eBusiness Newsletter 2005-11-25 14:Nov:th 2005-11-25 14:Nov:th http://www.stay-sane.com/ jon@oxer.com.au Copyright 2005 How To Build A Website And Stay Sane Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:23:53 +1000 Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:23:53 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/62 One of the most powerful things about running a website is that everything is measurable. Every page view, file download, inquiry, and order can be recorded and reported in meticulous detail by your server.

Because everything is measurable we don't have to just sit back and hope that the way our sites are set up is the best they could be, or make changes such as updating content or the interface design blindly without knowing if we made things better or worse. You can measure critical performance metrics of your site to obtain a baseline reference, make changes, and then measure again. The numbers will tell you if you did the right thing or not.

Let me explain.

Imagine you have a website that sells items online, and you want to see if putting testimonials on your home page would increase your sales rate. You could just "try it and see" but without before-and-after figures you'd be working entirely on gut instinct.

A better approach is to determine your current sales conversion rate by dividing the number of visitors to your site each month by your number of sales. Imagine your site had 1643 visitors in one month, and you made 54 sales: that's a 3.2% conversion rate. Next you make a change to your site by adding some testimonials on the home page, and measure again: next month you had 2093 visitors and made 86 sales for a 4.1% conversion rate. That's a nice little change that netted you an extra 19 sales over what you would have made at the previous conversion rate.

But did it really? The figures look good and we can congratulate ourselves on measuring the results, but was there another factor involved? Maybe a good review of your product came out that month, and the increase in both visitors and conversion rate came about because more people arrived at your site predisposed to buy after reading the review. Maybe your change to the home page had no effect at all, or actually had the opposite effect but was offset by other factors.

Hmmm, now it's getting tricky!

We can solve that sort of problem using a technique known as "A/B split testing", which involves randomly serving up two slightly different versions of your site to different visitors and seeing which one works better. In split testing the objective is to isolate a single change such as the addition of testimonials to the home page and see what the result of that change is.

So in our example above what we'd do is prepare a modified version of the home page and have it served up in place of the normal version 50% of the time. Then we would track the conversion rate for both versions, and because both versions are being tracked simultaneously we don't have to worry about effects like traffic spikes or unusual events. At any point in time half the site visitors are seeing one version, and half are seeing the other. That makes comparisons between versions much more valid than if you ran one home page one month and a different home page the next.

A/B split testing is an extremely useful technique that in my opinion is underutilised at present. If you're making changes to your site maybe you should think about giving it a go.

On another topic, I'm about to start work on the second edition of my book "How To Build A Website And Stay Sane" and I'd love to hear your opinion on what issues need more detailed coverage. The first edition has been used by thousands upon thousands of people all over the world as a roadmap for their website (re)development projects and I've received a lot of positive feedback, but there are a couple of topics in it that I should probably cover in more depth. I've got my own ideas about what they are, but I want to hear your opinion! Make sure you let me know ASAP and I'll do my best to accommodate you. Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:36:49 +1000 Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:36:49 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/61 It's been a couple of weeks since the last eBusiness News because I spent most of last week in Sydney at the invitation of the NSW Department of Commerce, appearing as a guest speaker at Contracts On Show which is a major event involving government departments and vendors. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak with representatives of the Department of Commerce, the Board of Studies, and the Department of Education and Training, and also major vendors including Red Hat, Novell and IBM. Overall it was a very interesting event.

Recently I've explained some of the basic concepts surrounding website metrics, such as what a "hit" really is and why pageviews are an important measurement. What you need to do now is start applying those scales to your website for real.

The most obvious things to look at are how absolute volumes change over time, such as whether the total number of visits is increasing month on month. This can be very satisfying because it shows you the efficiency of your marketing and tends to grow over time all by itself, possibly with spikes corresponding to specific events. For example, whenever my book "How To Build A Website And Stay Sane" is featured in a newspaper or other review I don't even need to be told directly: just watching the site traffic report is enough to know something has happened, and a quick look in the referrer report shows where all the traffic is coming from.

But volume isn't everything. When it comes to tuning your website you should be less concerned about volume and more about effectiveness on a per-user basis. What you really need to know is not just whether a large number of people are arriving at your site but whether your site is actually being effective at catering to the needs of those visitors.

