Period Three Blog

Jan192010

Talking with Hiten Shah - crazyegg, kissmetrics to name a few

Posted by Gene in Business, Web Development

Disclaimer: This is a cross post from unmatchedstyle.com

Recently I was able to get Hiten Shah (@hnshah) to sit down with us and give us a quick run down of what he’s got going on with his great web products: KissMetrics, CrazyEgg, Survey.io to name just three. Keep in mind Hiten is probably the coolest person you’ll ever meet, especially since this is the second sit down he did with me as I completely destroyed the first recording we did. So a really big thank you for being so awesome Hiten!

We first got to talk through his great new analytics product KissMetrics.com, which is now in private beta (@kissmetrics). What makes KissMetrics so useful is it’s ability to get at the core of what’s driving consumers to your products and truly helps you analyze what makes them buy. In their own words:

KISSmetrics is different from other analytics platforms due to a combination of three key features. We focus on funnels and conversions and make them easy to track and interpret, use people as the basic unit of measure, and support tracking of highly-flexible custom data through our simple API.

We discussed Survey.io (demo here), how we are using it here on UMS and the background behind the creation of the survey system. You can read more about it here, but here’s some background on the survey itself:

The surveys you can create using Survey.io have been hand crafted by Sean Ellis. He has been practicing metrics driven marketing and customer development for 12 years. Currently he is advising startups to enable them to reach their full potential by applying his 12in6 methodology.

Survey.io was designed and developed by the KISSmetrics team. KISSmetrics is a customer development platform with sufficient flexibility to give you visibility into what’s working and what’s not in your product. The tools and technology help you measure what’s happening and tune the user experience.

Finally we covered the future and recent updates for CrazyEgg.com. We love CrazyEgg and use it all the time for our own design projects.

Thanks for the quick update Hiten!

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Jan062010

Episode 31 - UMS Design Review

Posted by Gene in Design

It’s been a while, we’ve been busy I promise. Here’s a quick post to try to get back into things. I think you’ll like this one too. It covers an interesting design concept which is using a “special effect” or some other feature that’s “cool” to make people take notice of your website, but how in the end that might actually hurt you since it may not have anything to do with your website’s content.

This week we talk about three sites, WebMynd, We Bleed Design and ADII Rockstar. In addition to the design, we discuss the usefulness (or detriment) of having visitors come to your site for reasons unrelated to the actual content of your site.

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Oct202009

Permission marketing and active-lurkers

Posted by Gene in Marketing, Creating Community

It’s not just that you have users who do stuff and users who don’t, there is an in-between too. The “active-lurker”. I’ve borrowed heavily from a couple of sources to make the following points, starting with Joshua Porter’s post on Designing for Active Lurkers.

This post and Joshua’s post are all based on idea by Bradley Horowitz when he’s talking about the communities surrounding Yahoo’s many services like Flickr, Yahoo Groups, Upcoming & del.icio.us. The idea is that there are phases a non-interacting visitor (lurker) goes through before he/she becomes a content creator or conversion:
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1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)

10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress

100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

So, most of your users (even the contributors) are going to be passive most of the time.

This is permission marketing at it’s basic core. Real permission marketing is when people opt-in, not the legalistic definition not the CAN-SPAM law, but real people wanting to read your stuff and then choosing to participate when they feel passionate about a subject…

As Joshua Porter reminds us about what Seth Godin says:

“Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.” - Seth Godin

Here’s an example: On colamovies.com, we want more movie reviewers, but it makes logical sense that in order to get more reviewers we need to continue to focus on cultivating the visitor base that simply uses the website for movie times, then make it easy for those visitors to make reviews. The same is just as in the analogy Porter makes from Fred Wilson:

Just like bookstores use cafes to bring potential purchasers in the store, online retailers should intentionally cultivate an active non-transactor user base.

In other words, the big book stores use fluffy comfortable chairs and coffee to get you into the store to read the books in order to entice you into making a purchase…

So they key to transforming lurkers into active participants is to think of how to engage based on their current activity. Don’t just look at the current conversions and the paths those visitors took to convert. Look at the traffic patterns below the conversion, what are they searching for? What lead them to you? How are they using your website in ways you don’t intend?

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Sep292009

The secret to credibility

Posted by Gene in Branding, Creating Community

We get asked often to “bring more traffic to my website” and one of the suggestions we often make is for you to begin creating content you can share with your customers. Sharing information about what you know and how you do things can often lead to more trust and repeat customers, it also can go a long way to making you an expert in what you do. What does that have to do with credibility? Here’s the thing, when you ask us to bring your website more traffic, what you’re really asking is bring more clients, or more conversions - traffic alone is not the answer to this. More traffic won’t hurt mind you, but what good will it do if no one thinks you know what you’re talking about or if they can’t connect with you. Here’s a secret formula:

I learned this from a post on problogger.net a while back. There is no overnight route to creating credibility, and you have to build upon your audience (client base) and grow it. What are the benefits of creating credibility for your website? Those would be two fold:

1) Gives you the ability to change user attitudes toward you:
Keeps you in a positive light, they feel comfortable interacting with you, they embrace your point of view.

2) Give you the ability to change user behavior.
They give you their personal information, they complete a transaction, they return to your site often.

Trustworthiness and Expertise are two pretty huge things to work on with every news release and blog post you make, it takes time and planning but it can be worth it in a huge way when you achieve it.

