Jim Sterne Gives Back After Assault
Jim Sterne used 20 years of marketing experience and 13 years online service to create a list of the 20 most important tips (“silver bullets”) to optimize your website. After spending the previous hour ripping apart three sites, Jim gave out his top techniques that could have prevented the embarrassment. While this list is not rocket science, and you should not be surprised by anything on it, you would be surprised to review your own site with his list in mind. The first half of the 20 silver bullets pertain to corporate and site design basics while the last ten are all related to optimization.
The most important (and possibly oldest advice I can remember about online) is to test, measure, test, measure, test, measure, test, measure, and continue this for all time. You are never done, and all sites should practice continuously measurable improvement initiatives.
Some points are amazingly basic, but underused at many sites. Does the home page answer the most basic of questions: What are you trying to accomplish? Point #1 is to have goals. After all, if you don’t understand why you have a website and what you want from customers, then how can you design one for your users and expect them to take the right action? For example, most people look at their site as a selling process, but your customer goes through a buying process, bringing us to point #2: Focus on the Buying Process.
Bullet #7 stresses making the site functional. Some of this is obvious, such as forbidding flash animation, limiting picture bulk, and having useful 404 pages. Others were three simple ways to minimize user confusion: the mother-in-law test; the 5 random guy test; and the pop-up survey. The first two have people who know nothing about your industry checking out your site and attempting to complete a task while you watch. Jim’s example of the world’s best survey was three questions long. First, ask the customer what they were after, then ask them if they were able to do it, and finally ask them if not, why not. Do this as an exit pop and you can raise your customer satisfaction scores greatly.
The last ten optimization bullets are all ideas that that make incremental improvements as opposed to fixing the big mistakes that he blasted Tribe.net, cogbox.com, and Qqesttime.com for in the previous session. You can optimize everything piece by piece. Optimize the source of your prospects to make sure you spend the efforts and money in the places which will give you the customers who convert. Use A/B testing on landing pages (the best sites might actually test four separate areas of the page) to let technology tell you the answer instead of arguing over possible solutions. One example showed that Intercontinental Hotels saw a $20 million increase with a change in site copy.
It all boils down to some really simple concepts. Think like a customer. Boring is better. Work hard. Test and Measure.
