Marketing Articles About Advice

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Advice and Feedback.
I don't have to do much writing on my current assignment -- the Staffing Plan that I've talked about the past couple of days is my major contribution to the proposal in terms of new writing. Since this is a re-compete, my client has first-hand knowledge of the project and the ability and resources to write most of the sections.

So my role is primarily to provide advice and suggestions to the client, as well as feedback on their written sections. I will likely also be involved in some re-writing and editing as the proposal moves toward its final stages.

So what does this advice and feedback involve? Well, much of it has focused on interpreting the RFP, which contains a good deal of unclear information about what should be addressed in the proposal and where it should go. So I offer suggestions to my client about what the content of the various sections and ways that the information might be presented. "What should we say here?" or "What do they mean by this?" are questions that my client has been asking.

As drafts of proposal sections are completed, my client sends them to me. I review them and check them against the RFP requirements to see if they have addressed what the RFP has asked for. I also provide comments on the drafts using 'track changes' in Word. Some of my comments relate to RFP requirements; others relate to the content -- whether more detail or more specific information is needed, whether there are gaps or internal inconsistencies, etc.

I like this role a lot because I can advise people what to do without actually having to do the work myself. It's a welcome break from the intensity of writing.
(03/12/08 07:31 AM)
How an 8-Year Old Became Co-CMO. I have to share this story…it’s about how my Son got offered the job of Co-CMO for Bazaarvoice. Last week we had kids-at-work day. I brought in my 8-year-old Son Kyle and 11-year-old daughter Haley in for half a day to experience what I do at work. They were very excited, however, I had a number of meetings and conference calls. During these meetings my daughter at colored, read, and ate ice cream. My son, on the other hand, walked the halls and started offering advice to our employees. Soon, our Partnerships Director suggested he interview for a job. So, Kyle typed up an introductory letter and and started interviewing with our recruiter and several Bazaarvoice managers. I of course, still have no idea this is going on. Soon Kyle gets into Brett’s office (our CEO). Brett interviews him and soon realizes that his skills of giving “tips, advice and opinions” on things like pricing and how to sell products align well with marketing. So he offers him the Co-CMO position -- actually senior to me -- paying $50/mo and 100 shares! Fortunately I make a little bit more than that. In the video below I compiled some video that I and others collected that day, showing his interview with Brett and examples of the advice that he was giving me and our VP of Business Development, Brant Barton. None of this is staged for video, we just captured what was happening. He came up with all of this himself.... (08/17/08 09:00 PM)
How to Battle the Coming Brain Drain. How to Battle the Coming Brain Drain

"How to Battle the Coming Brain Drain
Older workers are retiring in droves. How do you prevent their crucial knowledge from leaving with them?

By Anne Fisher

If you scan the reams of "best advice" in the preceding pages, you'll notice a pattern: Many of the key advice givers are older and wiser bosses. No surprise there. It's the managers in their 50s and 60s who have had time to develop the most valuable knowledge and experience. But few large companies seem to prize that wisdom anymore. Intent on cutting costs, many employers are trying to get rid of people over 50, despite rising age-discrimination litigation. That's an exceedingly shortsighted policy. By forcing out the employees with the most experience, companies may be inadvertently pushing critical knowledge out the door before it is shared with the next generation. They'll probably regret it before long, since demographics suggest that business is facing a dangerous brain drain from voluntary retirements alone. And those folks' lost smarts can cost an awful lot to replicate. "