A great base metric for this is the percentage of visitors who view only one page, or "percentage one-page visits". These are people who arrived at your site but didn't click to go to any other pages: basically they got to your site, went "oops, this doesn't look useful" and hit "back" straight away or closed their browser. A high percentage of one-page visits shows you may be reaching a lot of people, but once they arrive you're not delivering what they need or expect. There will always be one-page visits but your objective should be to make them as small a percentage as possible.

Calculating the percentage of one-page visits is pretty easy. It's just the number of one-page visits divided by the total number of visits, all multiplied by 100. Or, to put it another way:

(one-page visits / total visits) X 100 = % one-page visits

So if you had 6174 visits last month, of which 1575 were one-page visits, it would be:

(1575 / 6174) X 100 = 26%

A related and very useful metric is average page views per visit:

(page views / total visits) = average page views per visit

So those same 6174 visits may have corresponded to 21988 page views, giving you:

21988 / 6174 = 3.6 page views / visit

Your objective over time should be to make your site more attractive on entry by decreasing the percentage one-page visits, and increase it's "stickiness" by increasing the average page views per visit. If you can achieve that you can improve the performance of your site dramatically even without increasing the number of visitors. Sometimes it's like having a big stream of people continuously walking in the front door of a shop and walking straight back out again: it often makes more sense to try to improve the way you service the customers you are getting rather than to simply try to gain a bigger crowd. Quality and effectiveness are what really matter, not vast numbers.

Then when the numbers come you can really make the most of the opportunity. Fri, 26 Aug 2005 16:39:39 +1000 Fri, 26 Aug 2005 16:39:39 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/60 In last week's "eBusiness News" I promised to talk about more performance metrics you could use to measure the success of your site, but with a couple of events on at the moment I'll have to hold that over until next week.

I'd like to invite you to come along next Tuesday to Swinburne University's eBusiness Expo in Melbourne where a new eBusiness tool jointly developed by Internet Vision Technologies and Swinburne University will be launched.

The tool is an interactive self-assessment system that allows business owners and operators to answer a series of questions and have a report generated showing areas in which the business can be developed further - effectively a customised eBusiness roadmap. Titled "Your eBusiness Journey", the tool is intended to be re-used from time to time to keep your personalised roadmap up to date and act as a guide to making the most of the opportunities available for business online.

In addition to the launch of Your eBusiness Journey, the eBusiness Expo will have a series of presentations on topics related to taking your business online and a small display hall where a number of eBusiness providers including IVT will show you some of the ways you can grow your business online. I'll be there along with a pile of copies of my book "How To Build A Website And Stay Sane" (featured in Entrepreneur magazine in The Australian today!) which will be available at a discounted rate, and Luke and Antoine will be on hand to demonstrate some of the latest features in SiteBuilder.

The event is split into two sections on Tuesday afternoon and evening, and costs $27.50 for either section or $44 for both. To register in advance just point your browser at

http://www.tafe.swinburne.edu.au/buscom/ccbi/seminars.html

to learn more, then give Neil a call on 03 9214 6896 to let him know you'll be coming. Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:07:59 +1000 Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:07:59 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/59 In the last eBusiness News I talked about the importance of using metrics and analytics to gain an understanding of how well your site is performing, and this week I'm going to give a gentle introduction to some simple metrics that you can obtain fairly easily from your webserver logfiles. These basic metrics are some of the fundamental building blocks that are used to derive all sorts of interesting information, so make sure you understand these before working up to more complex methods of site performance analysis.

As I explain in my book How To Build A Website And Stay Sane, it's critical to understand what the term "hit" really means. Most people have a vague idea that it's a measure of how many people have visited a site and that bigger numbers are better. Hit counts can be totally misleading though unless you know what you're really measuring.

A "hit" is a request from a web browser to the web server asking for an item on the server. That item could be an HTML file, or an image, or anything else on the server. Retrieving a web page typically involves one hit for the HTML file itself, then one hit for every image on the page and probably extra hits for other things you aren't even aware of including CSS files and alternative images to display when rolling your mouse over a navigation button. Every single one of those items counts as a "hit", so when one person visits one page it could easily count as 15 or 20 hits. Some pages might consist of only a plain HTML file and therefore count as a single hit, while other pages might consist of 100 items and therefore count as 100 hits for just one person to view one page.

