Shoppers always want a quick and convenient checkout and instinctively head for the shortest line. Even if you are not “selling” anything online, the concept is no different. The number one thing you can do to increase your conversion rate is to optimize your process’ flow. Creating a  process that uses as few steps/pages as possible and requires potential prospects to jump through fewer hoops can encourage them to complete the process on your site.

As IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller puts it in a recent CNET article, “One of the greatest barriers to buying things is the steps that it takes, and we all know the difference when you go to Amazon and you just push your little thing and it’s bought, paid for, delivered, billed, etc., instantly, and [...] how much that has made the difference between just browsing and buying…that little thing, [...] you scroll it, you do it, it comes, everything else is taken care of, is the answer to what’s going to happen on the Internet when, in fact, we get the applicability of that broadly.”

Some easy steps to help the conversion flow:

1. Low Barrier Entry:
An email address is really the only bit of information you need to contact me. Don’t scare me off by asking for too much personal info up front. Capturing my email address now gives you permission to get in touch with me… even if I don’t go through the whole process.

2. Save My Information:
If I bought something from you once, I may return. Don’t make me re-enter my information. Keeping my shipping information and credit card “on file” will make my experience quick, easy and convenient.

3. Include a Customer Service Contact:
Regardless of how much you simplify your checkout, I may still require assistance. If I can’t find the answer I need, I have no choice but to abandon my cart to find your site’s help page, or worse, make my purchase on your competitor’s site.

4. Following up is NOT begging:
Even if you optimize your process to be super low barrier, there may be “other” reasons beyond your control that cause me to not complete the process. So, don’t ignore the fact that I was interested to begin with. You have my email address now, after all, so follow up with me - remind me why I was there in the first place; ask me if I’m still interested; send me a coupon to get me to come back… just don’t forget about me once I’ve taken that first step.

BofA is part of a growing number of companies who are already utilizing the wildly popular Twitter tool – becoming the largest financial institution in the world using a social media tool for customer service.

What makes BofA’s use of Twitter so remarkable is that they are using a real person with a real name and an actual photo (not a logo or other avatar). Using the twitter handle @BofA_help, David Knapp is Bank of America’s Twitter Representative. I was amazed and impressed to discover that he is not just a CSR appointed to be the “face of Bank of America” on twitter, but David is actually the senior vice president and market manager for middle market commercial banking. I was also delighted by how genuine and immediate his responses were.

Out of frustration about a recent snafu with my finances, I posted this message to the twittersphere,

“BofA is charging me (long time customer) $350 in NSF fees, for a simple mistake. Maybe it’s time to switch banks.”

to which, within an hour, I received this response,

“BofA_help@kzarecki I work for Bank of America, anything I can do to help?”

The idea that BofA’s Twitter rep proactively goes out to find customers who need help threw me for a loop. This is something we’re not used to any more – Actual “Customer Service”.

I have to admit I was skeptical about any type of a resolution, as I had already attempted to work something out by calling BofA customer service line 3 times. But David Knapp asked me to follow up with my contact info and a description of the circumstances. I figured that it couldn’t hurt to give it one more shot, so I did. The very next morning, I received a phone call – not an email… not a form letter in the mail box… and actual live person, and not a CSR, mind you (I didn’t catch the guy’s name, but I think it was Mr. Knapp’s boss!) called me to say, “I think the right thing to do is credit you back [all but one of the ten $35 overdraft fees].”

Honestly, it almost brought a tear to my eye. Not just because I got most of my money back, but because I didn’t feel like just another no-name customer – all the personal attention made me feel like I was integral to the success of the company and my happiness is important. Seth Godin says in his post about in-bound customer service, “…the goal of every single interaction should be to upgrade the brand’s value in the eye of the caller and to learn something about how to do better, not to get the caller to just go away.” I applaud BofA for putting an actual face and person behind the twitter account and having a real person follow up with a phone call. While I may not be their most profitable customer, the treatment I received made me feel like I was worth a million bucks. Now, THAT is what I call “customer service”.

