John Doe says: “In front of 30 of your clients, you asked one of them to order you panties? Seriously? What kind of *&^%$#@ lunatic are you?”

Dear John. Your wife left you for her personal trainer. How could she? With a fake name like John Doe, you must be terribly creative. (And seriously “John,” if you are going to write “anonymous” blog comments you might want to use something like Anonymizer. I mean really.)

Yes, I did ask one of my clients to order underwear online. Hanky Panky’s specifically. Whether or not they were for me will remain unknown. I got enough whore comments after my Are Crazy Women Better in Bed? post — I don’t need more.

YES, THERE WAS A VERY GOOD REASON. I was making a point. (Yes, it happens… sometimes.)

I was at a client’s and they went on and on and on about how much they wanted to be like Nordstrom. (One of the worst ecommerce web sites ever in my not-so-humble opinion.) Nordstrom does this. Nordstrom does that. On and on about Nordstrom as if they were actually an Amazon or eBags.

Finally, I had enough so I said “go online and order me four pairs of honey-colored, low-rise Hanky Panky’s — the 4 for $45 deal that they have now. If you can do it within 10 minutes, I’ll give you $1,000.”

To make a very long story short (involving having to prove that I actually had $1,000 cash in my wallet), the client earned NOTHING. Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Why? As much as I’d like to say it was because he’s an idiot, the truth is he’s razor-sharp and a very sophisticated online shopper. It was more to do with the fact that Nordstrom doesn’t have a quantity box (yes, you read that correctly) and their buy and save offer looks something like this:

Buy 4 or more & save!
Add 4 or more of this item to your Shopping Bag and save $0.65 per item—that’s 4 for $45. Use Promotion Code BUYANDSAVE on the Order Summary page in Checkout to reflect the special price. Items must be ordered at the same time but can be ordered in any combination of sizes and colors. While supply lasts.

Yeah, good luck with that.

The point is: just because they’re a big company doesn’t mean that they know what they are doing.

Just because you see something that you like on an Internet Retailer Top 500 site doesn’t mean it works.

“Poor Mack Collier. That Amy Africa person has him cornered in that mini-room. I’m sure he wants to get away from her but how can he? He’s so polite and well-mannered –“

