Jan 17, 2012

Ever wished that one action or event triggered another to help you more easily manage social media (or your life)?

Well, you are in luck. ifttt is coming to the rescue.

I’ve been tinkering with the tool for a few days and wanted to solve a few work-flow problems. For example, I don’t check the weather forecast daily. But, if it rains, I’d like to have an umbrella or a jacket to look like I was prepared. ifttt to the rescue.

Boom. If the forecast calls for rain tomorrow, ifttt will shoot me an email to say “Yo. Grab that jacket and umbrella today. Stay dry.”

This is a great tool to sync notifications across multiple channels.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

After several great years at Phonebooth, I’m saying goodbye

Time flies when you’re having fun. After several fast-paced, exciting years at Phonebooth, I’m stepping out of the booth on December 1st. We’ve accomplished some incredible things together though! We’ve experienced great growth, significantly improved the product & marketing and been featured on almost every major press outlet.

I’m leaving a great team, some incredibly smart and talented folks and a growing business. While it is a difficult decision, I’m taking my talents (thanks Lebron) to Red Hat to tackle new, incredible challenges and continue growing their business that is changing the world through open source.

It is a challenge I’m excited to be a part of and I look forward to joining another stellar team. I’ll still be in Raleigh and will see everyone around. On December 5th, I’ll start a new journey with a slightly different shade of red.

Thanks everyone for the support and all the help along the way!

Marketers who aren’t A/B testing will be left behind

I’m passionate about testing. So much so, that I wrote a guest post for SocialFresh.com with a case study from our testing at Phonebooth.com. An excerpt is below, but check out the full post, “You are not marketing unless you are testing.”

An excerpt from SocialFresh.com

testing Ahhhh, metrics and analytics. For those of us that aren’t deeply involved in conversion (cough cough making money), we resort to labels for the “numbers people.” Some call them analysts, technical folks or SEO / analytics gurus and tend to think that this isn’t our job as marketers.

Friends, you are mistaken. Marketing without data is like diving into a pool with no water – it ain’t pretty. Gone are the days of creating messaging with a finger in the wind or creating ideas in your fancy ivory tower.

Good marketers cater to potential customers by learning. What works? What do they want to hear? What do they do with your product? Where do they go on your site? When do they buy? How do they buy? Where do they buy?

If you can’t answer a few of those questions, do a Google search for your local unemployment office and save that in your GPS.

An A/B testing case study

At Phonebooth, we launched a new website late last month after months of research, analysis, content creation, planning, stakeholder meetings and other things you do to try to make sure everyone is on board. One major element of our redesign was to become masters of testing. We hadn’t entirely neglected it in the past, but decided to make testing a focus.

Our first test was the main hero image (an elegant title for the stuff below the top nav / header). We had research telling us that customers buy our business phone solution because of value. Saving money makes people happy and we had data to confirm that.

We established five different messages with similar styles, colors, fonts, etc. The main variance was the actual copy.

Control: $20 per user / month
Variation B: Save up to 60%
Variation C: A usability version better explaining our product with a few key bullet points
Variation D: Save up to $2500 per year
Variation E: Free Your Voice – a creative concept

Visual Website Optimizer was our tool of choice and we built out the different variations. Each website visitor was randomly assigned one of the variations and that became their homepage thanks to a cookie. Every visit to the homepage would give each user their “unique” homepage and we had several goals to track.

Testing is nothing without goals

Metrics are great. Measuring the correct metrics is even better. It is critical to have a thorough understanding of what you are measuring and what it truly means. We created three distinct goals to track for this test.

Engagement – this is defined as clicking anything on the website. What this means is clearly debatable and it may be completely irrelevant, but I wanted to see how many folks clicked something on the page in a digestable way.
Enters the Store – we sell our business phone solution online. Tracking the funnel is extremely important and we wanted to see how many folks clicked into the store.
Buys Phonebooth – does this need an explanation? This is the most important metric for us. While entering the store and engagement are both important… frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. I want money. It helps to keep a roof over my head

Pretty simple, huh? Now, we’re ready to see what happens. From here, we start our test early on a Monday morning – a clean week.

Have some fun and test for yourself

Before you run a test, I highly encourage you to make an assumption. Guess what you think will perform the best and why. Heck, create a contest amongst your team and have everyone pick their favorite. Give a prize to the winners!

Leveling the playing field for testing will help everyone understand that a website isn’t a symphony of dorks and geeks coding and designing away to make something that they think looks good. It is science. Well, if done correctly that is.

While my opinion is arguably worth two cents, I thought that our control would perform the best. $20 is a really low number. It is inexpensive for a business phone solution. Plus, I had stared at this version for two months. It was stuck in my head, but I thought that folks would gravitate to a killer price and buy our product.

Click to view the Results!

Use opportunistic marketing to get more customers

I’m always amazed at how often marketers don’t take advantages of opportunities that present themselves. Virtually anything that happens can resonate in some way with a key value proposition or marketing message of your product.

I was reminded of this at lunch today near a closed and vacant Schlotzsky’s Deli.

I was eating a quick lunch and like to get out of the office occasionally to clear my head for a few minutes. I picked up lunch at Arby’s and parked in the vacant Schlotzsky’s lot to listen to sports radio and eat.

Two minutes after parking, a car drove up… parked… walked to the door of the completely empty building and then reluctantly walked back to their vehicle.

Another two minutes passed and a car pulled through the drive-thru, also completely empty. They paused for a few seconds and then slowly drove away.

In fifteen minutes, there were eight vehicles that approached a vacant restaurant (and note that it has been vacant for several months).

Why isn’t another restaurant taking advantage of this opportunity?

There is an Arby’s next door. A KFC / Taco Bell about 100 yards away. And even a Firehouse Subs across the street, with similar and arguably, better tasting sandwiches. Would it be that difficult for them to post a piece of paper to the door and drive-thru offering a $1.00 discount if they come to their restaurant instead and mention that they were at the vacant Schlotzsky’s?

I’d venture to say that in the fifteen minutes I was in their parking lot, someone could have gained at least eight more customers that may have liked their clever, albeit extremely obvious marketing ploy.

I know you are all very busy restauranteurs, so I’ve taken the time to make this simple. Just copy this format and see what happens.

5in5 Episode 3 with Steve Johnson (@sjohnson717)

Five questions. Five minutes or less.

5in5 is a new video interview series to ask smart people five questions in less than five minutes. It gives me the opportunity to learn about them and get answers to tough questions in a short amount of time.

Why the name 5in5?

Simple. Five questions. Five minutes or less.

What did you ask Steve?

1. What can marketers learn from product management?
2. What one word defines product management?
3. How has social media changed the way you do business?
4. What is the most important thing you do to prepare for leading a presentation or training?
5. What did you want to be when you grew up?

Pragmatic Marketing rocks if you don’t know about them. Steve led my training a few years ago and it has been extremely helpful in my career. They know their stuff.