What does that all mean? Basically that you can't just look at "hits" and expect the number to be meaningful unless you understand the context it's in. When someone says "Our site had over a million hits last month" it's not impressive: it's actually pretty meaningless, and probably just goes to show they don't really understand what they're saying. That million hits could have been less than a thousand unique visitors looking at a dozen graphically-loaded pages each. Still a good number of visitors, but not quite the crowd of one million people they probably imagine!

So, a "hit" is just a request for an object. That's all. Once you understand that you can start talking about hits in a meaningful way. For example, you can talk about hits to a certain image and know that you're talking about how many times that particular image has been requested. Or you can talk about hits to an HTML file, and know you're talking about how many people have viewed that page - which leads to a very useful base metric called "page views". A page view is one person requesting one page. The page view might consist of one hit or 100, but it doesn't matter: the important thing is that one person viewed one page. Using page views to compare traffic to different sites or sections of sites is far more useful than talking about hits, because it means you're comparing apples with apples. A page view is a page view, no matter how many hits it involves.

To really get a feel for what I'm talking about make sure you have a look at the traffic report for your site. Your hosting provider should provide you with a secure location where you can view a report updated every week or so. Find the section of the report that covers page views and have a look at the top item on the list: that's the most popular page on your site.

Other basic metrics you need to understand include "visitors" and "visits".

A "visitor" (sometimes referred to as "unique sites" in traffic reports) is a distinct computer used to look at your site. The figure is obtained by recording the network address of each computer that connects to your site, so if two different computers connect to your site it will be reported as two visitors. Obviously this is a crucial figure when it comes to the performance of your site, because the visitor report shows you how many different people are actually looking at it. The more visitors the better! There are factors which can affect the accuracy of this report but it's still a good baseline metric to track.

A "visit" is when one visitor comes to your site and views a number of pages. One person may look at one page and then go elsewhere: another person may click through dozens of pages on your site. In both cases it's called a "visit". Visits can't be measured directly by the server because it only tracks individual page views, so a visit report is really only a best-guess by your traffic report software. The figure is derived by grouping together page views by unique visitors and then treating that group as a "visit", so if for example you have one visitor come to your site and look at several pages on one day and then come back again a few days later that would be seen to be two "visits" by one "visitor".

"Page views", "visitors", and "visits" are the most fundamental figures you need to know when it comes to your site. Working up from that basic information it's possible to obtain an enormous amount of information about how well your site is performing, which in turn will show you what you need to do to make it more successful. For example, you can divide the "page views" figure by the "visits" figure to derive a figure for "average page views per visit". A small number of page views per visit means people aren't staying on your site for very long, while a large number means they spend a lot of time going through it in detail.

Information like that is pure gold when it comes to understanding what your site is really doing, and in coming weeks I'll explain some of the other interesting information you can derive from your site traffic report.
Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:48:07 +1000 Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:48:07 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/58 In past issues of eBusiness News I've talked a lot about emarketing, search engines, customer service, contact management and related topics, but I haven't done much coverage of issues related to measuring user behavior and site performance. However, one of the most powerful things about running a website is that everything is measurable, and understanding what to do with the data available to you is a critical factor in the success of your site.

When anyone starts talking about site performance everyone else's eyes start to glaze over because it inevitably ends up in a discussion about statistics, and pretty much everyone I know finds statistics both boring and confusing.

But it doesn't have to be. When you start to see the kind of information you can extract from your website it can become addictive: you may find yourself obsessively tracking visitor numbers and session statistics day by day, watching as changes in your marketing approach are reflected in near-real-time on your website.

So what I'm going to do over the next little while is spend more time focusing on the two core components of website traffic statistics: metrics and analytics. I'll talk about real-world situations and show you how to understand what's really going on with your website, looking under the hood to watch what visitors *really* do rather than what you may think they do.