I tried to stop listening and focus on something — anything else — while words like “aggressive”, “bully”, “witch with a b-” and so on constantly interrupted my thoughts.
The three women — two of whom I know and one of whom I don’t (although it didn’t seem to impact her from making vicious comments about me) — kept on yapping….
Diabolical thoughts of making a loud entrance and dramatic exit from the ladies powder room danced through my brain but alas, my respect for Mack, who was probably waiting outside wondering what in the heck (hey, he’s from Alabama — they say heck down there) was taking me so long, prevented me from making a scene. (And let’s face it, even if I didn’t utter ONE word, it would have been a kitty litter dust-up….)
As I waited not-so-patiently for them to leave, I distracted myself with some of the things that Mack Collier and I had discussed that morning.
Anyone who knows me, knows I’ve had just about enough of social media and the players — many of whom who give new meaning to “the ego grows in the depths of isolation” and most of whom are mean girls (or even worse, mean boys posing as mean girls.)
However, Mack is different. (And no, not just because he’s a Southerner and says things like “damned skippy” which I find amusing for some reason.) He’s a gentleman in every sense of the word; he bends over backwards to help everyone who asks him (even though most of those I’ve witnessed don’t deserve it); he’s gracious and humble as all get out, and most important, he’s not like all the other snake oil salesmen, crawling around the wild world of inbound marketing. (In other words, he actually knows something.)
If it wasn’t for the VERY FEW folks like Mack, I would have given up my QLOG on Day #2 and Twitter on Minute #3. I still hold that most companies get more than enough traffic — and frankly don’t need any more, they just need to figure out a way to convert that traffic to sales — but since the majority of marketers seem to be more interested in creating their own paparazzi (in other words, wasting time on Time-Suck, er, Twitter) than actually selling to people who have actual propensity to buy their products/services, I’ve been forced to learn a little bit about it. (And when I say little, I’m talking teensy-tiny here. Social media will forever be outside my wheelhouse, no matter how many whippersnappers or Bathroom Bimbelinas like the girls above, accuse me of being an old dog unwilling to learn new clicks, er, tricks.)
So, what exactly have I learned from Mack? Here are the top seven things. (Please note, Mack speaks with an accent — not a twang but a touch of social media-ese — so I’ve had to translate these seven sure-fire tips into, well, English.)
1. Not every company should be doing social media but EVERY company should be doing social media MONITORING. Even if you choose not to (or don’t have the time to devote to) spurring and spawning the conversation about your products or services, it’s going to take place. Therefore, you need to develop tools and techniques to make you a better listener. (Icicles are forming in Hell as we speak because I said that.)
2. The idea that content is king in blogging is total BS. Often times folks believe that if they develop a blog, with solid content, people will flock to it. So NOT the case. Mack believes that if you want people to read your blog, you need to work the system — Twitter, Facebook, posting comments on other people’s blogs and so on. From my personal experience, this is a lot of work — however, if you don’t want to put it in the sweat equity, you are going to need to pay for advertising on StumbleUpon, Izea, and HARO or by buying keywords, relevant banner ads, etc. (By the way, this post and the discussion afterwards are worth reading: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/06/idea-that-content-is-king-in-blogging.html.)
3. It really is a case of quality over quantity. As much as it’s tempting to buy 1,000 Facebook Friends for only $29.95, I never do it. (Bad example as I don’t even use Facebook but you get the idea.)
My dear friend, Lois Geller, follows over 4,000 people on Twitter and she’s constantly hammering people who follow none. “Don’t you want to learn?” she’ll say in that sweet, sing-song voice of hers. If I follow 4,000 people will I make more money on Twitter? What about if I follow 10,000 — will that be an exponential increase? Probably not. (Two dozen of the people who follow me do so because of their belief in the “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” saying. I also have thirteen dogs and seven babies. Even if my friend’s kid is going to do business with us, it’s not going to be for at least seventeen years.) I could go on but you get the point.
The number of people who follow you doesn’t guarantee that you will make any money there or anywhere else for that matter either.
Not to mention… if you need to talk to the decision maker to get a sale and the people who follow you are not, well, there just might be a lot of time-wasting, tire-kicking going on.
4. You need to think about the people you are trying to reach. I got my ass kicked with my Are Crazy Women Better in Bed? post. A lot of my readers weren’t happy. People thought it was “over the top” and “too brash — EVEN for me.” Personally, I think its the best post on conversion I’ve ever written but the truth is that my readers were right — it wasn’t written for them. (And yes, I will dedicate a post about why I wrote it when the dust has all settled.) Do I regret writing it? No. Because it served exactly the purpose I wanted it to serve. With that said, if I had known that people were going to be so offended, I may have done what I needed to do some other way. (More about that in #7.)
