Nobody’s going to discount the growth of mobile. We’ve all got our collections of phones, tablets, and even the occasional netbook. However, a fortune thrown at mobile development will net you no extra revenue if it doesn’t serve a user purpose.

While users on the desktop may be willing to put up with moderately clunky architectures, and sometimes enjoy clever things which achieve more of a branding goal than a direct sale, such extravagances are lost when your hands are cramped around a tiny screen waiting for data to slowly trundle across a 3G (or semi-4G) connection. The medium, in many cases, directs the message.

Is your sales message necessarily long-form? Remember, scrolling is clumsy to the point of awkwardness even on the best smartphones, and NOBODY likes pinching and panning to read a long novel. For example, if you’re trying to show detailed illustrations of spa services and explain the staff’s experience, nobody’s going to sit through it.

A better choice may be to abandon that messaging entirely for mobile users. A quicker hit with a stronger value proposition can work instead– for example, a downloadable coupon.

It’s also important to consider that mobile users may not even be engaging you for a direct buying opportunity. If I open a brick-and-mortar retailer’s mobile site, my likely concern is less about making a purchase online, and more about finding a nearby location. Feel free to remove your shopping cart, return policy, and such, to put that location-finder front and centre.

Maybe you’re not a retailer, so that’s not the obvious answer. In that case, it’s time to reevaluate the reason someone is on your site in a mobile device.

The first likely choice: he’s trying to find your retail partners. The good old “Where to buy” link is vital. However, that can be risky. If your distribution channel isn’t “tight”– knowing not just which distributors you sell to, but even most retailers– you may not have the details on important local vendors, leading the user to give up on your product as unavailable in his neighbourhood.

The manufacturer does, however, tend to have an edge on product information. Frequently, a retailer’s displays are limited to breif summaries of products, and whatever you can read off the box itself. I can recall trying to peck out manufacturers’ websites on a BlackBerry to do feature comparisons in the store– and when I got there, ending up in large, slow-to-load pages which didn’t fit my needs at all. Honestly, if you look at a screenshot like this, you know– if the information you need is even on the page in the first place– you’re going to be pawing all over the screen to try to dig it out. A simple, appropriately scaled product photo and a table of key features, on the other hand, would close the deal your point-of-sale display already opened.

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Indeed, this may be a rare truly appropriate use for QR codes– since it clearly ties to a single product’s packaging, a customer could scan and arrive at full details which won’t fit on the back of the box. A further enhancement could even come by tying it to packaging version– using a different code (and thus a different page) for seasonal, region-specific, or bundled products.

People scream blue murder about Amazon using their mobile presence to aid customers in comparison shopping, but customers who are researching their purchases on mobile devices aren’t just doing so to find the lowest price– information matters. Providing those details on a well-thought-out informational mobile site can help your brick-and-mortar partners outcompete Amazon- if the customers can get their questions answered before even seeing the online price, it increases their chance of closing the deal in-store.

Of course, all these paths lead customers to a purchase– even if not directly through your site. There are retailers who have to consider “maybe my product is simply not purchased off a mobile device”, where the value proposition is primarily informational.

Any sort of transportation product fits there– yes, you might be able to build a clunky product to let me buy a bus pass with a credit card number or mobile wallet payment, but I’m probably just wanting to check the time-table.

Other likely “information only” mobile presences include products which could require emergency aid (i. e. treatment if you swallow cleanser) or field service (repairing a damaged automotive component). While it may be depressing to focus on the crisis aspects of your products, being timely and correct may be a great way to earn customer trust.

It should run on any typically configured PHP hosting environment

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A staged deployment offers you several benefits at no significant extra costs.

First, you can get something live faster. If you don’t have a corporate presence, or your presence is technically decrepit, it is vital to replace it quickly. Every week you waste is a week your old site is discouraging customers and potentially strangling search engines.

Second, on a related note, it lets you get feedback from users faster. Some people really go the whole nine yards, and hire focus groups to test and prototype their site. But most small businesses start with sites designed based on an estimate of what users need, based on their own customer experience and our analysis. There’s going to be an expectation that things have to change, after you get the third angry “where’s the price list?” email. Rolling out a basic site early allows you to find and correct those mistakes before they’re built into deep links and navigation menus all over the site.

In an ideal world, each phase of development will really be three sub-phases:

• Build the code as specified
• Wait a fortnight to gather real customer experience
• Update the site based on what we learned

Moreover, in many cases, the feedback can help you steer future phases of development. If you find everyone’s looking at the Category A page on the main site, maybe you need a more prominent Category A presence in your shopping cart. Maybe nobody will fill out a contact form asking for Social Security Number, so you’d better not use that to attach all the customer data in your CRM.

Staged deployments also allow you to stagger your own development efforts. It does take a fair amount of your effort to build a site– get all the images you need, review the branding, sign off on content. If you also have to do this for a shopping cart or other major site module, the labor can be tremendous. You often end up involving many different departments, which can result in trampled toes and wasted efforts. Imagine, for example, if everyone in the office goes to try to obtain logo and letterhead at once. Imagine if they submit three different logos.

