If you’ve visited Wikipedia lately, you’ve probably seen the impassioned fundraising pleas from the site’s founder and his colleagues.

In fact, you can’t miss them. The banners have been appearing across the top of each page, imploring visitors to make a donation to keep the site running. I was a little taken aback the first time I saw one.

But then I asked myself: why do we always assume information on the web will be free? After all, this content is often incredibly valuable. It has become fashionable to mock Wikipedia for not being an authoritative source, but at the very least, it’s a great place to begin researching any topic (and many of the articles are, in fact, outstanding).

Type any term into a search engine, click Search, and you’ll be presented with links to thousands upon thousands of sites. Oh, sure, many of them are a total waste of time. But most contain at least a nugget of value. Sift through these sites for a few minutes, and you’ll develop a working knowledge of the topic you’re researching.

Best of all, this information is free—at least for you, the searcher. For content providers, though, online information is anything but free.

Can You Really Afford to Give Away Information?
Got some knowledge you want to share online for free? It’s gonna cost you.

Every website is hosted on a server somewhere—whether it’s in your spare bedroom or a massive data center. Each of these servers requires electricity, maintenance, and eventually, replacement. Right there, you can see why even “free” sites aren’t free.

If you want your content to read well and you’re not much of a writer, you’ll need to hire a professional. If you want those well-written pages to show up in search engines, you should make sure your writer knows something about SEO. Depending on your traffic goals, you may also need to invest in other methods of driving visitors to your site, such as buying pay-per-click ads or ad space in popular e-newsletters.

It all adds up. Seeking to not only defray these costs, but also make a nice little passive income online, many content providers are exploring ways of monetizing the valuable information they provide.

Monetization Options for Online Content Providers
One way to monetize an information website is to run banner ads. Once you have enough website traffic, you can simply charge advertisers a set monthly fee to display their ads.

An easier way to make money from online advertising is to sign up with Google AdSense or a similar service. Google will run contextually relevant ads in designated areas on your site, and you’ll get paid each time someone clicks one. More traffic means more clicks and more revenue.

Alas, once you start placing ads on your site, you’ll have to start asking yourself: how much is too much? If two banner ads are generating enough revenue to pay for your site, should you risk running a third? If your Google AdSense box is getting lots of clicks in the right sidebar, should you risk moving it into the main flow of your content?

Which brings us back to Wikipedia. Their monetization strategy is to come right out and ask us for donations. Do the fundraising banners bug you, or have you donated? Would you look at Wikipedia any differently if they began running banner ads or Google AdSense on the site? Would you pay a subscription fee for Wikipedia—or for any other strictly informational site?

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the notion of “free” online information. Please comment below, and thanks for reading.
 

I know it’s wrong to celebrate the downfall of another person. But if it’s just a software application, I figure it’s OK. So….hooray. Mobile Flash is finally dead.

Just weeks ago, Adobe announced plans to stop developing its Flash Player plug-in for mobile browsers. The company will instead be focusing on alternative application packaging programs and the HTML5 protocol.

As soon as I got the news, two thoughts popped into my head. First and foremost, my iPhone and I would like to know, what took Adobe so long? And second, how long will Adobe Flash even be around if Adobe is pulling it off mobile devices and suggesting that HTML5 is the way forward?

Proving Steve Jobs Right
If Flash does disappear entirely, Apple customers won’t be any worse off. The truth is, Adobe has never really delivered a mobile version of Flash that, well, worked.

In fact, the late Steve Jobs famously banned Flash from iOS devices. Sharing his Thoughts on Flash, Jobs remarked, “Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards.”

Jobs went on to point out that it doesn’t matter that iPhones can’t view Flash videos because most of these videos are also available in the superior H.264 format. And it doesn’t matter that iPhones can’t play Flash games, because there are tens of thousands of free games in the App Store.

And then he mentioned that Flash crashes Macs. Smack!

Steve Jobs may have left us, but today, Adobe is practically admitting he was right.

What Comes Next?
Standards come and go. Remember Shockwave? It slowly faded away. Will Adobe simply allow Flash to do the same?