5. Just because it’s easy to get a blog doesn’t mean it’s easy to maintain it. Yes, I learned this firsthand from wanting to stop mine after say, the THIRD post. (The allure of having one was far more exciting than actually posting on one, that’s for sure.) Mack’s been blogging for over four years and he’s learned a lot along the way — if you want your blog to be successful, it needs to be visually appealing (this is for certain as people see things in pictures, not in text, online); you’ve got to allow your users to comment on it AND you need to respond (I completely blew this on my first couple of posts and now everyone just sends me e-mails, which are nice but miss the whole community-aspect I want); you need to post frequently so your users have a pattern (this is something I am still working on); and above all, you need to create value. Honestly, I usually find all this value-talk a bit too-crunchy-granola-let’s-all-hold-hands-and-sing-kumbaya for my tastes. However, the way Mack explains it actually is a concept that I understand because I often watch our clients struggle with it. Blogging about your products one-by-one is interesting to nobody — not even the merchandisers who selected them. Blogging about how you can solve a problem or help someone become a better something is very interesting. Probably why Kodak’s blog helps you become a better photographer instead of just blogging about their cameras. (More about why your blog sucks can be found here: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/04/five-reasons-why-your-company-blog.html)
6. You will fail. Despite what many so-called social media experts will tell you, there is no magic formula for this stuff. What works for you might not work for me and vice-versa. In one of Mack’s posts, he says that he’s made a lot of mistakes along the way and that what he did when he first started blogging wasn’t exactly like what he’s doing today. He goes on to cite Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk about children and creativity. Children “make a go of it even if they aren’t sure what the right way is.” As we grow older, we become fearful of being wrong which Mack thinks is “mostly right.” (More on that and a link to Robinson’s talk are found here: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/05/you-will-fail-at-social-media.html.) I’ve been at this less than two months and I have made more mistakes than I can count. You get up, dust yourself off and get back in the saddle again.
7. You need to talk about what your readers want you to talk about, not what you want to talk about. Ok, so this is my biggest struggle and perhaps one that I will never conquer. Over half of the people who write me say something rage-inducing like “I love your tips on conversion, now can you please tell me how to take advantage of Twitter?” No. I cannot. I suck at Twitter, I barely use it and I have ZERO expertise where Twitter is concerned. Zero. Zip. None. Nada.
I don’t care how much money you want to throw at me (and the offers have been very generous), I am not going to give you advice on something I know nothing about. I got into this space when NOBODY had an e-mail account and still thought the fax machine was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I have been here through the days when you called someone after you sent them an e-mail to “just make sure they received it” because you didn’t really trust that wacky-cyberspace-thing and I am living through the “how do we make our message work on mobile devices?” age.
Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think social media is ALL a fad — but I also see a life beyond Google. (In 1999, Yahoo was the closest thing to God you could get. Yes, I said Yahoo. NOT Google.)
You need to do what’s best for your business. For you, it might mean building a Facebook fan page or it might mean, improving your lead-form-from-Hell. It may even mean doing both.
But whatever you do, pick your battles. There are some people and some things that are just not worthy of a fight. No matter how much you want to pounce on them.
P.S. If social media is YOUR battle — the war you want to wage — do yourself a favor, contact Mack and ask him about his down-and-dirty social media audit (it’s unbelievably inexpensive and worth every penny.) I don’t get any money from recommending him (so please spare me your e-mails and/or sales pitches) but I adore the guy because he drinks Dr. Pepper, NOT Kool-Aid where social media is concerned. Unlike his counterparts that think social media is the free world’s way to salvation, Mack has a clear idea of what works and what doesn’t and he’ll be more than happy to tell you.
P.P.S. Those social media folks are terrible (read: SUCK, BITE and BLOW) at selling themselves. Mack is a consultant and makes his money off his knowledge, experience and expertise. Please write him only if you are serious and have purchasing authority. If you write him for free advice that you think you are too good or know better than to use, you will have to deal with me. And trust me when I say, I am not from Alabama. I grew up in Vermont. We learn to tip cows five days after we learn to walk.
P.P.P.S. You can reach Mack at mack.collier at gmail.com (Yes, the “at” should be @ but I don’t want to make it easy for the spammers who seem to be so obsessed with me to get his address.) His site is www.mackcollier.com. He also has another site called the Viral Garden. You can find that here: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/. If you want to follow him on Twitter, he’s @mackcollier.

