Marketing Trenches

Had a discussion with a professional services firm today regarding a problem they’re experiencing.  The problem revolves around a very simple yet often overlooked page on the typical company website - the contact form.  This company recently redesigned their website, and while site traffic has been rising, their lead volume from these site contact forms has been declining.  As a matter of fact, the numbers from their web analytics package were pretty staggering - in the last month alone, 476 page views of the contact page, and only 3 form submissions.

While we looked under a bunch of rocks to rule out other problems, one look at the contact page told me everything I needed to know.  Here are the problems, and the prescribed medication:

Problem #1: The page is waaaay too crowded.  Lots of links, lots of imagery, lots of reasons to leave.

Solution #1: Treat someone sitting on your contact page like someone sitting at your cash register ready to make a purchase, except in this case remove the Snickers bars, the US Weekly and the Chapstick display.  Remove all clutter other than the essentials.

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For the millions of us watching CNN on election night and the 6 months preceding it, the segment that was most impressive had nothing to with the 18 talking heads on set.  It was John King’s mastery of the touch screen map.  Call him the new Czar of the Telestrator (my apologies to Mike Fratello), call him the Master of the Map, call him whatever you want…his almost error-free execution of those segments was damn impressive.  Of course, the show he put on would not have been possible without the existence of the analytics data surrounding the performance.

This offers further proof that we live in a analytics and data-obsessed society.  In sports, we love stats like earned run average and quarterback rating even if none of us can figure out where those numbers come from.  In politics, we love knowing that in Somerset County, 31.8% of white males under the age of 39 who claim Cheerios as their favorite cereal voted for Obama on election night.  In business, we love our business intelligence.  We love our decision analysis tools.  We love our web analytics. 

Businesses that use some form of analytics, or data collection and reporting tools, are at a distinct advantage over those that do not.  There is no disputing that.  So why do so many businesses, both large and small, run away from putting analytics tools in place?

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