Keep in mind this formula is talking about creating the perception of credibility, you can easily reverse all your hard work in an instant if you don’t actually live up to what you’ve created.

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Aug262009

Big guide to CSS support in email clients

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

The team over at Campaign Monitor has recently updated their giant CSS support guide to email clients and boy is it awesome. I’ve been designing and coding HTML emails for for almost 10 years now *sigh* and it never gets easier. It seems every month a new email client comes out, then there’s the iPhone now. Resources like these become invaluable to you if you do this kind of work. In their own words:

Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across the major email clients can be very time consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client.

Make sure and check out the web guide, you can also download the full spreadsheet for all the known email client support info.

Thank you Campaign Monitor!

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Aug202009

Game changer on Facebook

Posted by Gene in Social Web

Gary Vaynerchuck gives us a sneak peek at some Facebook functionality that they are testing that big users like him get to preview before the rest of us. By the way, if you don’t know who Gary is yet, check him out, a lot of what he says is simple stuff but it’s really good to hear.

Looks like Facebook is going to make the social timeline more public, allowing you to interact with other users who you may not be friends with. Not sure how that’ll work, most likely it’ll get released for groups and pages first - where it makes the most sense. The ability to look at other people (who you don’t follow) and review their posts and comments then choose to follow/engage with them has long been Twitter’s advantage over Facebook. It’ll be really interesting to see how all this actually comes out.

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Aug172009

SEO Self Defense Tips

Posted by Gene in Search Engine Marketing

I’ve been asked about the SEO presentation I gave at May’s RefreshColumbia meeting, the post is available on that site as well, there’s some other cool stuff to learn from there as well, so make sure and check it out when you have time. So in the video above at about 45:20 in you can catch me on there. Jay kicks off the meeting with some really neat design pointers and there’s two other talks as a bonus that are truly informational and worth the time if you have it. I’ve linked up my slides after the jump as well. Enjoy…
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Jul232009

Your email address and blacklists

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

Something I get asked a lot, since we have two email messaging products (swiftpress.com and our enterprise version of swiftpress) is: I’m sending emails to my list but they aren’t being delivered. Deliver-ability from your email messaging system provider is one thing, with swiftpress we have pretty good deliver-ability but it’s not just on our end of the server. It comes down to your domain name’s email history too.

What are DNS blacklists and blocklists? According to blacklistmonitor.com:

A dns blacklist or blocklist is a database containing known internet addresses (or IPs) used by individuals or companies sending spam. Various ISP’s and bandwidth providers subscribe to these DNS blacklist databases to filter out spam sent across their network or to their subscribers.

I won’t go into what you should do to keep off of a blacklist or maybe even how you got on one, that’s for another post, but for now let’s assume you just want to check.

Step 1 Find out what your IP address is:
You can do this by going to network-tools.com or dnsstuff.com and running a “Ping” look up by copying and pasting in your domain name.

Step 2 check the blacklists:
Now head on over to a couple of the blacklist services and check to see if you’re on there.

SpamCop
SpamHaus
Delivery Watch
MXToolBox
DNS Stuff
EmailReach
RepCheck
Blacklistedip
Blacklist.ie
Blacklist Check

If you see your IP show up in any of these lists, chances are you’ve been sending emails to honeypot email addresses. That is email addresses that are setup specifically for the purpose of catching you sending unsolicited emails. It’s a trap…

You then will need to petition the blacklist organization to get off of said list, if that fails we can then get involved to start tracking down specific ISPs that are blocking your email delivery and try to negotiate a way to get your messaging through. All in all, it’s a hard road to travel down. If you even suspect your list isn’t 100% quality you need to talk to us about it before you use it, I promise we won’t yell at you. We can help keep you out of trouble and it’s much easier to do that before you send, once you’ve sent to a suspect list you can’t take it back.

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Jun112009

Tumblr

Posted by Gene in Social Web, Blogging

We have several clients that we have setup blogs for over the past few months and we normally (almost always) use Wordpress. We’ll setup an installed version of Wordpress next to their website and pull in their post feed onto their main homepage or some sub section via RSS. We’ve done this with Twitter RSS feeds as well. I don’t really want to get into a Tumblr vs. Wordpress discussion, i’ve read them and honestly it’s not really comparing apples to apples.

Tumblr is possibly one of the easiest ways you can run your own blog on the internet, and it’s FREE. In their own words:

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML. Even use your own domain name.

Tumblr really is a blogging engine at heart, but it’s more like a purist cross between a blog and Twitter. It really shines if you are looking to make short/quick posts, post pictures or video files. The thing is it’s not as intimidating as a full featured blog, the system gets out of the way because it’s so simple and you don’t have to worry about all the moving parts. You can just focus on what you’re posting and get on with your life.
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Jun042009

Award for Best Web Usability

Posted by Gene in Period Three News

The WebHostingSearch.com has given Period Three the Award for Best Web Usability for the month of June. In their own words:

In the name of Web 2.0 we at WebHostingSearch.com are now handing out an award to one site each month that stands out from its competitors. The award is for Best Web Design with particular focus on great usability and accessibility. 21st century web design is so much more than color schemes, flashy banners and glossy buttons. Few understand the importance of usability and accessibility in web design so what better reason than to reward the ones who do.

Thank you Eva and all the rest of the team at WebHostingSearch.com we do truly appreciate it!

BTW: WebHostingSearch.com is really a great resource for web hosting service information, the site has reviews on all the major hosting providers as well as articles and video tutorials on hosting applications.

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