The bloodcurdling screams woke Cristina (name changed to protect the sort-of-innocent) up from her deep slumber.

In a recanting of the tale, she says “These weren’t screams of joy (read: ecstasy) or even the ones you’d get when you fall, but REAL screams – the kind from horror movies except only real.” (Hey, English is her second language. Work with me here.)

Still half-asleep, she sat bolt-upright in her bed thinking: What should she do next? Was she still dreaming?

As the “I’m-being-chased-by-an-axe murderer” shrieks continued, she dialed 911 on her cellphone. Cristina, not the most patient girl, says of the experience “Good Lord, those 911 operators are annoying. They never seem to share my sense of urgency. After explaining to them in excruciating detail what was happening, they transferred me to the police.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the 911 operators could pinpoint exactly where she lived and probably felt that she had been drinking… heavily. The Stepford Wives who live in her ritzy housing complex have so much Botox in their faces, they are unable to smile. There’s less-than-zero chance of them contorting their mouths into a scream. But I digress…

By the time she had gotten transferred (read: “six days later”), the yelps of agony had stopped. She was told the police were already en route (the stablemen can rally up those ponies “real quick” in Houston), so she sat Indian-style in her bed unable to go back to sleep – waiting.

About five minutes later, the wailing started again.

Cristina did not know what to do but she knew she could not just sit there so she fished underneath her bed for the closest weapon. In the South, everyone and their brother has a gun. Or in Cristina’s case – a piece of sports equipment.

“The golf club is the only thing I own that could be used as a weapon,” she explains. “It’s Jorgito’s (her nephew’s) and I’ve had it since I moved into that first apartment by the park. It is very heavy and I have no idea what type it is. It looks like an oversized one that you get at mini golf, so I guess it’s called a putter. I keep it under my bed which is no longer great because I used to be able to reach for it easily. But my new bed is so high, I practically have to fall off to get it. (Let’s be nice and not comment on the last sentence.) Anyway, the only thing that kept on running through my head was that if something really bad happened and I did nothing, I would never be able to sleep again. ”

So, what did Cristina do?

Southerners tend to do this thing where they’ll say something really awful about someone (i.e., “he’s dumber than a box of rocks”) and then finish it up with “bless his heart” to make it all better. So, in the spirit of the story, blind-as-a-bat (the girl cannot see an inch in front of her face without her contacts or glasses) and in ripped-in-all-the-wrong-places, polka-dotted, silk pajamas, BLESS HER HEART, Cristina and her flimsy putter stepped out of her apartment to rescue the damsel in distress.

As she rounded the corner with her KILLER WEAPON CHOICE (aka THE putter), Cristina heard someone behind her.

She stopped and slowly turned around to face a VERY LARGE, BEEFY, BURLY guy with a VERY SCARY LOOKING gun (“like the ones in Die Hard”). She nicely summed him up by saying “He looked like he meant business EXCEPT he had a better choice of weapon.” (Newsflash Cristina: You can’t hit a tee-ball on its FLIPPING stand, BLESS YOUR HEART, YOUR KIDNEYS AND YOUR LIVER TOO, so I’m not sure how you think you are going to be a death machine with your dime-store putter.)

Stunned, she turned around and faced yet another Hulk-of-a-man (thankfully, this time it was her neighbor) with an even bigger semi-automatic weapon.

“It’s best if you step inside.” He mumble-shouted. Well, that could be an embellishment. His accent was so thick, she couldn’t really understand him. He probably said “Get inside, you putter-bearing idiot, or I will blast you to smithereens!” (Sorry, I’m not up to date on my Will Smith lingo.)

Like a deer stuck in the headlights, Cristina didn’t move. “N-O-W, MISSY.” The neighbor bellowed as he pulled back on the charging handle to chamber a round. Cristina recalls, “That was an unmistakable sound and very scary, so it was basically all I heard.”

Cristina scurried inside. (God only knows why – a putter always wins out over cop-killing weapons. Hasn’t she seen “24”?)

In what-seemed-like-forever-and-was-probably-a-minute, the screams stopped. Ten minutes later, she heard sirens. Then an ambulance.

What’s the point of this silly tale? (Yes, shockingly enough, there is one.)