- I have personally seen this 'brain-drain' occurring. When money becomes your only factor for deciding whether or not to employ someone this is what happens. -ed. (07/29/06 02:29 PM)
New E-Book Offers Great Advice. If you are involved in selling (or marketing) professional services, you’ll want to know about this new eBook, The One Piece Of Advice You Can’t Sell Without: From 11 experts on selling professional services, produced by RainToday. They have consolidated... (02/28/07 09:00 AM)
[Fortune] They Best Advice I Ever Got. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fortune75/articles/0,15114,1035151,00.html [28 big biz people share the best advice they ever got; you need a subscription to get past the excerpts -t.s.]... (12/12/06 08:04 AM)
The One Piece Of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without. The staff at Raintoday approached a group of B2B lead generation experts with the following question: "What is the one piece of advice you simply cannot generate leads without?" The result was a special 36-page report with 10 all-new articles... (08/30/07 09:00 PM)
Career Tip #1: Find and Follow Your Passion and Strengths. I've been 'pinged' for career advice from time to time. So, I’m starting on a series of perhaps 15 or 20 posts that summarize my career learnings, principles and philosophies. This is the first. For this one, I’m going to answer an email from a reader asking about finding passion and leveraging strengths. Let me share my story... Thanks to Bryan Eisenberg, I’ve got to know Roy Williams over the past 5 years. He’s a best selling author and founder of Wizard of Ads and Wizard Academy. One day I asked him for perspective and advice for my career after 3 startups and 7 years at Dell. He didn’t tell me what to do, but he’s a master of extracting essence and principle. In a private conversation in his office he crystallized my core competency. With dramatic pause he started, “Sam, you have a gift very few people have. You are multi-lingual”. “Gracias. Sé, pero apenas un poco,” I thought. But he wasn’t talking about my limited Spanish skills. What he knew about me is I enjoy metrics and can talk about the PL with the CFO. And I also enjoy creativity – I used to be a designer, love to write and have managed creative teams. And I am good at ‘translating’ between both. I enjoy using both sides of my brain. In a word, “multi-lingual”, Roy captured what it is I do. In addition to this, I’ve learned that I find fulfillment in starting, building, and growing something.... (01/07/07 09:01 PM)
Free Advice for the Litigious…. http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did (05/17/07 09:00 AM)
Unblievable But True.
A few days ago I received an e-mail from a woman who said she was a professional grant writer. She wrote that she was very upset because the website that she had developed last year was not showing up in Google searches and she wasn't getting any new work. She said a lot of very nice things about my site and asked if I could take a look at her website and give her some feedback about it. She has been paying a monthly fee to an SEO company to submit her site to search engines and increase her ranking, but it wasn't working.

Well, I'm no website development expert, but I've learned a few things along the way in the 10 or so years since I've had my site. I thought maybe I could help. So I went to her website. I'm not sure what I expected, but to my surprise it was nicely done -- well laid-out, attractive and well-written. There were maybe 5-6 pages about her and the various aspects of her grant writing services.

I didn't have a lot of time to spend on this, so I was clicking through her site kind of quickly and scanning what she had written. It looked pretty good to me, although I noticed that there were a few things that were lacking. Then I go to her FAQ page and...BOOM! -- staring me in the face are five of the questions and answers that I have on my own site. She had taken them verbatim and just plopped them into her page along with a bunch of other questions and answers. I just could not believe my eyes.

I sent her an e-mail right then. I told her that I thought it was pretty strange that she would ask advice from someone whose work she had plagiarized, and I asked her to remove the material immediately. A day later I hadn't gotten any response and my questions and answers were still on her site. So I had to send her the nasty threatening letter (sigh). That pretty much did the trick. A few hours later she wrote back and said that she had removed my material. All she said was "it has been removed." No apology, no excuses, nothing.

I had a hunch that maybe I wasn't the only one whose stuff she had stolen. So I put an unusual phrase from her site into Google and sure enough, up popped another grantwriting site. She had taken nearly two whole pages of material from this other site and used them on her site. At first I thought I should maybe contact the other site and tell them. But then I decided not to. I don't want to get in the middle of someone else's plagiarism problems.

I couldn't resist e-mailing her once again to tell her that I knew she had plagiarized extensively from this other site and that eventually they would find out about it. Then, since she had asked for some advice, I gave some to her: don't steal other people's stuff.