If so, what will come next? Will Adobe fully embrace HTML5, simply come back with a modified version of Flash, or go in a different direction entirely? Will website developers use HTML5’s support for semantic markups to dramatically enhance the accessibility of websites? Will they tap into its features for enhancing SEO? For preventing piracy?

And with HTML5 as the new web standard, which other technologies may be on the chopping block?

We’d love to know what you think. Please take a moment to share your thoughts below about the demise of Flash, the rise of HTML5, or the future of web technology. 

Where was SMS advertising five years ago?

How about interactive digital signage? Or social referrals?

And did you ever think you’d be reading QR codes with your smartphone?

Marketing tactics and media never stop changing. But one of the most fundamental principles of marketing communication remains the same: a great idea still has value.

Of course, even the strongest message will only resonate if you articulate it clearly and aim it at the right audience. That’s why nothing is more pivotal to the success of a marketing or advertising campaign than the creative brief.

Give Your Creative Process the Right Foundation
At its best, the creative brief is a clear and focused piece that guides a project from start to finish. It defines every aspect of a creative project’s objectives. It’s the one salient document that all parties agree to, and the foundation of the creative process. Whether you’re using a short assignment brief for a quick-turn project or an all-encompassing brief for a major campaign, your creative brief can save you time and money.

Want to increase your profit margins and protect against budget overruns? Of course you do. That’s why you’ll use well-written creative briefs to run your projects efficiently. Here are seven tips to help you do just that:

1. Start every project with a solid brief – no exceptions. Launching an important project with a tight deadline? That’s all the more reason to take the time to write a good brief. After all, the expression “measure twice, cut once” applies to marketing, too.
2. Use critical thinking to simplify and focus your briefs. Many marketing professionals put too much superfluous content in their briefs. Background material is good – but throwing in “everything and the kitchen sink” will only confuse your entire project team and result in a watered-down creative product.
3. As you’re writing the brief, get signoff from all key decision-makers. Let everyone see, contribute to, and sign off on the brief – but be careful not to let them muddy up the objectives and strategy. It’s especially important to get signoff from anyone who will be present in creative presentations.
4. Let creative directors and senior creatives review the brief before your kickoff meeting. This will help prevent the catastrophe of discovering during the kickoff meeting that the strategy is unworkable, the target is under-defined, or the key message is misguided.
5. At the project kickoff meeting, give everyone involved a copy of the creative brief. By this point, you’ve worked hard to develop the brief. Now, get the most possible benefit from it by passing it out. The brief will serve as everyone’s contract, their reference, and their guide throughout the project.
6. Work to establish consistent, repeatable brief-writing processes. You don’t want to be starting from scratch each time. Learn as you go. Keep track of what works, and what doesn’t. Improve your process by incorporating the lessons of each campaign.
7. Hold brief-writing workshops for your team. Like any other valuable skill, brief-writing is something you learn by doing – and it takes practice. Set aside a couple of afternoons per year for hands-on brief-writing sessions. Strive to keep the atmosphere positive, and stress to everyone that practicing this skill will make their jobs easier.

The Little Document with the Great Bottom Line
If you really want to know the bottom-line value of a good creative brief, think about how many millions of marketing dollars are wasted each year on creative work that doesn’t resonate.

American consumers encounter between 600 and 3,000 commercial messages every day. They’re experienced, savvy, and unequivocally impatient – and in the online environment, their attention span becomes even shorter. That’s why there’s a greater need than ever for agencies and marketing departments to create smart, relevant work.

When you stop and think about the truly great advertising campaigns, engaging interactive websites, or smart lead generation programs, they all tend to have one common trait: a singular message and focus. This doesn’t happen by accident. A significant amount of work goes into the creative brief to make it possible to produce a simple yet powerful creative product.

Build a Creative Brief Program
All of this begs the question: where do good creative briefs come from?

Naturally, they come from good creative brief programs. Whether your company is a startup with great products but immature processes, or a major corporation with well-developed processes that sometimes stifle creativity, you can benefit from establishing a standardized creative brief program.

