often should I change my passwords?  What all do I need to protect my website and server from malicious attacks?  Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all solution to digital security, but it does help to understand how it works.

Just like "water resistant" doesn't mean your watch can't be damaged by water, having security doesn't prevent attackers from gaining access to your system.

If you have ever purchased a commercial grade safe, you know that they are rated based on the number of minutes it takes someone to crack them.  TL-15 means that it will take at least 15 minutes to crack the safe using normal tools.  When purchasing a commercial safe, you want to buy a rating that is higher than your security team's average response time.  

Similar to physical safes, digital security, including passwords and firewalls, all have a time rating.  An 8 character password can be cracked with brute force in just a few hours with a decent computer.  The goal of digital security then, isn't to prevent attacks, it is to identify them before they are successful.

For the websites I work on, I use a couple of simple methods to deter devious activity.  First, I limit the number of invalid attempts for certain fields and the number of overall page views within a given time frame.  This prevents large amounts of data from being scraped and increases the amount of time it takes to test 200,000,000 possible password combinations.  

The second part is to have automated monitoring of these activities.  Knowing someone is combing through 100+ pages on your site every minute, gives you options.  You can limit their access or discontinue it all together.

Highly sophisticated attacks will always be an issue, but unless you are a bank or government entity, you probably don't need to worry.  Most attackers are lazy.  If you put up a decent fight and prevent them from stealing the farm, they will end up moving on to the next, easier target.

What do you do to keep your files secure?