"Metrics" are defined units of measure, the yardstick by which we can judge how your site is performing. A metric can be a raw figure like "number of page views per day", or it can be a derived figure like "conversion rate" which is the number of sales as a percentage of number of visitors. Deciding what metrics you need and then making sure the necessary data is being captured is the first step to understanding the performance of your site.

"Analytics" is the next step, processing the raw data to gain a deeper understanding of performance by measuring or discovering trends that may not be immediately obvious. Analytics can be either a process of discovery to uncover trends you weren't aware of, or a process of measurement to track existing trends perhaps in the context of external influences that may or may not be under your control.

Both those definitions may sound a bit airy-fairy at the moment but I'll follow up in coming weeks with very specific examples of how they apply in the real world.

But first, time for a basic question: where does the data come from?

Mostly from webserver logfiles. Every time someone views a page on your site, the server records that fact. Included with the log entry is a variety of data including a timestamp, the network address of the user, the type of browser and operating system they are using, which objects (including pages, images, etc) they accessed, and the last page they viewed.

That data in itself is enough to extract a huge amount of information from. For example, the network address of the user allows a report to be generated showing which countries your visitors are located in and the object name allows a report to show which are the most and least popular pages on your site. Other reports derived from a raw server log include daily visit counts, visits by time of day, users by operating system, users by browser type, top referrers (sites that send traffic to you), and what search terms people are using to find you.

Those raw figures though can be supplemented by additional data stored by the CMS (Content Management System) that runs your site. For example, one critical data point if you have an online store is the number of sales you've made. That sort of information can't generally be found in the raw server logfile, though, because the server doesn't know what constitutes a sale and what doesn't. All it knows about is what pages and images people have viewed. Your CMS software, on the other hand, can track a bunch of additional information such as the number of sales and their value, the number of items purchased by each user and their shipping destination, the number of people signed up to your e-newsletter, and which articles in your online support knowledgebase are read most often.

It's when that additional data is combined with the data from your raw server logfiles and some basic analysis is performed that you can generate some very useful reports such as changes in conversion rates over time.

Those reports in turn will allow you to tune your approach and help you get the most from your site, so stay tuned for next week when I'll explain some of the basic metrics you can obtain from your server logfiles. Sat, 16 Jul 2005 04:06:04 +1000 Sat, 16 Jul 2005 04:06:04 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/57 It's pretty common to have a list of products in a back-office system such as your accounting or enterprise management software so you can generate itemised invoices, or maybe even in something as simple as a spreadsheet so you can generate price lists or a catalogue easily.

The problem is that to put all your products up on your website means duplicating all that information in a second location and then trying to keep them synchronised. If you add or update a product in your back-office system you have to remember to log into the administration area of your website, find the product, and make the same change there.

That's a pain.

A solution we've had great success with over the years is linking back-office systems including basic accounting packages to websites so they can automatically (or semi-automatically) update the content of the website on a regular basis. That means you don't have to care about making changes in two places: you just maintain your offline product information as you normally would, and when that changes your site is automatically updated to reflect the same change.

One of the earliest systems we totally automated was for Earth To Air Technology way back in 1998, taking data from their product / stock control system and doing a daily update on their website with no human intervention whatsoever. They didn't have to change their regular operational procedures at all, and didn't have to assign anyone to keep the products on their website up to date. It just happened.

Since then we've done similar things for clients using a wide variety of back-office software ranging from enterprise-level management systems right down to off-the-shelf accounting packages including MYOB, which just goes to show that it doesn't take anything fancy at your end. Almost any accounting package can be connected up in this way: the accounting system you use right now can probably handle it.

A perfect example is Plaster Funhouse, who maintain all their product information in MYOB as a normal part of running their business. Some minor customisation of their MYOB setup allows them to store additional information like the name of an image to associate with each product, a long description of each product, and the current stock level, and all this data is bulk-transferred to their website using an import system developed by IVT that converts it to the necessary format for display on the site.

Another example is Shaver Shop, who maintain their product information in an enterprise-level back-office system that performs a daily export which is then transferred to the website. The Shaver Shop system is 100% hands-off: they don't ever need to touch the system or think about how the products appear on their website, because it's all done totally automatically every day using fresh data from their existing back-office system.