The easiest way to do this is to sit down with a cross-section of your marketing stakeholders (including strategists, product managers, project managers, artists, and copywriters) and talk about what’s working and what’s broken in the creative process. Are briefs typically too long and detailed, or too, well, brief? Are key messages clear and concise, or so vague that they elicit scattershot creative? Is your review cycle contributing to missed deadlines and cost overruns?

Let everyone vent. Ask everyone to contribute constructive suggestions. Put your heads together, and make a plan for improving the way your creative briefs are written. Measure your results, and incorporate your learnings into each subsequent campaign.

It’s important to create a culture of constant improvement across your marketing team. Because remember: better briefs mean better creative, higher response rates, and a better bottom line.

A/B and multivariate testing is a lot like going to the gym.

You know you should be doing it. You understand the benefits of doing it. Your friends who do it swear by it.

But getting started is, well, painful. So it’s much easier just to keep procrastinating.

Keep in mind, though, that when you put off testing, you’re really just putting off getting better results from your website or online marketing campaign.

The best way to get started is to learn the ins and outs of A/B and multivariate testing, and when to use each. Here’s a basic overview.

A/B Testing
In A/B testing, you test a change in a single website element against the original (control) version. For example, you might tweak the headline on a landing page, or change the size of the product image on a product page.

A/B testing is a quick way to determine whether one idea works better than another. For best results, test new ideas that are drastically different from your control. Got a dull, gray “Buy” button? Test canary yellow, or fire engine red.

Here are some tips on executing an A/B test:

• Test a change to only one element. If you change your headline copy, while also bumping up the font size and changing it to red text, you won’t be able to tell which change caused the increase (or decrease) in your conversions. And that would defeat the purpose of testing.
• Split your traffic 50/50, so that equal numbers of visitors will see option A and option B.
• Test enough for statistical relevance – but strike a balance. Too many marketers either pull a test too early, or let it run beyond the point when it is yielding useful results.

Multivariate Testing
A/B testing is clear, crisp, and to the point. There’s no arguing with the results. But if you have a variety of elements to test and want to speed up the process, consider multivariate testing.

In multivariate testing, you test multiple elements simultaneously. For example, on a product page, you might want to test two new headlines, two new product images, and two new order buttons. Assuming you use your current headline, image, and button as the control, that means you’ll have 27 different combinations of elements to test (3 x 3 x 3).

One of the goals here is to determine which combination of elements results in the most conversions. It’s all well and good to know that headline A beats headlines B and C, but multivariate testing also helps you determine that headline A works best with image B and button C.

Another goal is to find out which individual elements influence visitor behavior – and which don’t. Using your control as the baseline, you can then determine what change you caused by swapping in different headlines, versus different images or buttons. You might find, for example, that neither of your new headlines caused much of a change, whereas your new order buttons both caused significant spikes in conversions.

Because multivariate testing involves many variants, you’ll need more traffic to gather a significant sample size. This may mean you’ll need to run your test for a longer period of time. But because you’ll be testing multiple elements at once, you’ll probably still find that multivariate testing yields faster results than running a series of A/B tests.

Building a Testing Strategy
If you’re just getting started with testing, we recommend a simple, five-step approach:

1. Figure out where you’re at.
Determine your current conversion rates for the pages on your site that seek to drive conversions. Keep in mind that a conversion doesn’t necessarily involve a sale – it can also be someone signing up for your email list, filling out your form to request more information, or downloading your white paper.

Next, you’ll need to assign a value to each conversion. When a visitor downloads a free white paper, you don’t make any money up front. But if 2% of white paper downloaders typically go on to become customers, and the average lifetime value of your customers is $1,000, then you can say the long-term value of a white paper download is $20.

2. Decide where you want to be.
Identify your most important conversion goal for a section of your site – or for the entire site. Whether you want to collect more email addresses, convince more people to friend your company on Facebook, or persuade more people to actually buy a product, focus your testing efforts on this one goal. Also, make sure you know exactly which metrics you’ll use to track your results.

3. Get buy-in.
When you start trying to make changes on a website, you’re going to step on some toes. One of your executives may love the headers you’re using on your landing pages. Another colleague may insist that large product images are a waste of space.