Is this unbelievable or what? Either she was playing some kind of sick joke or she had totally forgotten that she had plagiarized my material. My money is on the latter, but I guess I'll never know.
(03/14/08 09:01 AM)
Lovely E-Mail.
I get quite a few e-mails each day. Some are from people asking about my services, others want me to answer their questions, and still others write rather lengthy stories about various hardships that they want to overcome by getting grants that don't exist. Then there is the e-mail I received yesterday asking for a donation so that the sender could attend a conference in Las Vegas, which she can't pay for because she doesn't have any consulting work. Hmmm, I would like donations so that I too could go to Las Vegas.

But every so often I receive an e-mail that just plain makes me happy. I got one of those yesterday too. Here it is:

I am 30 yrs old with little to no experience in writing up
proposals. I am currently working in a middle management position in a
small company. I feel I have an idea that would greatly benefit the
company I am currently working for. After approaching one of the senior
management with it, he told me he liked it and to write up a proposal.

I have been searching the internet for the past week and a half
attempting to gain insight and advice into how to create a quality
proposal. I am not the type of person how expects, or even wants, to
have someone else do my work for me. Most of the sites I found offered
to create a proposal for a fee. It is my belief that unless
circumstances require otherwise that a person should learn to do things
for themselves. It was a nice surprise to find on your site a starter
list of sorts that I could use to begin to make a proposal on my own.
Your "Proposal Preparation Checklist" and Proposal Pointers and
Pitfalls" are wonderful tools and I wanted to take a moment to thank you
for freely distributing them. It is a welcome relief when someone sets
forward information to allow people to empower themselves. The links
you have provided to other websites are also wonderful. Just skimming
over the Checklist and Pointers, I have already noticed some points I
would never have considered.

So again, thank you so very much. I really appreciate the effort you
have put into your site and also the information you have offered freely.

What a beautifully-written thank-you note. And to boot, it expresses my own mantra -- "do your homework" -- just perfectly.

It's just so nice when something like this pops up in your mailbox!
(03/01/08 09:01 AM)
Lovely E-Mail.
I get quite a few e-mails each day. Some are from people asking about my services, others want me to answer their questions, and still others write rather lengthy stories about various hardships that they want to overcome by getting grants that don't exist. Then there is the e-mail I received yesterday asking for a donation so that the sender could attend a conference in Las Vegas, which she can't pay for because she doesn't have any consulting work. Hmmm, I would like donations so that I too could go to Las Vegas.

But every so often I receive an e-mail that just plain makes me happy. I got one of those yesterday too. Here it is:

I am 30 yrs old with little to no experience in writing up
proposals. I am currently working in a middle management position in a
small company. I feel I have an idea that would greatly benefit the
company I am currently working for. After approaching one of the senior
management with it, he told me he liked it and to write up a proposal.

I have been searching the internet for the past week and a half
attempting to gain insight and advice into how to create a quality
proposal. I am not the type of person how expects, or even wants, to
have someone else do my work for me. Most of the sites I found offered
to create a proposal for a fee. It is my belief that unless
circumstances require otherwise that a person should learn to do things
for themselves. It was a nice surprise to find on your site a starter
list of sorts that I could use to begin to make a proposal on my own.
Your "Proposal Preparation Checklist" and Proposal Pointers and
Pitfalls" are wonderful tools and I wanted to take a moment to thank you
for freely distributing them. It is a welcome relief when someone sets
forward information to allow people to empower themselves. The links
you have provided to other websites are also wonderful. Just skimming
over the Checklist and Pointers, I have already noticed some points I
would never have considered.

So again, thank you so very much. I really appreciate the effort you
have put into your site and also the information you have offered freely.

What a beautifully-written thank-you note. And to boot, it expresses my own mantra -- "do your homework" -- just perfectly.

It's just so nice when something like this pops up in your mailbox!
(02/20/08 09:01 AM)
Lovely E-Mail.
I get quite a few e-mails each day. Some are from people asking about my services, others want me to answer their questions, and still others write rather lengthy stories about various hardships that they want to overcome by getting grants that don't exist. Then there is the e-mail I received yesterday asking for a donation so that the sender could attend a conference in Las Vegas, which she can't pay for because she doesn't have any consulting work. Hmmm, I would like donations so that I too could go to Las Vegas.