Cristina is the marketing director of a very successful, very well-run, B2B catalog that sells to two DYING markets. (We’re talking dusting the seats of the Titanic here, folks.) One of them is automotive dealerships if that tells you anything. And their business is thriving. Yes, you read that correctly. THRIVING – in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad economy!

Why, you may ask? Easy. They use us to help them.

SERIOUSLY, the reason is that Cristina approaches her market just the way she approached what happened at her chi-chi-la-la apartment complex. She is VERY aggressive and she will use whatever tools she has in her arsenal (even if it’s a flipping putter) to win. She doesn’t always have access to the latest and greatest shiny things, but she takes what she does have and uses it to her advantage. She has a great team that’s all on the same page — and they work really hard to get stuff done.

Many marketers are paralyzed with fear these days. Their lack of action creates exactly what they were afraid of. This is not Cristina’s case. She has decreased her offline prospecting efforts and put money into her more profitable online marketing. She has increased her e-mail frequency (Much to the dismay of a couple of her employees who felt she was overmailing, she has actually increased response and profits by e-mailing MORE!) Put simply, she has cut out the fluff and done more stuff.

Below, you’ll find seven ideas for getting more bang for your marketing buck. And, if you don’t have a gun and can’t get a bang, read it as seven ideas for one-putting every green.

P.S. To this day, Cristina does not know what really happened – only that she got a flyer underneath her door saying there was a home invasion and that someone was attacked. The guy was arrested and there was a statement that all tenants were responsible for their own safety (Nothing like sensitive building owners reminding you that they are not liable if you get butchered on their premises).

7 SURE-FIRE TIPS YOU CAN USE TO IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK

1. Read and react.
Online companies are more fluid than offline companies – you have a huge opportunity to continuously improve what you are doing. A good example of this is PPC spending. It blows my mind how many people set a monthly budget for PPC and then spend just to that number. Sure, they may allocate more money at Christmas than they do in July but the reality is that when the money is gone for the month they wait till the next month. For the love of all things holy, PPC is a numbers game! You need to make hay while the sun shines! Figure out the cost per sale that you are willing to accept. If your program is profitable, don’t throw away sales just because you’ve used your entire budget in the first week – re-evaluate and readjust accordingly.

2. Start paying attention to your organics.
When paid search came into play, many marketers got lazy and abandoned all their organic efforts. That’s a shame of epic proportions as for many companies, organic results are their best converters – not to mention that you can’t beat the price (FREE!) The best thing about organics is that you don’t need to build Rome in a day – doing small things over a period of time can often make a difference. Look at your page titles; make sure your URL strings are simple and static; ensure your redirects are set-up properly; use meaningful links (for example, click here is NOT good); check your meta descriptions (aka elevator pitches) to make sure they are aggressive enough to get someone to click; and use H1 heading tags for content titles.

3. Determine whether or not you’re e-mailing enough.
I can already tell you, you’re not.

4. Develop a trigger e-mail program.
Trigger e-mails (aka on-demand or good dog e-mails) are e-mails based on an action. They have better deliverability, open rates, clickthrough rates and conversion. The best trigger e-mails are typically abandoned cart (or lead form) e-mails, but there are dozens of others too – thank you’s (signing up for a free catalog or newsletter), confirmations (for orders or quote requests), abandoned search e-mails, EBOPP’s (e-mails based on past purchases) and more. Triggers needn’t be fancy but they should be personalized based on the user and the good, bad or indifferent things he did on your site.

5. Consider live chat.
In the old days (four years ago), I was not a big fan of chat. Very few people knew how to work it and it was expensive. These days it’s dirt cheap (sometimes even free) and there’s a lot of good information out there on how to best set up your program. Consider using chat on your highest exit pages (or the pages that lead up to them) – search and checkout, for example. You should start first with user-directed support (they click to start the conversation with you.) Then, when you master that go on to instigated chat (you start the conversation with them), which usually performs about 4-5 times better, right out of the gate.