Why originate when you can emulate?

“Emulation means never having to visualize and describe…. it’s cheaper to borrow rather than buy.”, According to nerdless.com.

**** All sarcasm from here on out, people… but the content in quotes is actually from their website. ****

Finally,  folks, you no longer have to take any ownership in your presence on the web.
Too busy to spend time working with a web company to develop your corporate site?
Only want to be as good as your competition?
Don’t want to be unique or stand out among the crowd?

Then we have the perfect thing for you!

Now you can just  steal borrow from those who have already done it.

That’s right, kids!
“Emulating an existing design eliminates a lot of back-and-forth between you and your site builder, saving time.” You’re a busy person. You don’t have time to waste talking with a professional website design company. C’mon, nobody cares if your site is user friendly, standards compliant or that all your page titles are the same! As long as you LOOK like those other guys who are making the money, you will too! And you just KNOW that if YOU think that other site is “cool” then everyone will think YOUR site is just as awesome!

HEY! “Get over your worries about being an imitator. Unless you emulate a direct competitor, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever see both the original site and your emulation.”

See kids… it’s O.K.to steal borrow what other designers have created as long as no one will ever see the original AND your copy side by side. So, copy that design… download those cool photos you found on Google Images… and use that copy you hacked together from those other sites…and you’ll have yourself a brand new website you can call your own. Won’t you be soooo proud to show this off? And what a time and money saver. Gosh, why didn’t YOU think of it? Yes, proud website owner… don’t bother trying to be the best, when you can just look like the best?! (let’s see how long that will work.)

OH, by the way… those other websites you’re stealing from… who do you think designed them? I’m pretty sure they didn’t copy from someplace else. Do you suppose they maybe took their business seriously, dedicated some time and resources to their investment, and worked with professional web designers and developers to create a website that actually caters to their goals and needs. Yeah… probably more likely.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” - Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832) … but when it comes to the web, imitation is just bad business.

Seth Godin’s recent post “Ignore sunk costs” shows a photo of a store front sign with the largest word spelled incorrectly, and suggests that “just because the guy spent a lot on the sign for his store doesn’t mean he shouldn’t spend more to spell the biggest word properly. The amount he already spent is irrelevant. What matters is what the benefit of spelling ’stationery’ properly will be.”

The same concept can be applied to your website. Yes, you may have sunk several thousands of dollars into having your website built 5 years ago,  but a lot has changed since then. More people have hi-speed internet access, better monitors, web browsers are more sophisticated and above all, web users are way more savvy and have higher expectations from websites that they visit. So, what have you done with your website since you had it done 5 years ago?

I know. You paid good money to have all that fancy Flash® animation done, and made sure that Pachelbel’s Canon plays on every page, but who cares? No, really, WHO CARES? Does it convert? I mean, are people actually going back to your website and saying, “OMG, I LOVE all those Flash® animations! I think I’ll buy more of their products!” NO! And I’m not speaking just about the “design” of your site, I’m talking usability, conversions, and yes… SEO.

Simply put, just having a brochure-type website and hoping that “If I build it, they will come” just doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to rethink your web presence. Don’t think about how much money you spent to have it done. That initial investment has already paid for itself. If it hasn’t, all the more reason to do something about it.

Like Seth says, “When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past.”

• Making a website standards compliant
• Appropriate use of “alt” attributes on images
• Appropriate use of “title” tags (and attributes)
• Using CSS for layout (thus making the HTML more compact and easier to get through)
• Use of appropriate content and keywords

The list above won’t do much to increase your rankings in the search engines unless your competition is nonexistant on the web. So, what needs to be done to actively pursue increasing your ranking in the search engines? Well, that is where “Search Engine Marketing” (SEM) comes in. With an active search engine marketing campaign, you can cultivate your website over time and show those search engines that you have a site that is well taken care of and relevant to people.