But every so often I receive an e-mail that just plain makes me happy. I got one of those yesterday too. Here it is:

I am 30 yrs old with little to no experience in writing up
proposals. I am currently working in a middle management position in a
small company. I feel I have an idea that would greatly benefit the
company I am currently working for. After approaching one of the senior
management with it, he told me he liked it and to write up a proposal.

I have been searching the internet for the past week and a half
attempting to gain insight and advice into how to create a quality
proposal. I am not the type of person how expects, or even wants, to
have someone else do my work for me. Most of the sites I found offered
to create a proposal for a fee. It is my belief that unless
circumstances require otherwise that a person should learn to do things
for themselves. It was a nice surprise to find on your site a starter
list of sorts that I could use to begin to make a proposal on my own.
Your "Proposal Preparation Checklist" and Proposal Pointers and
Pitfalls" are wonderful tools and I wanted to take a moment to thank you
for freely distributing them. It is a welcome relief when someone sets
forward information to allow people to empower themselves. The links
you have provided to other websites are also wonderful. Just skimming
over the Checklist and Pointers, I have already noticed some points I
would never have considered.

So again, thank you so very much. I really appreciate the effort you
have put into your site and also the information you have offered freely.

What a beautifully-written thank-you note. And to boot, it expresses my own mantra -- "do your homework" -- just perfectly.

It's just so nice when something like this pops up in your mailbox!
(02/21/08 09:01 PM)
What Makes a Marketing Champion? An Interview With Matt Strain of Adobe. Matt Strain is director of worldwide relationship marketing at Adobe, where after just three years he is recognized as a Marketing Champion who adds financial value to the company. He has had a distinguished career in technology marketing. He recently took time to share his thoughts about what makes him successful and offered advice to fellow marketers for getting ahead in our challenging and competitive field. (07/29/08 09:01 AM)
[Ajarn's SQL Corner] Top 15 Myths About Business. http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/markc/articles/4280.aspx There are a lot of misconceptions, myths, bad advice and outright lies about what it takes to be successful in business. And most of those are continually spread by people who have never gone into business for themselves.... (12/12/06 08:04 AM)
Small Business Fundamentals - The List. When I went through business school I wasn't taught the fundamentals of small business. It wasn't until I started researching online business after graduating that I came across practical advice regarding the core facets of successful small business. There was one thing in particular that was continually hammered into me as I read more and more about building profitable businesses - the targeted mailing/contacts list is vital - and the web is the perfect vehicle to collect and maintain a list whether your business operates on or offline. List Based Direct Marketing As I delved further into online marketing I... (04/06/07 09:01 AM)
Seth Godin Q&A on Blogging and Marketing. Since I interviewed Guy (#2 marketing blog), I thought I'd ask Seth (#1 marketing blog) to answer some questions. I met Seth Godin in the early 90's searching for a book expert for advice as I wrote my first book. This was just before Seth became the marketing guru he is known as now (after Permission Marketing). He's a lot more busy and popular now, but he is as gracious to answer questions now as he was back then. (Note: Now that I have the top two bloggers, maybe I should interview all the other bloggers who have more popular blog than mine until I can get back to interviewing myself! #21 :-) Which blog posts have gotten you the most impact (not necessarily traffic, but actual personal or business impact), and why?Actually, it's not a post by post thing. There's no question in my mind that it's cumulative. Do a google search for MARKETING CHOCOLATE and there I am. Go figure. It adds up. And over time, it tells a story. You can't fib for four years...Here's how I'd summarize the main points in your books...feel free to modify these. Permission Marketing = customer is in control. Idea Virus = ignite consumer networks. Purple Cow = be remarkable. Marketing are Liars = tell a story. What's next? What else?I have actually tried to summarize my books at www.squidoo.com/seth {note from sam: there is a download there for Seth's new ebook, Flipping the Funnel} What are the three biggest mistakes... (07/29/06 02:28 PM)
Content ideas for lead nurturing and tactics to use. When it comes to lead nurturing, I find that many marketers get stuck because they lack enough good content to do it consistently. My advice (if you plan to do it) is to start accumulating content and building your lead... (08/17/07 09:00 PM)
What A House Hit By Lightening Looks Like.
The parents of a close friend just had a direct lightening strike on their house. It immediately burned to the ground and everything was lost.