6. Use exit pop-ups and other rat traps.
(Yes, traps.) Just this morning, I got yet another e-mail from a client listing the reasons why they are morally opposed to pop-ups. For some reason, these type of e-mails always strike me as amusing. Just because you don’t like them that automatically means your customers won’t, right? Oh wait, the logic is that EVERYONE in the world blocks them, even though most people don’t even know what they are or what they are called. The fact of the matter is that even if 80% of your users blocked them (which they won’t), they’d still work.

Exit pop-ups are effective because the user MUST interact with them – there’s no choice in the matter. They are also one of the strongest action directives you can use on your site. They’re perfect for reminding people of abandoned carts; executing short surveys; promoting e-mail sign-ups; and more. In the end, if the user sees an exit pop-up, that means they are leaving your site without doing what you wanted them to do. Don’t you owe it to them – and yourself – to give them one last pitch of why you want their business before they walk out the door? (Correct answer: YES!).

7. If you’re not using it, consider getting rid of it.
It blows my mind how many companies have these fancy-schmancy packages (statistical packages, for example) that they do not use. If you’re paying a lot of money for something and are not using it, think twice about whether or not you really need it. I have a client who cut over a million dollars from their budget this year just by substituting packages. For example, they were paying about $200,000 per year for a split-test package that they had only used twice in the year (both times unsuccessfully.) They dumped it and implemented Google Optimizer instead. Is Google Optimizer better than the old package? No, but it works… and in this economy that’s what counts.

“That’s a Birkin Bag! Ohmigod, you have a Birkin bag!” She shrieked…Her nails-on-a-chalkboard voice interrupting my ever-so-peaceful slumber. “An Hermes Birkin Bag. You have an Hermes Birkin Bag… at the beach no less! How on earth did you get it?”

I pretended to be dead.

In a high-pitched shrill that only a dolphin could understand, she droned on and on about movie stars and waiting lists and other things I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in.

I was doing my best to ignore her. Focusing on my deep yoga breathing (in from the core, out through the nose) while simultaneously writing a note to Bose in my head. (Dear Bose, I would like a refund for my noise-canceling headphones immediately. They obviously are defective or you are guilty of VERY false advertising.)

She continued assessing my belongings in a most officious manner. “Prada sunglasses… A Chanel bathing suit… A Louis Vuitton beach towel…. That cover-up? What is it? Looks like Dolce…” I thought for a second I should tell her it was Cavalli but I didn’t have the heart. Obviously she was taking her prospective job interview at Sotheby’s very seriously.

Despite my repeated (and most earnest) pleas to the mythological Gods of the Ocean, this woman wasn’t going to leave till I acknowledged her. Little did she know, I had no plans to do so. I tried to focus on the waves (read: summon things that could come out of the ocean to bite her.)

“All those nice, expensive things and your website sucks.”

I burst out laughing. That did it. She won.

I sat up and stared at her intently trying to place her. I had no earthly idea who she was.

“How exactly do you know what my website looks like?” I asked.

“My husband. You helped him build his business. OUR business. He goes on and on about you like you are some sort of saint so I finally looked you up last night. Your eightbyeight.com site? It’s very ugly.”

I smiled, imagining what she would have thought of it before we redesigned it a couple months ago. She probably would have had a heart attack. I instantly regretted moving to the new site.

She prattled on in her perky bimbelina sort of fashion. “You obviously have some taste, even though it’s disrespectful to bring that kind of bag to the beach. And I should be thanking you, I guess…. Maybe… But last night when my husband went out to his game…”

Ahhh… Finally… The lightbulb went off in my head… Yes, her husband. Founder of one of the most successful e-commerce companies in the last decade and one of my poker buddies. (I use the word “buddies” for everyone who gives me money!)