A slightly more unusual example is Complete PC Solutions, who don't even need to maintain the product information themselves: it's pulled from data feeds provided by suppliers. The 21,000 products on the Complete PC site are updated daily with the latest prices and stock levels, and even the product categories are maintained automatically. If a supplier adds a whole new product category containing a new range of products it just appears on the website with no human intervention and they are immediately available for customers to order.

I hope these examples have shown that it's possible to have a website that's kept up to date with minimal ongoing effort. Sometimes it can be tricky doing the initial setup necessary to handle automatic updates but once everything is in place it's set-and-forget: you just go about business as usual, and your website will always reflect the very latest products and pricing.

I love it when we can make things so easy you don't have to think about it! Fri, 08 Jul 2005 15:35:14 +1000 Fri, 08 Jul 2005 15:35:14 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/56 Next week I'll return to my regular news emails with a discussion of how to use your accounting software to keep your website up to date (seriously!) but the last week or so has been rather frantic for me with a series of interviews and rather interesting press coverage that came out of comments I made about Linux Australia on my blog.

My last IVT News email was about RSS and how it can be used to "syndicate" a news feed or blog and let people subscribe to it. That's exactly what happened with my blog, and it just goes to show how powerful they can be: one little post that hits the right topic at the right time and all of a sudden you can be a media superstar (or supervillain). At least for a while!

If you're really interested you can see the blog post that started the storm but it probably won't make a lot of sense when read out of context. In any case it was never my intention to cause so much controversy, I was just seeking feedback from the Linux community, but it's still a great lesson in the publicity that a blog can generate.

Anyway, since it's my birthday this month I've decided to do something a bit different and celebrate by doing a half-price offer on my book How To Build A Website And Stay Sane. Instead of the regular retail price of $69.95 you can now buy it online for $34.95 at the book website. Wed, 29 Jun 2005 09:31:53 +1000 Wed, 29 Jun 2005 09:31:53 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/55 Recently my company has been receiving almost daily queries from clients asking what the little "RSS" links on some websites are all about. RSS has been around for years but it's only with the recent blog explosion that it has really taken off, so a lot of people are a bit stumped when they come across it and wonder what it means.

So, time for a little lesson in RSS 101!

Many websites now include little buttons or links with labels like "RSS", "Atom", "XML", or "Syndication". These aren't links to other web pages: instead they are links to special files which are designed to be loaded in a piece of software call a "news reader" or "feed aggregator".

You can think if it as being similar to an email link on a webpage: your web browser doesn't understand how to send an email, so if you click an email link on a page your browser opens your email software and gives it the email address. In a similar way, an RSS link is not meant to be used by your browser directly: it's intended to be passed to a feed aggregator program.

However, many computers currently do not yet have feed aggregator software installed so when you click the link your browser probably won't know what to do with it and will just display an error message instead.

But what is RSS anyway?

Websites often publish lists of news headlines and other stories that are updated fairly frequently. The problem is you don't know when they're updated, so you have to keep going back to the site to see if anything new has been added. And if you regularly visit a number of sites that can be a real pain.

RSS and Atom feeds are designed to solve that problem. They allow you to run a piece of software on your computer that regularly checks your favourite websites automatically to see if they have published anything new, and if they have it displays them to you on your local computer without you even having to open a web browser. The software also keeps track of which stories you've seen already so you can choose to only be shown stories you haven't seen yet.

To read RSS or Atom feeds you first need to install feed aggregrator software on your computer. There are a huge number of feed aggregators available free on the Internet for Windows, MacOS and Linux, so getting the software isn't the problem: it's choosing which software to get! For Windows a good starting point is the Top 10 feed reader list at http://email.about.com/cs/rssfeedreaders/tp/top_rss_windows.htm, which provides information about where to download them.