The simple advice from my friend if this ever happens to you is "get out fast and not go back for anything that is not a human being." She also suggested that you check your home insurance to make sure you are covered for this.

(08/27/08 09:00 PM)
Decker's 15 Career Tips. This concludes my series of career tips, which was prompted by a few friends reaching out to me for advice. I'm sure I could think of more, but these are the first 15 that came to mind...and 15 is a good place to stop. Here's the list with links: Find and Follow Your Passion and Strengths Create Soundbytes for Your Personal Brand It's WHO You GET TO Know Choose Who Your Work For Take Initiative Outside Your Triangle Inform Others Connect to a Visible Brand Learn, Challenge, Fun Feed Others Go Where There's Margin Growth Always Can Do Take Bigger Risks Answer First Show and Know Metrics Never Eat Alone... (02/03/07 09:00 PM)
Career Tip #5: Take Initiative Outside Your Triangle. If there’s one piece of advice I’d give anyone in any job who wants to be considered a ‘rockstar’ it is to take initiative. Be entrepreneurial. See opportunities to improve before you’re told to improve them. Look for new opportunities. Think outside your responsibilities. Mistakes are easily forgiven when you have an employee that is going to be ‘making plays’. Think about the expectations of your role and responsibilities as a triangle. Now, if you put a circle inside the triangle, representing what you accomplish, then there are some unfilled spots, and your performance is below expectations: If you fill the triangle you are meeting expectations, and are a “good” employee: But if you take that circle of accomplishments outside the triangle, outside what’s expected, outside your responsibilities, you are exceeding expectations. You become a rockstar, potentially an A player, and someone who will be considered to take on more responsibility: So what should you take on? Think about it this way: “do your boss’s job”. Consider taking initiatives in areas your boss has focus. Make sure these initiatives that will clearly make an impact, are measurable, are visible and helpful to others as well (they should if your boss is focused on the right things). In other words, if you go outside the boundaries of your responsibilities, choose to work on things that matter most to your company: your boss, your customers, and impact to the PL.... (01/13/07 09:00 PM)
Career Tip #4: Choose Who Your Work For. Throughout my career I’ve worked for and with many bad managers, some good ones, and a few great ones. The great ones manage the business well, motivate the team, and make the right calls...but they are also genuinely motivated to help you succeed. They provide air cover to get things done, they look for connections, introductions, development opportunities. They force you to stretch. They share career advice, lessons learned, and best practices. In short, if you work for the right person they can be 4x more impactful for your career and development (I made that stat up, but now you ‘read it somewhere’.)... (01/13/07 09:00 AM)
116 Subtitle Ideas for Guy's New Book. Guy Kawasaki invited his readers to submit book ideas for his next book. There are over 125 of them now. There were some good and bad book titles listed here...but more useful were the subtitles submitted, as they describes the problem statement or solution for the book (see below). Participants (many who are entrepreneurs) provide insight into their chosen topic of interest, albeit through the lens of what they know Guy for (his previous books and blog). In summary, these are the most common themes I saw through the subtitles: Is this business a good idea? The future (will it be a good idea) (i.e. What is Web 5.0?) How to get inspiration to get started (i.e. inspirational tales and advice to start a company) Practical entrepreneurial tips -- raising money, spending money, finding partner, hiring engineering, etc. How to create demand in this new market of supply Globalization The life lessons of Guy What else did you find interesting from this list? A roadmap for bootstrapping entrepreneurs who want to change the world - but don't know where to begin. How a Start Up can take on the Giants How To Meet Your Genius Co-Founder Or: How to find the right representative for your business, if people like (to buy into) your products and ideas, though don't consider you as a person to be very smart when they meet you. ;-) Methods for engaging community to find great ideas How to realize your new venture is in trouble or... (01/02/07 09:00 PM)
Learn Word of Mouth Marketing -- WOMM-U, May 8-9. This year the Word of Mouth Marketing Association is doing something completely different (disclosure: I'm on the board). It will be WOMM-U (Word of Mouth Marketing University), the first training-based conference full of case studies, operational cookbooks, and practical advice to make Word of Mouth Marketing work in your organization. The tracks will include topics on Managing a blog program Activating WOM in Social Networks Building a Sustained WOM Program Measurement: The ROI of Fans Selling into the CEO ...and much more. Keynote presenters includes my friend Joseph Jaffe (author of "Join the Conversation") and Jeffrey Graham, who leads research for NYTimes. Join me at this unique conference, May 8, 9 in Miami. Register here. (02/28/08 09:01 PM)
The Best Advice For The Economy I've Heard In A While.
Mark Cuban has a brilliant post up titled How to Jumpstart the Economy - Tax Free Small Businesses. He totally nails it. Send a copy to every politician you know.