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he had a thing for you but he only likes skinny, voluptuous blondes, three things you’re not.” She covered her mouth as if she was horrified by her oh-so-intentional comment.

It took everything I had to resist the temptation… If her husband preferred Barbie Dolls, he may have spent less time eyeing the Asian cocktail waitress and not have lost his shirt at the card table the night before. But I didn’t say anything. (In consulting, this is what we call client confidentiality.)

On and on she went like the Energizer bunny. “So it really must be that your stuff works. I mean our sites are much prettier than yours, but they’re not at all as nice as they’d be if YOU weren’t involved.” She sniped in a rather accusing tone.

Good Lord. Did this woman have an on/off switch behind her neck that I could grab hold of?

While I plotted plotting her imminent demise (burying her alive in the sand would be a public service, right?), she plopped down on my towel as if we were best buddies. (Note to self: Adjust our contract to say that client relations don’t extend to their spouses. Oh, and double our rates to a very specific client for his oh-so-bothersome wife.)

“So, tell me, why does your site look like the way it does? Don’t you care at all about your brand?”

And there it was. The infamous branding question. The one that we get asked day in and day out.

The query I had traveled thousands of miles to avoid even for just a couple days…

You know, the one that sends me over the edge every single time.

It would have been easier to explain to her the meaning of life. In fact, it would have been simpler to teach this Beachtime Betty about quantum physics.

“I don’t believe in online branding.” I said making sure to slowly enunciate every word just so she wouldn’t miss one.

She started to say something but I interrupted. Nirvana awaited. If I was ever going to get back to tranquility, I was going to have to make this fast. “Offline branding takes time, money or both. Online, most companies have neither. On the off-chance they do have the money, they aren’t necessarily going to have the time but even if they did that’s not what customers care about. They care about finding what they want and buying or obtaining it quickly with as little outside intervention as possible.”

I paused for a moment and then continued. “Sites like Amazon, eBags, and eBay are not necessarily pretty but they work because they meet the user’s base requirements. Most sites today ignore the users and design for the CEO (read: OR his annoying wife) completely ignoring what the users want and need. If you are a good site, you need to design it for the user which means you need a good entry page, solid navigation that works independently of your text search function, a perfect cart and checkout and…”

“But our site….” She interjected.

I cut her off at the pass. “In the big scheme of things, your site isn’t all that pretty either. You are lucky in that you have a gorgeous, multi-dimensional product. Your business is successful because you have an easy-to-use checkout, fantastic delivery and a great e-mail follow-up program that really works. Not to mention that you were also in your market first.” I said in the most condescending tone I could muster hoping that the whole authority position would work.

“If we had less of those boring words….”

In the South, they have a saying “it’s harder than putting pantyhose on a snake.” I always wondered who came up with that – sitting on a porch rocker, kicking back a couple Buds, thinking about wrestling Hanes Her Way on some legless viper.

This conversation defined puttin’ Spanx on a Sidewinder and unfortunately, it was far less stimulating.

“Those ‘boring words’ are what gets you most of your traffic. Search engines can’t read pictures. They can only read text. You use those words to get them to crawl your site to give you organic rankings. You know, the free ones, that get you business so you can stay at chi-chi-la-la places like these.” I retorted.

She kicked up some sand with her hoochie-mama-red toes. “Well, I guess it’s not my site that I am worried about anyway, it’s yours. I mean, you are our consultant after all and we are a company that needs to be cautious about the company we keep.”

I would have laughed in her face except she was so darn serious.

“I agree.” I said. “The eightbyeight.com site is not at all what I wanted.”

She looked like she had won the sweepstakes. (Correction: she won the lottery when she got married. She looked like she had won the Miss Universe Pageant or something of equal importance.)