Websites should not be viewed as static bits of code that just “sit there” until someone stumbles across them. They should not be put out on the web just “to have something out there”. With a nurturing environment, a website can grow and thrive and attract a community of users that value what the site has to offer. Just like people need to be taken care of and encouraged, websites need frequent attention to be seen as successful, high-ranking sites in the eyes of search engines (and users).

Internet Explorer 8 has been in development since sometime in 2006 (as well as being in public beta for over a year) and is purported by the dev team to be one of the most standards-compliant browsers on the market. And it’s true that an early beta version of IE8 passed the Web Standards Project’s ACID2 test (although it’s worth mentioning that other browsers have been passing this test with ease for quite some time already). That’s good news for web developers (like us) who typically have to wrestle with various versions of Internet Explorer to get it to render standards-compliant web pages correctly. We probably have our favorite browser - Mozilla’s Firefox - to thank for that, since their standards-compliant browser has been steadily eating into Microsoft’s share of the browser market.

Some of the improved security features include private browsing and better (the best?) malware blocking. Also touted are new features such as web slices and accelerators. Web slices allow users to save just a portion of a page that IE will keep updated (although I think this is dependent on the page developer marking a section off as a “slice”) and accelerators are a way for page developers to automatically include links to web services or sites in a context-sensitive way. I’ll have to check those features out more to really get a handle on what they can do.

Now I just need to figure out how to install IE8 side-by-side with IE7 for testing…

Links:

• Internet Explorer 8 home page
• Direct download for Windows XP
• Direct download for Windows Vista

Chocked full of “B” vitamins and caffeine, Dairy House’s “STAMPEDE” Energy Chocolate Milk delivers a boost of energy in a delicious, creamy drink.

Look for it soon in your grocers dairy case!

Steve Crowe was an amazing man that knew almost everything about everything. He performed often at the pipe organ at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis and the Lincoln Theatre in Belleville while at the same time running a coal transportation business in Venezuela, managing a farm in Illinois, selling and cracking safes (shame when you forget the combination), grading and brokering fine gems, tearing down buildings, opening movie
theatres, and most importantly having a huge heart and being a great friend.

Steve introduced Stan Kann to Tower29. The legendary organist of the Fox Theatre and Steve shared a mutual love of music and performing. We are privileged to have handled Stan Kann’s media production needs over the years and sharing many wonderful moments at meetings and events with him.

Steve and Stan you are missed.

(l-r) Stan Kann, Steve Crowe and Tom Bommarito enjoying each other's company at a Tower29 bbq.

This isn’t to say that there is no “silver bullet”. However, we need to use the analogy correctly. Just as garlic and a stake-to-the-heart will work on vampires, silver bullets are specifically reserved for werewolves; zombies must be decapitated; ghosts - busted; etc. The idea is that each individual target requires it’s own unique approach. Hence, “target” marketing.

An effective targeted or “direct” marketing campaign uses one or more advertising media to generate a response that can be measured. This is often referred to as a “conversion”. Measuring these conversions will allow business owners to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns

For this very reason, Internet Marketing has become more and more important to a successful business marketing strategy. It’s not that the internet is where all of your particular customers are to the exclusion of traditional media. We will never claim that someone who stumbles on your website is definitely going to buy something from you right then and there. But, by paying attention to the results of your efforts, we can track, measure and significantly improve your marketing effectiveness.

So, we test ideas, analyze results and use these results to develop strategies. We expose your most profitable products and services to those whom are most likely to benefit from them. Monitor the results and make adjustments. If you don’t sell products online, your goal may be to capture viewer data, offer information, coupons, white papers, establish a connection, create a dialog [BLOG]. Even if you have no intentions of ever selling products or services online, you know the advantage of having more of the single most significant business resources at your disposal. Viewers.

