Become a Hero at Your Company… How to Leverage Your Existing Website to Generate Increased Profita
Yosi Heber, President of Oxford Hill Partners, shared his insights on how to improve the profitability of a website in a straightforward session. Heber brings his extensive consumer products experience to bear on the topic—he was Brand Manager on Jell-O at Kraft, and later worked on Dannon where he created the kids’ yogurt category as well as Marshmallow Alphabets. He’s literally been there, done that. He’s developed a terrific proprietary methodology for reviewing websites that’s a great approach for evaluating effectiveness in terms of sales and profits. It’s a structured, disciplined approach that can yield concrete results.
According to Heber, ten years ago the Amex advertising budget spent 80% on TV. Now, TV is only 35%. As a brand manager at Kraft, Heber said there wasn’t much respect for profitability. Now, brand managers are rigorously evaluated on profitability. All companies have websites. Few have figured out how to make money with them. Many have invested millions, but their websites rarely generate positive ROI. Often, web operations have just become cost centers that lose money.
So how do you apply classical CPG strategic planning and marketing to create web-based strategy and solutions that unlock the power of a website and help generate new and incremental revenue? Enter Heber’s proprietary methodology, “EQ Pulse”. Companies need to think beyond a website as a positive customer “branding experience” to increase revenue and profit. EQ Pulse is an analytic tool (actually, more of a framework) which provides a total score of the overall capacity of a site to drive revenue. Heber outlined EQ Pulse’s Eight Strategic Revenue Drivers:
1. Potential Traffic and New Customer Acquisition
2. Home Page (Store Front) and Branding
3. Products & Merchandising
4. Navigation and Customer Experience
5. Entertainment Value & Stickiness
6. Customer Care & Trust
7. Call to Action/Revenue Maximization (Traffic Conversion)
8. Relationship Building & Customer Retention
Using his method, Heber rates a website on a scale from 1 to 10 on each of these drivers, assigns a weighting to each driver, and comes up with an overall site evaluation on a scale of 100. He does the same for competitors’ sites, and then looks for best practices and identifies areas where his client’s site can be improved. The example he showed us had a site which rated fairly well on all drivers except 1 and 8, and he gave specific recommendations, with examples, on what should be done to improve things: better search engine marketing to improve traffic and new customer acquisition, and better follow up to retain customers and build relationships with them.
Heber then gave several case studies to illustrate each point, including:
- Godiva chocolates’ improving its Google rank by developing a new category, “business gift giving”, which it featured prominently on its website and which propelled it to the top position on Google.
- Amazon.com, which improved merchandising by offering recommendations and giving discounts on book bundles (“buy this book with…”), which enhanced their ability to cross-sell.
- Slim Fast, which developed the idea of extending the longevity of New Year’s resolutions beyond January via a free support club offering exercise logs, buddy support and a weight tracker, which increased their business by 22%.
So how does one apply this? Heber recommends:
- ask yourself whether you make or lose money with your website
- evaluate how your site stacks up versus the competition and h
- assess how well you take advantage of the 8 Strategic Revenue Drivers.
His final recommendation? Call him for a full scale EQ Pulse assessment, of course! It was a worthwhile session and Heber’s approach, coupled with his experience, seem to me to be a real asset to improve a website’s performance.