Once you've installed a feed aggregator you will need to add feeds for your favourite sites. Check the documentation for your software for the specifics, but the basic concept will be using an "add feed" option into which you paste the URL of an RSS or Atom feed. This is where the RSS and Atom buttons on websites come into it: if you want to add that site to your list of feeds, just click the button and copy the URL, then paste it into your feed aggregator. For example, the URL for the IVT news feed looks like this:

http://www.ivt.com.au/sb/modules/latestnews/feeds/rss2.xml

If you paste that URL into your feed aggregator you'll be notified each time a news item is added to the IVT site. Once you've added some feeds your aggregator will regularly check them for updates, and notify you of any new stories you haven't seen yet. Sat, 18 Jun 2005 03:36:11 +1000 Sat, 18 Jun 2005 03:36:11 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/54 Right Now Technologies recently released a white paper titled "Stop Random Acts Of CRM", which got my attention for two reasons: firstly because my company provides a CRM as part of SiteBuilder (in fact you're receiving this email right now because it's being personalised and delivered to a bunch of people all at once using SiteBuilder) and secondly because I've been at the receiving end of "random acts of CRM" recently and it's *really* annoying!

OK, let's back up a bit. "CRM" is "Customer Relationship Management", and the term is used to refer both to the general process of managing customer interactions with your business and also to the specific tools which allow that to happen. So CRM is both a process and a piece of software. Using CRM in your business is about keeping track of your clients and suppliers, recording information about when you last spoke to them on the phone, what particular service areas they are interested in, what they've bought from you in the past, all that good stuff. Yes, you could do it entirely with bits of paper - a well managed Rolodex is a primitive CRM system.

Modern CRM tools like the Contacts module in SiteBuilder allow you to do much more though, such as ask questions like "which customers bought a dual-stage frobnotzer from us last year but haven't bought anything since?" and have it generate a list of matching customers. Then you can create a promotional email talking about your dual-stage frobnotzer upgrade rebate scheme, and have it personalised and sent to just those people on the list.

So CRM is about making sure all communication with your customers is as relevant and meaningful as possible, treating each one as an individual and not just bombarding them with generalised newsletters and such. In the example above you don't want to send information about your frobnotzer rebate scheme to *all* your customers: only those that actually bought a frobnotzer from you. To all your other customers the scheme is irrelevant, and telling them about it won't generate good will: it's just more marketing noise to annoy people. Good CRM helps you keep your communication relevant.

But CRM is not always good. Sometimes CRM, like Anakin, ends up working for the Dark Side and becomes the problem it's meant to alleviate.

CRM should not be about having the tools to just blat out more marketing, more promotions, more newsletters, more more more: it can certainly do that, but that's not the point. It's critical that you keep in mind that the objective of CRM is to make you *relevant* to your customers. CRM gives you the power to do lots of things, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

A classic problem is when a business has multiple departments all responsible for dealing with customers. For example, the sales department handles transactions while the support department handles problems. The sales department will likely have a CRM available to make them more efficient at pushing out promo information and tracking leads, but the support department will also find they need to track support requests, follow-ups, etc. So they start doing some CRM themselves. Other departments also start tracking customers internally with various home-brewed systems, and before you know it the company has customer contact information spread around a bunch of departments with varying levels of awareness of each other.

My latest bad CRM experience is a direct result of one of our suppliers suffering this problem. Although IVT runs our own Australian data center, we use a provider in San Francisco for our US-based servers. When I first made contact with this particular provider I asked some questions about the services they provide and received answers from a salesperson. I later asked some follow-up questions, and received answers from a different salesperson. When I was satisfied that they could provide the services we need I placed an order for a server. So far, so good.

But at about this point two things went wrong in CRM-land. Firstly, the two salespeople that I dealt with both entered me into their CRM - independently. So I ended up in their database twice. Secondly, when I placed my order with them I should have been flagged as an active customer so they would know I'm not just a prospect they need to keep pitching to. That obviously didn't happen, because even though I've been a customer of theirs for a long time I still regularly get promotional emails along the lines of:

"Hi, thanks for inquiring about our services and we'd like to offer you a discount if you sign up in the month of June."

This is very bad from a marketing point of view because making existing customers aware of a special sign-up deal makes them annoyed that they didn't get that deal when they signed up. A typical customer who gets a promo like this will feel cheated that they paid full price when they signed up, even if the full price was a good deal anyway. That's just human nature.

Then to really rub it in, I get all the promo emails twice - identical in all respects, but with one personalised to appear to come from the first salesperson I dealt with, and the other to appear to come from the second. Personalised email is much better than an impersonal promo blast, but when it's done properly it should be impossible to tell. Getting two identical emails seconds apart which purport to come from different people within the same company pretty much blows that illusion!