If your target is werewolves, there IS a silver bullet. If your target is vampires, use garlic. Whatever the case, know your target and use the appropriate “weapon”. If you go in unarmed, without an effective internet marketing strategy, you have already lost.

About Hot Legs of Kansas City

We cooked up a pretty cool contest and we’re calling it Hot Legs of Kansas City. Here’s how it works: We’ve recruited 16 notable Kansas Citians — doctors, dentists, athletes, broadcasters, students, entrepreneurs and business superstars — to compete to earn the title of “Hot Legs of KC.” Chances are, you know one or two of these amazing and committed people. They all want to win this fundraising challenge, and here’s how you can help them sprint across the finish line.

About the Touched by Cancer Foundation

The Foundation was formed to empower those touched by cancer — either through a personal diagnosis or the diagnosis of a family member or friend — to embrace life and not accept a cancer diagnosis as a death sentence.  Touched by Cancer helps provide hope by sharing understandable, useful education and funding treatment-related and wellness-related grants in our communities.  The Foundation’s educational programs focus on diagnosis; treatment; patient advocacy; nutrition; complementary therapies; coping strategies; and, most importantly, sharing what others touched by cancer have learned on their healing journeys.

After multiple attempts by the Post-Dispatch’s photographer to catch us in the act of doing work, he was lucky enough to snap this quick shot of Tower29’s creative director, Ken Zarecki.  My guess is he was either checking his email or reading about whatever Apple’s next life-changing application might be, but no one reading today’s newspaper will ever know.

Check out the Post’s story on our building, the Ludwig Lofts.

Codename: Midori (everything needs a codename, right?) is what looks to be the new direction in a post-Windows world. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Microsoft dominates PCs all over the world. All this legacy code and thinking has come with some significant baggage when it comes to the way that people now want to use technology. More and more I find myself wanting to be able to access everything from a central location instead of emailing myself reminders to do things on the computer when I get home. Virtualization, Terminal Services, Remote Desktop, GoToMyPC, VNC, Box, Orb, Google Docs, synchronization software (remember the ‘briefcase’ icon on old laptops?), online project and client management software, even online email access… The list goes on and on of software and services that are either centrally hosted or that provide ways to easily access systems that have the stuff you want.

Thin clients were a great idea for corporations in the past, but have been waning in popularity - until recently. It may not be too long before you can access anything you want from work, home, phone, or maybe even public-access internet kiosks.

So… do you think the death of the OS as we know it is inevitable? Is Google going to end up dominating the new computing world with an online version of an operating system? Are the computers of the future just going to be dumb terminals that can only access the internet?

In the field of online marketing the act of noticing goes into hyperdrive. Information across the World Wide Web is experienced differently than driving down a road, walking through a museum or reading the morning newspaper. A loading web page is an onslaught of text and images battling for attention. Web surfers consume hundreds of lines of source code and decide which data they like/dislike or need/don’t need in a split second. Quantitative and qualitative analytics gives us insight to surfing habits, tracks our goal conversions and referring links but the power of noticing contributes to our ability to respond, adapt and deliver.

It all begins with the fundamental art of noticing that Portigal and Soltzberg discuss. Soltzberg says “There’s another classic Zen concept that everything you need to know and experience is already happening and present, but you need to get your old ways of thinking out of the way so you can experience it. Doing contextual research is like using “super-noticing power” to peel back those layers of preconception, culture and habit. When you do that you get to something fundamental and then you’ve got a really solid platform for developing new concepts.”

Maybe you have never really consciously exercised “noticing power” or maybe you have forgotten how important it is. Try some of the noticing exercises mentioned in Portigal and Soltzberg’s discussion. You will be surprised to realize how many things you are actually experiencing but not really noticing.

At the end of the day July 14th, Dennis Phillips holds onto nearly 25% of the chips in play (26,420,000) with 9 players left in the 2008 WSOP Main Event. I have been seated at the table with Dennis many times and his “extremely aggressive” play, as Andrew Feldman at ESPN refers to it, is definitely not out of character.

