From the monthly archives:

June 2009

From the archives: Tim Peter thinks’ 6 (OK, more like 11) most popular posts this year

by Tim on June 30, 2009

in Customer Service, Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Strategy, social strategy, twitter

Can 2009 really be half over already? We’ve accomplished lots here at thinks Central so far this year, reaching new records in visitors and page views, growing our subscriber count and increasing Twitter friends. But half over?!? Sheesh.

Well, before we move forward to the second half of 2009, now seems like a good time to take a look back at what you all loved so far this year. These posts are the ones you seemed to enjoy the most based on traffic, bounce rate, time spent and comments. And if you’re new to thinks, these should get you started on the right path here.

Enjoy!

Many businesses – especially in service industries – don’t yet have a handle on their online strategy. Which is what led us to ask the following question: Is your business still invisible? Why?
We all want more customers and search engines like Google continue to work for most companies. That’s probably why these two posts get so much attention:
- Top 5 SEO best practices.
- Screw Google, or Why I Hate SEO.
Even for companies more comfortable with online, the rise of the social web is causing many to rethink their strategy. Want to know more about how to apply a strategy to social media? This review of the POST Study by Forrester Research – part of our Book Review of the Week-ish series – seems to be helping many answer that question.
Assuming you have a social media strategy, many still struggle with Twitter. For most, its key identifying traits are the amount of media attention Twitter gets and the perceived difficulty in using the tool to make money. So it should come as no surprise that four separate posts got lots of love from you this year. In no particular order, these are:
Finding useful tools takes time and energy. So it’s no surprise that our posts comparing Jimdo to SiteKreator, Webnode, Weebly and Wordpress and Jimdo adds social features get a lot of love.
Of course, getting customers and keeping customers are two different things. Maybe that’s why articles on how to keep customers, like I heart Zappo’s: The best customer service story you’ll ever hear continue to get so much attention.

Finding customers. Connecting with customers. Keeping customers. Yep. That’s how we roll here at Tim Peter thinks. Stay tuned for the next 6 months for more of the same. Only, y’know, better.

Miss one of your favorites? Or is there something you’d like to see us do better? Tell us all about it in the comments.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.

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And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
e-marketing, Google, google, internet business, internet marketing, marketing, online marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, social, social marketing, social media, social strategy, solutions, strategy, tools, wordpress.com, wordpress.org, weebly, synthasite, jimdo, sitekreator

Tagged as: jimdo, links, sitekreator, social, social marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, social network, social networking, social networks, social strategy, Strategy, synthasite, tim peter, timpeter.com, twitter, twitter client, weebly

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4 steps to improve your online customer experience (Small Business E-Commerce Link Digest – June 26, 2009)

by Tim on June 26, 2009

in E-commerce, del.icio.us links

Everybody wants to do better by their customers. But what’s the best way to do that? Check out these tips and you’ll find it’s not as hard as you might think:

Before you can improve your customer’s experience, you’ve got to know who your customer is. Mining your internal data gives one type of valuable customer view, while personas offer another. John Quarto-vonTivadar at GrokDotCom provided an excellent overview of how personas work that’s worth checking out.
Once you know who you’re trying to talk to, the next step is to get ‘em to your site. And it’s no secret search engines play a big role in making that happen for most online businesses. But how to put search engines to work for you is a bit of a secret. Fortunately, SEOmoz’s new SEO best practices unravels some of the mystery to ranking well, while Search Engine Land unmasks a cool tactic for finding link opportunities .
Of course, getting people to your site is one thing. But if they don’t stick around, what good is it? Assuming that your site is fast enough to keep customers around, you’ve still got to convince them you’re the right place for them. Your reputation remains one of the top reasons customers choose to buy online. How can you convince customers you’re the right place? Well, Linda Bustos offers an excellent overview of how to communicate your reputation to customers online.
Finally, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re taking care of all your customers. Linda Bustos returns with a strong overview of accessibility and its importance to your business (think “taking care of your customers” because it’s the right thing to do and “avoiding lawsuits,” if nothing else). Following standards offers many benefits, including accessibility, SEO, a faster site, and lower costs. And that just might be the best way to improve your customer experience.