(07/28/08 09:01 PM)
How to Establish Credibility. How to Establish Credibility

by Michel Neray

"Look up 'credible' in Webster's Dictionary, and you'll find 'Capable of being credited or believed; worthy of belief; entitled to confidence; trustworthy.'

OK, so no surprise there.

Credibility gives you permission to speak, and gives the person you're speaking to permission to listen.

Regardless of whether you are in the service business or sell a tangible product, everyone needs to establish credibility, especially with prospective clients. But if you're a consultant, adviser or coach, then it's harder for your clients to evaluate the value of your advice and recommendations."

- Credibility is what Donald Trump has. It is his most valuable asset. Who else can say, "Lend me $320 million dollars so I can buy a casino with no risk to me." and get away with it. Donald gets people to do this for him because he has credibility. Donald never has to inform people of his credibility, they know. He just brings them solutions. This is what you should be doing and this is what Michael Neray points out so clearly in this article. -ed. (07/29/06 02:29 PM)
Career Tip #9: Feed Others. This is a tip if you are a manager...it’s both a career tip and a management lesson. I learned a painful lessons early in my management career. It is foolish to try to control too much. First, I discovered I didn't have all the right answers (amazing!). But more importantly, the company couldn’t get as much done, my employees didn’t learn, and they became unmotivated when I micro-managed or took over from where they left off. Early in my career I had a web developer working for me who sent me a page he designed. Rather than making suggestions and letting him complete the project, I got into the code, made the changes myself and showed him the final product the way I wanted. I could see the frustration on his face, and a couple months later, he resigned. Perhaps every manager needs a jolting mistake like this to change behavior. It only needs to happen once. A leader needs to seed and cultivate great people who will make their vision of producing something they own. I soon realized that there’s an entrepreneur in EVERYONE and a leader’s job is to create a structure so they can exercise that entrepreneurial spirit. By the time I got to Dell I had learned this lesson, and as I built a team I got better and better at feeding others. I might feed them ideas, advice, tips, perspective, introductions, or whatever to help them accomplish. I put a goal out there and see... (01/16/07 09:00 AM)
Marketing Bullseye 11: Write in Customers' Language. The bulls eye concept because it not only helps describe middle-brain marketing of blending creativity with measurement, but it also conceptualizes the idea of choosing the most effective way to do things. So what’s the bulls eye in copywriting? Many marketers look at their competitors’ web sites and copy. In the end, every site looks like the other and clever white-paper-speak terms emerge. Terms that are not the language of the customer I don’t think that’s what copywriting means!. Hit the bulls eye by writing in the language of the customer. To use the same terms, phrases, and straight-forward speak that a customer might use when asking someone else about your solution (and of course, they probably didn’t use the word ‘solution’)! Holly Buchanan of FutureNow describes it this way: These aren't the words your customers are using to describe what they need, what their problems are or what they're looking for. They're not looking for human capital management solutions - they're looking for a staffing company. They're not typing human capital management solutions into search engines. They're typing staffing company or staffing services. Andrea Learned describes how Intuit hired an editor from People Magazine to reinvent their terms for QuickBooks. Accounts receivable became 'Money In' and accounts payable, 'Money Out.' Her advice: Follow your customers home. What is in their magazine rack? What words do they use when they email or IM friends, and so on? This sort of anthropological look should give you some in-depth insight as to... (09/30/06 09:01 PM)
Help prevent what you treat....
In reading a recent post on Bill's blog in his Monday Morning Motivation series, he offers the advice to chiropractors, or any doctor for that matter, that their highest calling is to help prevent what they treat.