Hacing a break between modules allows you to organize and plan for the next phase– lining up any assets we’ll need, and reviewing the results of previous changes to make sure nothing needs to be changed based on them. It also simplifies things if you hope to use a seperate chain of command– maybe main corporate signs off on the front page, and then you introduce the retail division with autonomy over every decision made pertaining to the cart.

All too often, development turns into a “the perfect is the enemy of the good” situation. By waiting until you can build a full questionnaire, instead of going live with a contact form, you’re leaving leads on the table. By holding the entire site while you build out a shopping cart, people can’t find out your address and hours of operation. Is it worth it?

One thing we can’t stress enough is not to simply take your existing site and run it through a translator, whether Google Translate or a college intern hired for sub-minimum wage.

A one-to-one translation tends to ignore legitimate technical differences between nations. For example, form validators designed for 5-digit American zip codes will blow up if fed an analogous Brazillian CEP code instead. Phone numbers are often pre-validated too, and can prevent users from proceeding through your sales funnel. You might have a gorgeous looking site up, but zero conversions, and such runaway validators are the cause.

Aside from hard failures, there is also an atmosphere of soft distrust created by a straight transliteration. Maybe your addresses aren’t shown in the way your visitors normally make out an envelope. Or you quote 12-hour time when all the other ads are in 24-hour time. A key part of website development is to build credibility, and it’s the small things which show you have a real local presence and understanding.

Second, don’t ignore the product mix! Carmakers have driven themselves mad for decades over the fact that they can’t just sell the same model in Seoul, Sao Paulo, and Sedona. In the end, they’ve largely given up. Learn from their efforts. Maybe a few of your products have worldwide appeal, but a substantial amount of your success will involve picking products that are truly targeted towards local audiences. Plan ahead and be ready to move “laterally”. Maybe you sell diet supplements in America, but there aren’t enough fat people in China yet to justify the costs. Use your manufacturing contacts to sell an immune-boosting or general health supplement instead. The product mix also goes all the way to packaging, brand names, and sizes– will people in a 10-square-metre Tokyo apartment want to store a drum of 500 pills, or a little packet of 14?

Finally, plan payment early. We see a lot of websites– even within America– trip and stumble when it comes time to set up payment processing. It’s time- and labour-consuming to set up, and it often triggers other design choices, like what shopping cart to use. On an international site, the issue is doubly important: many American credit card processors won’t accept transactions in foreign currencies, and even if they did, it might incur extra fees, a sure way to dissuade customers. It becomes very important to also research alternative means of payment favoured in the target country. For example, the bank-to-bank transfer that’s complicated and expensive in the US is simple and extremely cheap in parts of Europe and Asia, so accepting a wire isn’t such a big deal. Other countries have developed ‘pay at a local store’ services to accept cash payment when credit card penetration is low. You have to ask: do we need to cater to the demographics which use these services? Will it get us more business, or save us costs?

At Web-Op, we’re helping companies cross international barriers. Whether it’s an American seller trying to get in on the “Rise of the Rest”, or a Chinese manufacturer eager to build a global brand, we can help.

It’s not meant to pick on her specifically, but rather to ask a legitimate question: are you using social media as a tool, or fighting what it represents?

Fundamentally, Facebook still hasn’t grown out of its roots– college kids poking each other and playing games. Yeah, the games are more elaborate now, and generating $9 billion market cap, but it’s still very much a personal, and an individual-to-individual environment. There’s a strong back-and-forth mentality. In most cases, a company is still an outsider– primarily having a page to push messages out to their ‘friends’, rather than having a conversation. Some firms actually do better– soliciting real discussions and forming a conversation with their staff- but if you aren’t going to use it except as a megaphone, you’re not really embracing the spirit of the medium.

In addition, there’s the overall feeling that your social media choice entails. Each of the major social networks still standing has attempted to establish a flavour– MySpace remains focused on entertainment and music, LinkedIn is about business, LiveJournal focused on privacy and being a closed network of friends sharing diaries, and Facebook turned into connecting with old friends and family. For her environment, LinkedIn may be a more sensible place to focus her profile– it wouldbe a good way to connect with potential employees, and it establishes an atmosphere of professionalism you simply don’t see in a network where half the messages are about imaginary livestock.

Finally, are you building a shell of a page, or do you have a content vision? We did this before in 1996. Yes, you have a website social network page. But does it say anything new and useful not seen on the Yellow Pages ad website? A well-maintained social network presence can be an excellent way to monitor customer feelings, or a means to deliver exclusive discounts (and thus force the almighty “Like” to get in on them), but nothing looks deader than an empty page. There may be some minor reputation-control benefits by having Brand X’s Facebook page show up when you search for Brand X, instead of an angry customer review, but if the page offers customers no value, they’ll keep going and find the bad review anyway, or worse, conclude you’re out of business.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to be an active participant in the social media blitz, as long as you can successfully explain why you’re there and what you’re doing. In a way, that’s probably good practice for any business operations.