Or subscribe via email.

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow Tim on Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
bounce rate, bryan eisenberg, continuous improvement, e-marketing, internet business, internet marketing, landing page optimization, marketing, online marketing, page design, performance, search engine optimization, seo, solutions, success

Tagged as: accessibility, Customer Service, E-commerce, e-commerce sales, linkdigest, links, standards

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Guest post: Don’t leave data on the table

by Tim on June 23, 2009

in analytics

One of our favorite phrases here at thinks Central is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. And you really can measure anything. But many people struggle with finding the data that can help them measure what matters most. That’s why we’re thrilled to have this guest post from RJMetrics co-founder Jake Stein, which looks at one key source of data: your back-end database. RJMetrics offers hosted business intelligence dashboards and database analytics to companies that operate online and facilitates the real time monitoring and reporting of business data to investors, managers, and advisers. Take it away, Jake…

Without web traffic data, most online marketers feel like they are flying blind. Tools like Google Analytics make it fast and convenient to monitor page views, goals, and even information on ad spend and customer acquisition. However, if you stop there, you’re not flying blind, but you are keeping one eye closed.

Too many businesses, especially small businesses, overlook the most valuable source of information they have: the back-end database. Virtually every ecommerce site, social network, SaaS web application, widget, ad network, online game, and most other websites have a database. It is the workhorse that stores messages, logins, profiles, transactions, relationships, behavior, preferences, and everything else that is necessary to run an online business. The database is the historical record, for every user and customer you have ever had.

If you are not yet convinced that the database is a critical tool for online marketers, then think about this question: What is the maximum you would pay to acquire a customer? Your web traffic analytics tool might tell you what you are paying now, or what you have paid in the past, but it cannot address the question of the most you should be willing to pay. The answer to that question is your expected customer lifetime value (CLV). There is more than one way to calculate CLV, but each requires an analysis of the historical record of your customers’ activity.

Sure the database stores all this great information, but what do you do with it? The number of analyses you can run is endless, and they vary based on business model and data set. Some of the more interesting ones include customer lifetime value, repeat purchase probability and cohort analysis. All these metrics can be segmented by referral source, initial activities (i.e. characteristics of first the transaction or free trial), geography, and demographic information. The number of potential permutations can seem overwhelming, but you can narrow down the analyses if you think carefully about the questions you want to answer. [thinks editor's note: For more information on how to do that, check out these 7 keys to successful web metrics for one approach and our series on how to build the right metric for your marketing for another. Back to you, Jake.]

So how do you actually get the data and run the analysis? If you or a member of your team knows SQL (Structured Query Language, the lingua franca of databases), then you can use it to extract data for analysis. From there, most people use a spreadsheet like Excel to do the nitty-gritty work. However, if you have a large data set, want your analyses to be continually updated, or just don’t want to commit the time, energy, and expertise to do it in house, then it might make sense to use a specialized tool to extract and analyze the data. After all, you’re not tracking your page views by reading server logs, are you?

Here are five tips that will help you get the most out of your database:

Store the source: When a new user or customer registers on your website, store the associated referrer, coupon code, and/or campaign in your database. This allows you to calculate how much revenue, including repeat purchases, is generated by different sources. Plus, it’s easy to add this to the database (our site, www.rjmetrics.com, does it with less than 10 lines of php code).
Don’t overwrite data: It’s tempting to store information that changes often in a table that tracks the current state of the world (is the user logged in right now? Yes or No) but you lose data on historical activity if you don’t keep a record of each action. As Yogi Berra could have said, “Once you lose data, it’s gone.”
Don’t slow down your site: If you are going to run complicated database queries, do it on a backup or dedicated statistics server so you don’t slow down your site. Servers are easy to replace, disappointed customers are not.
Use your database for deeper testing: Readers of thinks know that testing is important for optimizing online performance, but tests can be about much more than “Did they buy today?” The most valuable customers are the ones that come back again and again, and you can use your database to analyze who comes back and why.
Some analysis is better than none: If you’re stuck on which database analytics are right for your business, don’t sweat it. Start with something simple, like segmenting your sales data by a category or two and go from there. Even if you are not yet a database pro, a little bit of insight is better than none at all.