A complicated process is a surefire way to lose crucial conversions and testing a prospect’s patience gives them a reason to shop elsewhere. Additionally, once they’ve been through the steps and have determined it to be too cumbersome, they may never return.

Shoppers always want a quick and convenient checkout and instinctively head for the shortest line. Even if you are not “selling” anything online, the concept is no different. The number one thing you can do to increase your conversion rate is to optimize your process’ flow. Creating a  process that uses as few steps/pages as possible and requires potential prospects to jump through fewer hoops can encourage them to complete the process on your site.

As IAC/InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller puts it in a recent CNET article, “One of the greatest barriers to buying things is the steps that it takes, and we all know the difference when you go to Amazon and you just push your little thing and it’s bought, paid for, delivered, billed, etc., instantly, and [...] how much that has made the difference between just browsing and buying…that little thing, [...] you scroll it, you do it, it comes, everything else is taken care of, is the answer to what’s going to happen on the Internet when, in fact, we get the applicability of that broadly.”

Some easy steps to help the conversion flow:

1. Low Barrier Entry:
An email address is really the only bit of information you need to contact me. Don’t scare me off by asking for too much personal info up front. Capturing my email address now gives you permission to get in touch with me… even if I don’t go through the whole process.

2. Save My Information:
If I bought something from you once, I may return. Don’t make me re-enter my information. Keeping my shipping information and credit card “on file” will make my experience quick, easy and convenient.

3. Include a Customer Service Contact:
Regardless of how much you simplify your checkout, I may still require assistance. If I can’t find the answer I need, I have no choice but to abandon my cart to find your site’s help page, or worse, make my purchase on your competitor’s site.

4. Following up is NOT begging:
Even if you optimize your process to be super low barrier, there may be “other” reasons beyond your control that cause me to not complete the process. So, don’t ignore the fact that I was interested to begin with. You have my email address now, after all, so follow up with me - remind me why I was there in the first place; ask me if I’m still interested; send me a coupon to get me to come back… just don’t forget about me once I’ve taken that first step.

BofA is part of a growing number of companies who are already utilizing the wildly popular Twitter tool – becoming the largest financial institution in the world using a social media tool for customer service.

What makes BofA’s use of Twitter so remarkable is that they are using a real person with a real name and an actual photo (not a logo or other avatar). Using the twitter handle @BofA_help, David Knapp is Bank of America’s Twitter Representative. I was amazed and impressed to discover that he is not just a CSR appointed to be the “face of Bank of America” on twitter, but David is actually the senior vice president and market manager for middle market commercial banking. I was also delighted by how genuine and immediate his responses were.

Out of frustration about a recent snafu with my finances, I posted this message to the twittersphere,

“BofA is charging me (long time customer) $350 in NSF fees, for a simple mistake. Maybe it’s time to switch banks.”

to which, within an hour, I received this response,

“BofA_help@kzarecki I work for Bank of America, anything I can do to help?”

The idea that BofA’s Twitter rep proactively goes out to find customers who need help threw me for a loop. This is something we’re not used to any more – Actual “Customer Service”.

I have to admit I was skeptical about any type of a resolution, as I had already attempted to work something out by calling BofA customer service line 3 times. But David Knapp asked me to follow up with my contact info and a description of the circumstances. I figured that it couldn’t hurt to give it one more shot, so I did. The very next morning, I received a phone call – not an email… not a form letter in the mail box… and actual live person, and not a CSR, mind you (I didn’t catch the guy’s name, but I think it was Mr. Knapp’s boss!) called me to say, “I think the right thing to do is credit you back [all but one of the ten $35 overdraft fees].”

Honestly, it almost brought a tear to my eye. Not just because I got most of my money back, but because I didn’t feel like just another no-name customer – all the personal attention made me feel like I was integral to the success of the company and my happiness is important. Seth Godin says in his post about in-bound customer service, “…the goal of every single interaction should be to upgrade the brand’s value in the eye of the caller and to learn something about how to do better, not to get the caller to just go away.” I applaud BofA for putting an actual face and person behind the twitter account and having a real person follow up with a phone call. While I may not be their most profitable customer, the treatment I received made me feel like I was worth a million bucks. Now, THAT is what I call “customer service”.