For the first time in WSOP history, there will be a 4 month break between the 10th player going out and the final table.  Play will resume November 9th & 10th to determine who earns the coveted WSOP Main Event bracelet and the $9,119,338 first prize.  According to the ESPN WSOP broadcast schedule, the final table action will be edited immediately and aired on ESPN November 11th at 8pm (CST).

Good luck Dennis!

Here’s a list of 29 benefits you should consider for using a blog on your business’ website:

1. Build an active community around your company & products (subscribers, comments, etc.)
2. Easily generate new content, quickly
3. Search Engine (SEO) benefits from the additional content
4. Humanize your business
5. Create more inbound links to your fresh content
6. Promote your brand
7. Direct communication to your clients & potential customers
8. Reputation Management tool allowing you to respond to any negative comments and address criticism directly
9. Inspire others to use your product/service through real stories of helping your clients succeed
10. Great public relations tool that the media can reference in their articles & reports
11. Become an industry expert & resource
12. Supports & integrates with all of your company’s marketing initiatives
13. Gives your visitors a reason to return to your site
14. Introduce clients & potential customers to your new products and/or services
15. Encourage ‘Word of mouth’ advertising in the online world
16. Network with others in your industry
17. Educate your customer about you, your company and your products / services
18. Evaluate your customers’ opinion of your company / product
19. Earn credibility by sharing your challenges & solutions
20. Increase Search Engine visibility easily by creating a wider variety of content
21. Allow your colleagues to contribute content without technical limitations
22. Blogging is fun
23. Communicate in a more casual/candid way
24. A great recruiting tool
25. A crisis management tool
26. Encourage interactivity within your organization
27. Respond quickly to current events
28. Another excuse to fill your meetings with buzzwords… “Blog”
29. Impress your neighbors

As someone with loved ones who have battled breast cancer (My Mom is 5 years cancer free!), participating in the Race for the Cure imparts a sense of togetherness with so many that have helped friends and family fight breast cancer. For those brave women currently in the battle, I only wish that the Race for the Cure inspires a little hope along their way to being cancer free.

It is estimated that 182,460 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008.

Visit the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure St. Louis

Here’s the Tower29 office (before it was our office):

View Larger Map

2323 Kazakhs have downloaded the latest release of Mozilla Firefox 3, as of the 21st hour of “Download Day 2008“.

The Firefox team set out on a mission to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period.  At the time of this writing, they have reported more than 7.22 million downloads worldwide.

If you are still using Internet Explorer, I’m sorry.  I’d highly recommend checking into Firefox, a free, open-source, standards-based web browser that makes life easier for web developers by following the rules.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our office during the Ludwig Lofts Grand Opening ceremony and participated in the drawing.

We’re propping open our doors to welcome all of our friends and neighbors at the LoftWorks Grand Opening event. Press 3W, come on in and snag yourself a bag of goodies. Enjoy some snacks and beverages while you’re here. Watch for the occasional NERF dart.

Join us for the Grand Opening of the Ludwig Lofts. Mayor Francis Slay and the Downtown St. Louis Partnership cordially invite you to join Craig Heller and LoftWorks as they celebrate the Grand Opening of the Ludwig Lofts. The event will feature Landmarks Association of Saint Louis in the 2008 Preservation Week kick-off. Originally built in 1905 for a music company, this seven-story building has been home to the Ludwig Aeolian piano store for 66 years, from 1920 to 1986.

New commercial spaces and residential display will be open during the Grand Opening event. Commercial tenants include Simply Elegant Bridal, SUDA Architects & Associates, Signature Studio Creative Photography, Meyer Financial Group, Tower29 Marketing Group, Where Magazine – St. Louis, Ebersoldt + Underwood Architecture and Saint Louis Bride Magazine.