You’re going to have to manage these expectations – and be prepared to slay some sacred cows – before you start testing. Before you dive in, have a meeting in which you clearly articulate the goals of your testing project and give everyone a chance to discuss. Take comments and suggestions – but avoid letting “committee-think” clutter up your testing program with secondary and tertiary objectives that distract you from your true focus.

4. Determine a testing order.
You can’t test all pages at once – but whatever you do, don’t start “safe.” Start your testing on the pages that have the most potential to deliver greater revenue. You’ll find them close to the end of your conversion funnel – your lead-gen forms, opt-in pages, and shopping cart pages.

Your next testing priority? We’ve all heard the expression, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.” Open Google Analytics (or a similar program) to determine which pages are your most popular entry pages. Are there any with high bounce rates? Focus on turning that around by pulling people deeper into your site.

Next, optimize any pages that have high abandon rates. By tweaking specific elements, can you prevent more visitors from jumping ship?

5. Identify which elements to test.
On the pages you’ve decided to optimize, give some thought to which elements may be driving visitors away, rather than compelling them to take the action you want them to take. Test some better alternatives.

Focus on eliminating clutter and distractions, making calls-to-action more visible, rewording copy to increase urgency, and reassuring the prospect about their decision to convert.

Testing Tools
Check out some of these testing tools to help you in your optimization process:

• Google WebSite Optimizer 
• Optimizely 
• Visual Website Optimizer
• Unbounce 

Parting Thoughts
Testing isn’t just about confirming what you already know – it’s about taking chances and being willing to fail in pursuit of the Next Big Breakthrough. You’ll make greater progress if you “fail faster.” That means you should run your tests on high-volume pages, and, if possible, use multivariate testing to execute multiple experiments at once.

Once you’ve learned what you can from your high-volume pages, apply those lessons to lower-volume pages. And don’t forget to share what you’ve learned with your email marketers and web designers.

After all, just like going to the gym, testing and optimizing your online marketing is much easier to do in a group.

Did you catch the Power of eMarketing Conference in San Francisco?

On April 19 and 20, I had the privilege of speaking on three panels at the conference. Naturally, social media and SEO were the hot topics of the day. But the conversation also trended toward lead nurturing and how to drive conversions from your social conversations.

Here are a few quick thoughts on the three panels I participated in.

Don’t Stop at CAN-SPAM Compliance
On the morning of April 19, I was on a panel with a Director of Compliance for a large corporation. The conversation focused on best practices in subject lines and email formatting, and how they apply to spam traps. These three ideas really resonated with the audience:

1. CAN-SPAM compliance is the bare minimum. If you want to avoid spam filters and get your message delivered, you need to go much further.
2. Keep subject lines short and sweet, yet descriptive and honest. Remember that if your subject line is longer than, say, 70 characters, it will only be partially visible in a preview pane or mobile device.
3. Image-only emails not only provide a bad user experience (most of your clients probably set “images off” as a default), but are also a spam filter trigger.

 “You Can’t Handle the Truth” About Email Content
For my second session on April 19, I shared the stage with Loren T. McDonald from Silverpop. The conversation was much more detailed. In fact, I felt like we were two old war buddies sitting up on stage reminiscing about battle scars and answering questions. We covered deliverability, content creation and relevancy, frequency, and, of course, CAN-SPAM.

We even had a “You can’t handle the truth!” moment when an audience member complained that he didn’t have any content. We spent the next 5 minutes covering all the different ways you can generate content.

If you face a similar problem, look at these simple facts:

1. If you sell products or services, you have content. Go to your people who know the product best. Interview them and create a top 10 list.
2. If you have customers, you have content. See point #1.
3. You can repurpose existing content to create new content. If you’ve captured a video, do a write-up about it for your newsletter. If you’ve published a popular blog post, make a web clip summarizing the top points. If your CEO is giving a presentation, have him or her write an article about the subject.