...but what are you doing to help make yourself obsolete?
...The highest calling of any doctor (of any ilk) is to help prevent what it is they treat.

That got me to thinking about my philosophy as a consultant and speaker. It's hard for those of us who work on the retainer system to hold the philosophy of "helping to make ourselves obsolete", but that's exactly what we need to do. There is such an abundance of opportunity out there and by working closely with our clients (whether our consultative calling is inside or outside the enterprise) to move them to a higher platform of strategic or digital marketing execution expertise, we're truly offering the service that they need (and not the service, that we need...)

ACTION REQUIRED:

Think about this in your interactions all week. What have we done to truly understand the client and share our wisdom on making them better marketers (or, whatever they are) so that you too can one day be obsolete to them and move on to helping clients help themselves? That is the highest calling of any consultant.

(08/04/08 09:01 AM)
Want more signups/subscribers? Test your forms!.
This from Bill Flagg of RegOnline talks about how he has continuously works on optimizing the account signup page for the RegOnline website to maximize the conversion rate. [via Brad Feld]

What a great post to encounter first thing this morning. I just had this discussion with two separate clients in the past two days on how to optimize their account signup and newsletter subscription forms. Some great advice from Bill:

Here's what I learned to ask myself and my team... 1. Which information is a must-have? Do I have to know where they came from or can my web analytics tell me? 2. Which information could we collect later? For example, we collect billing information when the client goes live with their event. 3. Eliminate the rest. If a piece of information doesn't create a change in action, then I eliminate the field.

I agree with Bill 100% and often ask a couple more questions to get this right. Of course, you're never done asking questions. You should always be testing you forms to achieve greater conversion!

1. What data can you market to? If you're asking for address, birth date, phone number and the like - are you really going to market using all of that data or are you just collecting it because you think you need it (or your CEO thinks you need it)
2. How does the data tie into the rest of your CRM and database marketing efforts? If you're a B2B company you'll want to and need to know different things than a CPG company.
3. What's the "form fatigue" factor and how do you eliminate data point collection to ease up on your customer's patience.

(05/02/08 09:01 AM)
Links for 2007-08-21 [del.icio.us].
- YouTube Initiates Monetization Strategy With Transparent Video 'Overlays'
  No pre-roll ads here. Smart move.
- Dear Palm: It's time for an intervention - Engadget
  Some (much-needed) advice for Palm.
- Microsoft launches Tafiti - Search and Silverlight experiment - LiveSide
  Some signs of life from Microsoft search.
- GigaOM Schmidt: Google will ‘Probably’ Bid on Spectrum «
  Google signals it's ready to rumble for next-gen radio waves.
(08/22/07 09:00 AM)
Should You Consider Buying a Foreign Franchise? . It's a well-known fact that popular U.S. franchise operations like McDonald's and Subway have become as ubiquitous overseas as they are in North America. What many people don't realize is that a wide ...
(08/26/06 09:02 AM)

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