“It took us seven years to reach our first billion in online sales, and at our current pace and growth rate it will take us less than three years to hit our next billion” — Jim Ensign, VP of Marketing at Papa John’s.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/biztech/05/08/papa.johns.ap/

The Pizza industry is a great example of a business model that may never have felt the pains of ignoring online ordering.  Their business would have continued as it had pre-2001 — taking phone orders and profiting.  Instead, they took the leap; taking online orders, purchasing hardware for all their locations and dealing with all the unknowns that this system must have introduced.  In 2007, Papa John’s reportedly received $400 million in pizza orders via their online ordering system.

Their business model wasn’t broken, they simply chose to use their website to grow their business, improve customer loyalty and make more money.

We recently redesigned our website and it’s still not bringing in any new business. What should we do?

Having a well designed website to promote your business online is not the finish-line, it just gets your business in the race. Set some meaningful goals and put together a plan of action to reach them.

Your Internet marketing strategy should at a minimum include plans for the following :

• Generating traffic to your new website
• Tracking what visitors actually do on your site
• Fixing the leaks in your site’s sales pitch (from analyzing your visitors’ actions & intent)
• Building customer loyalty & giving visitors a reason to be a return customer
• Supporting website inquiries, orders, content updates, etc.

Take your web presence seriously. Just having a website without a game plan means missing out on the potential revenue that dominating others in your industry could bring.

He beat me to it, but Super-Ken came to the office today with 6 Nerf dart guns. Plus we got some really cool Nerf shades! See? It’s not always work, work, work for us. It does good to give our brains a break from all the HTML, ASP, SEO, and other various acronnyms that fill our time and hard drives. I’m just waiting for everyone to start bringing in their “upgrades” next week (fully automatic, scopes, Nerf dart magazines, and the like). ;)

Oh, the humanity…

The Paragon awards, sponsored by the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations, recognize outstanding achievement in communications at community, junior and technical colleges. It’s the only national competition of its kind that honors excellence exclusively among marketing and PR professionals at two-year colleges.

Matt is honored to have been a part of the selection process and is proud to be able to further support the visual communications community.

Congratulations to our client Charlie Oldani, owner of Oldani Brothers Sausage Company for sweeping the professional division of the 29th Annual Hermann Missouri Wurstfest.

• Reserve Grand Champion – Traditional Sommer Sausage
• Reserve Grand Champion – Specialty Wurst
• Reserve Grand Champion – Italian Sausage
• Grand Champion – Exotic Wurst
• BEST OF SHOW

Check out the Food Network coverage.

Actually, the game was called off due to rain with the Cardinals leading 5-1. The season opener, the first to be rained out since 1994, has been rescheduled for tonight. Despite the delay, reliever Russ Springer said during yesterdays season opener, “We’ve got a high energy team. We’ve got a maximum-effort team. We’ve got a combination of veteran guys…We’ve got talented guys at every position.”

It’s as if Springer is talking about our team here at T29. Our crackerjack team of developers and designers and internet marketing experts are pumped up and ready to get back to work blasting websites out of the ballpark.

Our new office is located on 10th and Olive. The space is awesome and putting it all together has definitely been a lot of work for everyone involved.

We have a new phone number:

(314) 621-4904

We can also be reached via email: blog -at- tower29 -dot- com.

Be sure to note our impressive collection of cardboard in some of these photos from the move.

As of April 1st 2008 Tower29 Marketing Group will be operating out of our new office at 1006 Olive Street… no foolin’. The move not only accommodates our growing staff and expansion of services, it also introduces a creative and fun environment which aligns with the character of Tower29 and our staff.

Tower29 Marketing Group
1006 Olive Street, Suite# 303
Saint Louis, MO 63101

So don’t let the highway 40 shutdown discourage you from heading to the city and experiencing the undeniable energy of downtown St. Louis. While you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and visit us. Our doors are always open.

Check back soon for more photos of the new place.