The term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) has been abused and seems to have become a catch-all for anything and everything related to increasing search engine ranking/visibility and user traffic to a given website. As I see it, “optimization” is the act of making the website easy for search engine bots and spiders (and bears, oh my!) to crawl through a website and parse the content easily. So, that would include things like:

• Making a website standards compliant
• Appropriate use of “alt” attributes on images
• Appropriate use of “title” tags (and attributes)
• Using CSS for layout (thus making the HTML more compact and easier to get through)
• Use of appropriate content and keywords

The list above won’t do much to increase your rankings in the search engines unless your competition is nonexistant on the web. So, what needs to be done to actively pursue increasing your ranking in the search engines? Well, that is where “Search Engine Marketing” (SEM) comes in. With an active search engine marketing campaign, you can cultivate your website over time and show those search engines that you have a site that is well taken care of and relevant to people.

Websites should not be viewed as static bits of code that just “sit there” until someone stumbles across them. They should not be put out on the web just “to have something out there”. With a nurturing environment, a website can grow and thrive and attract a community of users that value what the site has to offer. Just like people need to be taken care of and encouraged, websites need frequent attention to be seen as successful, high-ranking sites in the eyes of search engines (and users).

Recently, while attending a fundraiser for one of our clients in Kansas City, I was asked if Tower29 had the “Silver Bullet” when it comes to Internet Marketing. I have to admit I was a little dumb-struck by the question. This gentleman seemed pretty knowledgeable about SEO and other online marketing tools, so surely he knew that there are as many different customers as there are websites – each with their own unique habits, wants and needs. So I found it odd that he would be so insistent that there could be a “magic, one-shot… silver bullet” solution to marketing online.

This isn’t to say that there is no “silver bullet”. However, we need to use the analogy correctly. Just as garlic and a stake-to-the-heart will work on vampires, silver bullets are specifically reserved for werewolves; zombies must be decapitated; ghosts - busted; etc. The idea is that each individual target requires it’s own unique approach. Hence, “target” marketing.

An effective targeted or “direct” marketing campaign uses one or more advertising media to generate a response that can be measured. This is often referred to as a “conversion”. Measuring these conversions will allow business owners to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns

For this very reason, Internet Marketing has become more and more important to a successful business marketing strategy. It’s not that the internet is where all of your particular customers are to the exclusion of traditional media. We will never claim that someone who stumbles on your website is definitely going to buy something from you right then and there. But, by paying attention to the results of your efforts, we can track, measure and significantly improve your marketing effectiveness.

So, we test ideas, analyze results and use these results to develop strategies. We expose your most profitable products and services to those whom are most likely to benefit from them. Monitor the results and make adjustments. If you don’t sell products online, your goal may be to capture viewer data, offer information, coupons, white papers, establish a connection, create a dialog [BLOG]. Even if you have no intentions of ever selling products or services online, you know the advantage of having more of the single most significant business resources at your disposal. Viewers.

If your target is werewolves, there IS a silver bullet. If your target is vampires, use garlic. Whatever the case, know your target and use the appropriate “weapon”. If you go in unarmed, without an effective internet marketing strategy, you have already lost.

I was reading an article published on www.AIGA.org recently called Ever Notice? – A dialogue between Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg about the importance of being aware and the advantages of tapping into your “super-noticing power” in practicing design and specifically in user research. It reminded me of my days as a student of graphic design and the noticing exercises we practiced. I still employ the same noticing tactics today but I had forgotten how important this fundamental principal is to marketing and visual communications.

In the field of online marketing the act of noticing goes into hyperdrive. Information across the World Wide Web is experienced differently than driving down a road, walking through a museum or reading the morning newspaper. A loading web page is an onslaught of text and images battling for attention. Web surfers consume hundreds of lines of source code and decide which data they like/dislike or need/don’t need in a split second. Quantitative and qualitative analytics gives us insight to surfing habits, tracks our goal conversions and referring links but the power of noticing contributes to our ability to respond, adapt and deliver.

It all begins with the fundamental art of noticing that Portigal and Soltzberg discuss. Soltzberg says “There’s another classic Zen concept that everything you need to know and experience is already happening and present, but you need to get your old ways of thinking out of the way so you can experience it. Doing contextual research is like using “super-noticing power” to peel back those layers of preconception, culture and habit. When you do that you get to something fundamental and then you’ve got a really solid platform for developing new concepts.”

Maybe you have never really consciously exercised “noticing power” or maybe you have forgotten how important it is. Try some of the noticing exercises mentioned in Portigal and Soltzberg’s discussion. You will be surprised to realize how many things you are actually experiencing but not really noticing.