Protecting Your Online Reputation
Our session on email and branding covered everything from tone and voice to email and newsletter design. Across the board, everyone agreed that having a consistent tone and communicating and fulfilling on your customer’s expectations is key. There was some disagreement about using comical versus professional tone, and about how often to send communications. But much of that hinges on whether you’re writing B2B or B2C emails.

Here are some of the high points, which may seem obvious but are easy to overlook:

1. Naming your constant communications helps boost deliverability and open rates. So, name your newsletters, webcast series, and any regular postings (especially your blog).
2. The fastest way to lose the branding battle is to do a bait and switch. Be consistent, and deliver what you promised.
3. Protect your online reputation. Don’t spam, don’t incite flame wars, and keep the conversation on topic.

 If you were at the Power of eMarketing Conference, I’m glad you could join us.

If not, there will be another conference coming up in October in Rhode Island. Ozone Online’s Joel Lockwood and I plan to participate. It’s always good to get out of our bubble and swap best practices with others who are in the trenches.

See you there?

Copywriter, Keven Smith

We’re pleased to announce the launch of InsulinForward.com

Changing Lives, Online
It’s not every day that Ozone Online gets to work on a website that changes lives. But when Medtronic Diabetes engaged us to create the brand vision and develop the website for its Insulin Education Program, that’s exactly what happened.

Medtronic’s objective was to provide top-notch insulin and pre-pump education, and ultimately, to drive patient awareness and engagement. Ozone Online has a long track record of delivering on these types of goals. We dove into the project with a real sense of purpose, knowing that as a result of our efforts, diabetes patients would get educational information that would better their lives.

Providing a Hopeful Vision
Our first priority was to develop a program name, brand positioning, and associated visuals. These elements needed to provide diabetes patients and their healthcare providers with a hopeful vision that a better quality of life is possible with the Medtronic Diabetes/LifeScan personal insulin education plan.

Nailing the Message
With our branding foundation solidified, we then focused on designing and building the website using our agency’s proven best practices. During the discovery and information architecture project that preceded our creative work, Ozone Online defined the functional requirements for the Insulin Education Program website, as well as the optimal information architecture and user experience for each target audience segment based on their needs and the project goals.

Doing this groundwork made it much easier for us to provide on-target creative. We designed the website, rewrote web copy provided by Medtronic Diabetes, and produced all necessary website assets for handoff to a Medtronic Diabetes technical partner for development on the Force.com platform. In addition, we created a questionnaire that encourages users to define their optimal online educational experience, helping Medtronic to improve their content.

Measuring the Impact
How do we know the website is working? At Ozone Online, we’re big believers in gathering metrics and applying this knowledge to enhance current and future projects. We are tracking the number of healthcare providers nationwide who enroll to become participating Insulin Forward education centers, and the number of patient referrals generated by both the education centers and the website itself.

Of course, the greatest benefits of this project will be the ones that are hardest to quantify. As Insulin Forward classes go into full swing, we won’t be able to measure the exact value of helping diabetes patients live their lives to the fullest – but that’s OK. It’s just good to know that, thanks to our collaboration with Medtronic Diabetes, millions of people now have a new ray of hope.

Visit www.insulinforward.com now and let us know what you think!

Is it just me, or are Americans spending more time than ever on social networks?

As it turns out, it’s not just me. In June 2009, Americans were spending 16% of their total online time on social networks. By June 2010, that number had risen to 23%. (For reference, Americans spend just 8% of their online time reading and writing emails.)

Advertisers are gradually waking up to this rapid growth. Between 2009 and 2010, they increased their social advertising spend by 20%.

But even their current budget of $1.68 billion represents only 6.7% of their total online advertising spend.

In other words, online advertisers are still, well, socially awkward.

Why?

The Challenges of Breaking Into Social Networks
It’s not that advertisers don’t want to socialize. It’s not that they don’t realize people are spending more and more time on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

It’s just that breaking into these networks is more difficult than making a splash in other types of online advertising.

When you want to run a banner ad, for example, you create your ad, pay your fee, and voila’ – you’re getting your message in front of people.

But to break into a social network, you must figure out how to become part of the conversations people are having within that network.

As I said, this can be difficult – but it’s not impossible. To guide your efforts, try using what I call the Three T’s.