“I wanted Flash, all sorts of animation and long-form video. But we read our stats and that’s not our customer base. People come to our site for information and we deliver it the best way we know how. It’s not perfect but it has a lot of tips and techniques you can use to build your business which is our brand. Folks don’t come to my conferences because I wear Armani and they certainly don’t see me over and over because I am the most polished speaker (I’m not) with the fanciest PowerPoint presentations. (You’re lucky to get slides.) They come because we have really good information that’s practically guaranteed to improve your business and most of it won’t even cost you a lot of money.”

She remained completely unconvinced.

I desperately wanted my towel back so I thought for a moment and then said, “One of my favorite clients bought me this Birkin Bag after he quadrupled his sales while cutting his online marketing and advertising costs in half in a down market. Do you own one?”

“No, but I wish I did.” She pouted. “Maybe you could talk to my husband while you are here about those nasty abandoner-people we have. He says you know how to make them convert.”

And it was then, and only then, that she truly understood. I guess if you have the right message (which includes the right offer and the right product), it really doesn’t matter what your site looks like.

5 Things Customers Really Do Care About (and not one of them has to do with pretty designs)

1. A solid entry page.
This is a huge determinate of your online success and really sets the tone for your overall site conversion. The rule of thumb for entry pages is to change them based on your user traffic – look at how many days it takes for your user to repeat (in other words, visit your site again) and change your entry page in half that time.

For example, if your typical user repeats in six days, change the page in three. The changes don’t need to be major, they just need to be in the top of the middle and right-hand columns and enough to make the user take notice.

2. Navigation that works.
Navigation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get what I give you. If I don’t give it to you, you don’t get it. If you don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

Users never talk about searching for something, they talk about finding what they want. Three-tiered navigation tends to work best. The top navigation serves as the action bar, the left-hand serves as the index and the bottom is a repeat of the top (primarily for your more sophisticated users.) There’s no such thing as right-hand navigation. Instead the right-hand serves as the “save column” – it’s the last stop a user will look before they leave your site so you need to do everything in your power using plugs (non-animated banners) and “stickies” (recently viewed items, for instance) to get them back into your site.

3. The perfect checkout.
There are many mysteries in life, how to create the ideal checkout is not one of them. There is a magic formula that everyone should follow. It’s a five-step checkout that includes Welcome (an absolute must have), Bill-To, Ship-To, Payment and Delivery Options and the Confirmation. (Your View Cart page is separate from checkout.) After you master it (meaning you know exactly where and when your users abandon), you can move to a single-step checkout but you shouldn’t do it before then.

4. A trigger e-mail program.
All e-mails are not created equally. Trigger e-mails, aka Good Dog e-mails, go out to users after they perform specific actions. They’re typically known for thank you’s and confirmations but there’s a whole level of triggers beyond that for things like abandoned carts, failed searches, site exits, EBOPP’s (e-mails based on past purchases), EBOSI’s (e-mails based on selected interests) and many others. Triggers typically have much better deliverability and drastically-increased conversion than thrusts e-mails.

5. Easy ways to find you.
Technically this shouldn’t have been last, it should have been first because if your users can’t find you all of the above is moot. It goes without saying that you need to be well-ranked in search engines, directories, and alternates (things like price comparison engines). For those of you who are only doing PPC and not worrying at all about the others, you should take a cold, hard look at your traffic driving strategies. Organic rankings are incredibly important and should not be treated like a red-headed stepchild. Same with data feeds.

6. BONUS: Evidence.
Users go online for three reasons: speed (we think it’s faster); self service (we think we can track our packages at fedex.com better than someone who has worked at FedEx for 20 years), and to collect evidence (we want to know that there are other people just like us or who we aspire to be). As internet shopping becomes more and more sophisticated, evidence becomes increasingly important. From a user’s perspective, evidence is user reviews, bestseller’s lists and bursts, polls and surveys, testimonials, lifestyle pictures of people, ask the experts and so on. (Evidence should not be confused with Social Media. Social Media has some evidence-type things but they are different in that “evidence” takes place on your site and your site alone.