Return on Intention

In the information economy he who has the most information wins. Well, thats not exactly true. He who has the most relevant information that leads to insight wins. Trying to move forward and make positive changes without data is like trying to drive without a dash board. No, its worse than that. Its like trying to fly a plane without the instrument panel, at night, in a storm. Its a disaster. Imagine being on flight at 1:00 am and hearing the pilots voice comes over the intercom to say “Well everyone, we’ve lost power and have no visibility, but I feel like we should go left. Lets try that, I’m sure it will all work out”.  I can guarantee there is not enough tiny bottles of alcohol on the plane to make that announcement go over. We need information to make good decisions, without it we can only make changes based on our best guess, like going left and hoping it works out. 

One of the greatest things about doing business online is the ability to gain data about what is going on. Because of its nature, the internet allows us to closely track user interactions to a greater extent than any other channel. The truly amazing thing about this is not how much good data can be had, but the fact that so few companies actually use it. Perhaps its lack of knowledge, experience, budget or (I fear to suggest) care. To try and overcome some of these barriers, allow me to suggest a few simple, and cheap (or free) ways to gain better insight. 

1. Track your website usage. Tracking your website can offer you a chance to see how people are actually using your website. This means you can see how many people are showing up, but more importantly, what they are showing up for. You will be able to see what content they are reading, and what they aren’t. You can see how they move through your site and how they found you to begin with. This is the data that guides you to make the right decisions on what content to put up, and what your audience wants. Without this data, your really just guessing. 

It is true that in the past, getting this data required a software investment, and in some cases, a pretty substantial one. Alas, those days are over and you can now get a really great set of tools for free from google. Google Analytics takes nothing more than pasting a few lines of javascript on the bottom of each page of your website. Thats its, and did i mention its free? There is no reason not to use this. If you don’t already have it, go get it here. Right now.

2. Unique Contact Information. The internet has replaced the yellow pages as the number one way for people to find companies, products and services. Even the products and services that many people think are not “web” related, like plumbing. A client we work with wanted to know how many people were directed to them from their website. One of the largest revenue sources for this company was plumbing services. Not very techie is it. They weren’t getting a lot of responses from their “contact us” web form. Thats not really surprising, many people don’t use those. Many people like to call a phone number and talking to a real person. Imagine that. This companies market was no different.

To answer the question of how effective their website was at generating business, they published a phone number on their website that was different than all of there other collateral. On their trucks and service vans they have one number, on their phone book listings another. Because of this simple tactic they are able to track where people got the phone number. As it turns out, 63% of their business comes in through the web site number. Go ahead, steal this tactic. See where your customers find you. 

3. Ask. Yep, its that simple. Ask your customer questions. This doesn’t have to be a huge indevor, just ask. Think about this, when was the last time you were doing business with someone and they asked you for anything over “do you want fries with that”?  You can do surveys, paper or on the web. You could conduct focus groups if you have some extra budget allocation you need to spend. You could also pick up the phone and ask some of your customers how they are doing. Is your product / service working correctly? Is there anything that could make it better? It can take as little as three seconds to ask someone when they come into your store how they are doing. You might be surprised at what you find out. What have you got to lose, other than the opportunity to make a difference to your customers?

A lot of money is spent on experts to get a short cut to insight. This can very helpful, but consider this,  they are experts because they do this stuff over and over until they notice patterns in how people react to similar situations. They do this stuff over and over. Why not do some of that yourself and gain some expertise? It can only help. 

There are many other things that can be done to get a clear picture of what is going on. Many ways to slice the data and gain real bottom line shaping insight from it. This is where professionals can help. I hope this can at least get you started down the path of getting cleaner information so you can start to make decisions based on insight, not guesswork. When you have a good base of information, then call in the experts to help take you to the next level. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 11:05 am and is filed under Doin' it right, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.