The Three T’s of Social Advertising
If you really want your products and services to become part of the conversations people are having online, just remember: Target, Test, Tweak.

1. Target. Social networks are all about communities and groups. This can play in your favor – if you’re willing to do the up-front work.

You can target your ads to a very specific audience that’s defined by gender, age, locality, and interests. But beware: social networkers have become spoiled by an environment that’s tailored to their precise wants and needs. If you’re not ultra-specific about how your product or service is relevant to this audience, they’ll ignore your messages.

2. Test. As soon as you begin investing in social media advertising, be sure to set reasonable daily budgets for testing your ads.

When placing your social media ads, make sure you put tracking tags on your ads to measure your important metrics. Depending on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you will be interested in testing and optimizing for different metrics. For example, if your KPI is to drive registrations for a newsletter, you want to track the click through rate from your social media ad to your sign up landing page, and your registration conversion rate for newsletter signups. You can then look at your cost/registration for each of your ad placements as a measure of performance. If your KPI is brand awareness, you can optimize your banner cost/click, since you want as many people clicking to your website as possible.

3. Tweak. Once your ads have been up for a while and you’ve gathered data in the form of metrics related to your key performance indicators, analyze and adjust your overall campaign to trim the fat and maximize your results. Bring your best-performing creative to the forefront, find the social media placements that give the best results, and always continue to test new approaches.

As you can see, there’s no shortcut to social advertising success. But by taking the time to craft messages that appeal to specific groups and continuing to optimize, you can dramatically boost your results.

Everyone says they want to reduce their sales cycle. But most of us find the task daunting at best. If we’re going to get serious about improving the way we move prospects towards a purchasing decision, we’ll need to break down some lofty concepts into actionable chunks. This is the first in a series of articles that will do just that.

So, where to begin?

I’ll start by expressing my fervent hope that you’re tracking your website visitors. Whether you’re using a free tool like Google Analytics or have invested in a powerful solution such as Adobe Site Catalyst, you’ve laid the groundwork to minimize the time from first customer interaction to sale.

We’ve touched on all these points before. This article will explain how you can use those tracking metrics to identify your hottest prospects and close the sales cycle faster. First, I’ll share two tips on converting faster through optimization and acceleration. Next, I’ll give you two ways to highlight the opportunities that are ready for your sales team.

Build a Follow-Up Strategy for Conversions
This tip is the most basic of the four. After your visitors have responded to an offer or downloaded a trial, provide them with an appropriate follow-on. For example, on the thank-you page that appears after you deliver the offer, you can supply a few additional offers to drive further engagement.

The key, of course, is relevance. If someone downloads an industry white paper, don’t follow up by offering a 5% discount on top-of-the-line server hardware. Your prospect is probably not ready to make a purchase decision.

Instead, the follow-on offer should be mapped along your nurturing flow. Offer something that will drive the visitor from awareness to interest, such as a case study or an interactive educational tool. Then use your web analytics to see which offer combinations have the highest take-rates and which also increase social sharing and return visitors. These metrics indicate relevance with your visitors and can help your sales team drive the direction of the conversation.

Analyze Funnel Conversion Drop-Offs
For this next idea, it’s critical that you take the time to set up your goal conversions and funnel path. We all hope that someone will land on our site, read a page or two, and then click to have a sales person contact them. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. It’s our job to lead the prospect, step by step, to that glorious conversion. But some of our prospects have SOS (Shiny Object Syndrome) and drop off our path to enlightenment.

That’s where funnel conversion analysis comes in. When set up properly, this analysis can help us understand where prospects are falling off. We’ll then need to take a look at our flow and see what adjustments we can make – in terms of how information is presented, what type of information is shown, and in what order – to optimize the prospect’s experience and drive better conversion performance.

Measure Multiple “Goal Page” Touches
This strategy plays off the previous one. After your prospect has converted once, watch to see whether they come back and convert multiple times. Start building a “hot leads” list (this is a basic scoring that we’ll examine in depth in a future article) based on people who have touched n goal pages.