I've got plenty of other examples of CRM gone bad but I'm sure you get the point. The lessons to learn are:

* Integrate your CRM uniformly across your whole company: never allow individuals or departments to build up their own contact lists separate from your official system.

* Check your data, and when staff are adding new entries make it easy for them to spot duplicate entries.

* Create appropriate customer categories within the system and then *use* them! Don't send sign-up promos to existing customers, and don't treat all your contacts as one amorphous blob. Use the power of your CRM to make each customer feel like you are talking directly to them. Thu, 05 May 2005 04:18:53 +1000 Thu, 05 May 2005 04:18:53 +1000 http://www.stay-sane.com//ebusinessnews/id/52 There was an interesting study performed recently by ScanAlert to determine how long a web user takes to make a purchasing decision.

In my book How To Build A Website And Stay Sane" I talk about "high-consideration" versus "low-consideration" purchases, and that site owners need to know how much information and reassurance should be given to visitors before they are comfortable enough to make a purchasing decision. I explained that consumers go through a process of obtaining enough information to be satisfied they can make the right decision, and that it's critical that websites contain enough information to allow that to happen.

But how much is enough? How long do web users really spend researching each purchase?

Popular wisdom has been divided on the issue, with some saying that web users are more likely to make impulse purchases because of the simplicity of ordering online and others saying that web users tend to spend a lot of time on research before making a purchase - which may even be done offline some time later. Personally I've always leaned toward the latter, and I know anecdotally that many of IVT's clients find they have lots of traffic to their site which doesn't translate directly into online sales but does result in an offline transaction at a later date.

The ScanAlert study tracked more than 8 million web users, measuring the length of time from when they first visited a website to when they made a purchase. They found that the average time delay between a consumer's first visit to a website and their first purchase was just over 19 hours, with over 20% of shoppers delaying their purchase decision for more than three days.

The results included:

* 50% took more than 1 hour
* 40% took more than 3 hours
* 35% took more than 12 hours
* 28% took more than one day
* 21% took more than three days
* 14% took more than one week
* 4% took more than two weeks

Keep in mind that many of the 50% of shoppers who spent *less* than one hour on a site to make a purchasing decision had probably already spent extensive time doing research on other sites. While a study like this cannot show it, I suspect that a very small percentage of consumers actually make a purchase within an hour without first conducting research on other sites.

Nevertheless, even with that limitation in mind the study still shows quite clearly that user behaviour tends towards using the web for extensive product research prior to making a purchase, with many people visiting a website to investigate options and then returning hours, days or weeks later to make the purchase. Almost half of all online purchases are made by people who visit once and then make the purchase on a return visit, rather than making a purchase on the initial visit.

So what can we learn from this?

Firstly, make sure you provide enough information on your site to allow potential customers to feel comfortable in making a purchase decision. Because shopping online is such an intangible experience, consumers need to satisfy themselves that the product they are considering will actually meet their needs in a different way to if they were in a physical store looking at it on a shelf. They can't touch it or hold it, they can't talk to a salesperson about the features, and they probably feel that if it turns out to be a lemon they can't return it as easily as to a real store. It's therefore critical to put up enough information for them to make a purchase decision - details of features, lots of pictures, testimonials from other customers, and a simple way for them to ask you questions if they need to.

Secondly, trust and credibility are important factors. Users don't just look at one website and make a buying decision: they generally look at many sites selling the same or similar products and use the web to comparison-shop, then hours or days later they select a vendor and make a purchase. Unlike visiting real stores, skipping from one online store to another is only a click and a couple of seconds. When purchasing from a traditional store a consumer will probably determine a 'class' of product (such as an MP3 player) that they want, then consider the retailers available, then travel to one retailer, then determine the type of MP3 player they want from the range available at that store. Online, the process is different: it starts with researching the types of MP3 players available which leads to a decision about which type to buy, then an examination of the retailers who can supply that type of item, and finally a purchase from the retailer who fulfils certain needs such as a level of trustworthiness and value.

You can find more information about the report online.