A goal page is a page that contains high-value content. If a prospect visits a goal page, it’s an indication that they’re looking for information to help them make a buying decision. With Google Analytics or Omniture, it’s easy to create and apply segmentation, and then look into your Marketing Resource Management or Customer Resource Management system to generate your hot leads list. You can also use the segmentation to find optimal flows for your site – and then apply these learnings to other key pages.

Monitor Return Visitors or Multiple Visitors from the Same Company
WARNING: Custom coding ahead

This last strategy is the most fun. In the B2B space, I’ve worked with many clients who want to target not only specific customers for lead nurturing and scoring, but also their associated companies. Google and Omniture both have some basic domain reports that can help you find out which companies are visiting your site.

Want to take it to the next level? Capture IP addresses in a custom variable. Here’s where to do it in Google Analytics (Omniture also has this capability).

Why capture IP addresses? So that you can target specific companies. It makes sense that when a company wants to do business with you, multiple people from that company will probably visit your site for research. You may get visits from end users, Finance, IT, Legal, and possibly even an executive or two. Use your web analytics to set an alert that identifies any spike in the number of visits from a set of key accounts. You can then identify which pages and products they’re most interested in and have your sales team follow up proactively.

Next Steps
We’ve only scratched the surface here. You can easily take the foundation I’ve given you and create any number of different scenarios to leverage your web analytics. In future articles, we’ll explore how you can also use Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, and Testing and Targeting to shorten the sales cycle. Subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up-to-date on these and other topics.

We designers spend years perfecting our craft and learning how to come up with elegant solutions to creative challenges. We describe our creations using words like aesthetic, gestalt, visual flow, and brand identity.

Do the suit-wearing people who employ us understand our jargon? Many of them understand our words, if not the concepts behind them. But do we understand the jargon of The Suits? As professionals trained in facilitating communication, we certainly ought to.

Now, if you feel the least bit icky about memorizing business acronyms and marketing buzzwords, remember this: when you learn how to talk the talk, you’ll be able to sell your designs much more effectively, thus expanding your creative freedom. The Suits will trust you more. They’ll think you’re a superstar if you can tie your design choices to better business performance.

And you may even be able to reason with that marketing manager who insists you use their favorite color instead of the approved corporate colors.

Sound like a deal? Let’s look at some common business acronyms and analyze what they mean for designers.

RFP (Request for Proposal) – A document put out by a client who needs work done. The RFP essentially tells designers, “Show me what you’ve got.” In response, you’ll want to submit a proposal that makes it clear you can do exactly what they’re looking for. Ideally, you’ll include a price quote that’s cheaper than your competition, but not so low that you end up looking like a rookie.

SOW (Statement of Work) – A contract with the client that explicitly states important project details, such as schedule, project scope, deliverables, and payment schedule. Why bother with a SOW? For one thing, it protects you when a client starts asking for additional deliverables in the middle of a project. By gently yet firmly pointing to the original SOW, you can make it clear that more deliverables will require more time and more money.

ROI (Return on Investment) – The value a client receives for spending their money. Depending on the type of project, this may be expressed in terms of revenue, website traffic, publicity, or sales leads. ROI measurements give clients a way to justify their budget and feel safer about spending cash. (Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tie ROI back to specific design decisions.)

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – A form of advertising that seeks to attract website visitors from search sites (Google is the biggest player). Marketers love SEM because it delivers an easily trackable ROI that’s often directly proportionate to how much they spend. You’ll usually hear about SEM when you design landing pages.

PPC (Pay per click) – The pricing structure used to buy ad placement on a website. The client only pays when a user clicks on their ad or banner – rather than paying for every “impression,” or appearance of their ad on a website. For designers, the upside to PPC banners is that they need to be visually enticing. The downside is that clients often want you to include huge, ugly buttons.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The art of making a website appear as a top result from keyword searches on Google (or any other search engine). Clients who are heavily into SEO will want all the words in your web designs to be HTML text instead of images. They’ll also want you to include a lot of copy in the design.

CTA (Call to Action) – The link or button that urges the reader to click through to the next page. The CTA is often some variation of a big, red, shiny button that says CLICK HERE.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator) – Any really important metric that determines how successful a business is. Typical KPIs include the total number of sales or how many people open an email. Most design projects are intended to improve one or more KPI. The more you can move those numbers, the more they’ll love you.

CMS (Content Management System) – Any system, such as WordPress, in which web pages are created in two parts, with the layout structure handled separately from words and pictures. Most clients love using a CMS because they can update their website without going back to the designer. A CMS also enables you to serve up one website in several different languages, rather than creating several language-specific sites.

You’ll probably hear hundreds of other acronyms tossed around in meetings, but learning the ones on this list will give you an edge in communicating your designs. Once you add this business speak to your design arsenal, perhaps The Suits will accept you as one of their own (but with better fashion sense).

What have I missed? Do you have any business speak that you’ve translated to Designer? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

According to research, 64% of marketing and sales executives are dissatisfied with their lead nurturing programs.

Are you one of them? And have you abandoned some or all of your programs as a result?

If so, maybe it’s time you took another look at lead nurturing. Although the process seems like a lot of work, the benefits far outweigh the effort. Here are five reasons why.

1. You’ll find out who really wants to hear from you.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, you can’t take for granted that everyone in your marketing database wants you to send them content. One best practice of lead nurturing is to get explicit permission up front from your recipients.

We at Ozone Online recommend using the double opt-in method, in which you ask your prospects to confirm their original opt-in by responding to an email. Yes, this adds a step to the process and may scare off a few lukewarm prospects – but you’ll end up with a list of subscribers who truly want to hear from you. (You’ll also prove that your organization has the utmost concern for online privacy, which certainly can’t hurt your sales.)

2. You’ll get to know your prospects better.
The lead nurturing process gives you numerous opportunities to ask your prospects for more personal data in exchange for the free information you’re providing. You’ll use this data to build increasingly detailed prospect profiles.

These profiles will not only help you provide the right information to the leads already in your pipeline, but also enable you to refine your lead generation activities in the future. The result? More high-quality leads to pass to Sales.

3. You’ll show customers how you can solve their specific problems.
Some companies figure “anything is better than nothing” and indiscriminately blast content to their entire prospect database. But if you take the time to develop relevant messages that focus on solving specific problems, you’ll differentiate your company from the competition.

Using the information your prospects submit and the actions they take throughout the buying cycle, you can present them with information on the exact products, services, or features that address their needs. You’ll have a chance to call out specific, relevant benefits that you may not have mentioned in your initial lead generation pieces.

4. You’ll know exactly when prospects are ready to talk to Sales.
As your leads move through the buying cycle, it’s key to set up a lead scoring process. Just make sure your process is based on your most important demographic and behavioral characteristics. These may include:

• Company size
• Title
• Purchase timeline
• Budget
• Downloaded white paper
• Used product comparison charts
• Attended webinar
• Downloaded product trial
• Watched video
• Commented on a blog
• Called your 800 number
• Visited your tradeshow booth

So, when do you pass a lead to Sales? It’s simple. Just assign point values to each of these characteristics and activities, and then set a trigger point for passing along the lead. You’ll continue to adjust your point values and trigger point over time, as Sales gives you feedback on the quality of your leads.

5. You’ll get results.
You may be pleasantly surprised at the numbers you see in your lead nurturing program. In one program documented by Marketing Sherpa, IBM Cognos recorded impressive results:

• About 11% of website visitors completed a registration form, compared to an industry average of 3%.
• Open rates for nurturing emails increased to 33.3%, compared to 13.2% for the company’s traditional multi-touch campaigns.
• Click-through rate increased from 0.09% to 15.5%.
• Response rate increased from 0.05% to 17.5%.

Tap an Untapped Resource
Leads that sit in the marketing pipeline month after month are wasted opportunities. And in this economy, nobody can afford to waste an opportunity.

By implementing even the simplest lead nurturing program, you tap an untapped resource – the leads you already have – and squeeze value out of marketing programs you ran in previous months and years. As your program grows and gains sophistication, it can deliver results that more than pay for its cost.