Much like a funnel in the kitchen, a properly configured conversion funnel will start with a large opening– the 50,000 visitors who hit your site in a month– and narrow down to a smaller number– like the 200 who buy– at the end. At each step, it should get narrower. There’s value in all of these factors– how fast it narrows, as well as how many people enter and leave the whole process.

Insight From The Funnel

The most obvious detail a conversion funnel provides is where dropout occurs. If you have 60% of visitors who reach a step abandoning the conversion process, it’s worth reviewing that step. However, there are plenty of side-notes to be seen:

* If you’re seeing a lot of users jumping into the middle of the funnel, you may have an incorrect view of the customer’s workflow. Maybe they’re starting at a product page, provided by Google, rather than your home page, and it may be worth concentrating efforts to close the sale there.

Another common source for mid-funnel visits is the “split session” mindset. For example, many visitors will review the first few pages of a site, to confirm features and price, and then return to the one which offers the best deal to complete their order. Knowing where they pick back up can help you customize a message for returning visitors, or a plea to keep them from searching elsewhere first.

* If all your visits aren’t registering, you may have issues with the tracking code. This is especially true if you need to send users across domains, such as to a shared-SSL site. A fix here can also improve your overall analytics experience.

* Filtering the funnel by additional variables can provide “passive” data about compatibility. Rather than wait for people to say “It’s broken in Safari”, you can see “Safari users had a 98% dropout at step 3″ yourself.

Setting Up The Conversion Funnel with Google Analytics

In Google Analytics, it’s possible to digest traffic data into a conversion funnel without having to add any new tags. All you need to do is go into the Analytics control panel and select the “Goals” system.

First, you determine a goal page, like “/thankyou.php”. Here is where you know the conversion has occured- a good choice is the reciept, or “thank you for contacting us” page.

Then, you plan a specific path to that page that you plan to monitor. For example, “/index.php” to “/contact.php” to “/thankyou.php”. Here’s the big thing they don’t mention: if you set up several conversion funnels, they can’t cross.

It’s easiest to set up the funnel steps by using the “head match” option, as it just relies on easily legible names. For example, a “head match” of “/thankyou.php” will match “/thankyou.php”, “/thankyou.php5″, and “/thankyou.php.not.really”. However, it avoids having to fight with complex syntax, and in most cases, avoids the risk of having pages which inadvertently trigger matches. The more sophisticated techniques, using regular expressions, can be valuable for building a funnel with variable paths, such as “any product page”, as a step. But if you’re just monitoring, say, the pages in a standard checkout, or the front page to a contact form, it’s overkill.

Once this chain is set up, you have to wait for it to process new data to fill the funnel report. Unfortunately, the five years of back data you have won’t be resorted into the new funnel.

Conclusion

A conversion funnel is a relatively easy way to get more value and understanding out of the analytics package you’re already using.

While it’s often seen as a grand investment strategy– building a portfolio of names and holding them for sale, it’s actually a very weak strategy.

First, your revenue angles are limited. Yes, there are some new ‘Parking Plus’ concepts, like throwing out an affiliate-based store, or slapping a canned forum or wiki onto your dead domain to give it a life, but these often mean handing over a huge cut of an already small revenue stream to the development service. Beyond that, there’s little more than selecting different parking services and hoping that you can find one which generates $8.95 per year to cover the renewal costs.

That’s the sad fact of domaining: most of your portfolio is going to barely cover expenses; if you’re lucky, once a year, explodinghamsters.com will pay for a curry dinner when parked.

Second, you can never enter the search game. Even if you develop a brilliant site atop your parking provider’s toolkit, you will have obvious fingerprints. Your nameservers will be those of the parking firm; the underlying software’s basic nature will be visible. Hell, even the template structure will be obviously betraying that you didn’t own your site. In addition, these sites rarely, if ever, have a high-quality link profile, so even if there aren’t inherent penalties to the site, it won’t meet the search engines’ quality estimates.

Third, you’re generally taking a passive approach to marketing. I note this is especially true with owners of specific types of domains. If you bought a hundred domain names solely because they’re four-letter-long “brandable” .com domains, you can’t really go out there. All you can do is hope someone invents a product, names it something you own the domain for, and will pay premium money because he didn’t do his homework before running the $200,000 media campaign.

Yes, the ‘invented name’ only applies to some domainers, but frequently, those people who have keyword-rich domains, are pursuing a mechanical approach of whatever name has the most exact-match searches on Google, or the highest pay-per-click estimates. Ironically, it’s a strategy which makes you focused on the very search engine who doesn’t want you to rank at all. Naivete is also a factor: will you be able to provide a message on your exact-match domain that will register enough to get that paid click, or just trigger the big-blue-back-button?

So how can you do better? Invest in a complete property. Build a site with fresh content, rather than a parking page, and connect it to a comprehensive link-building campaign. With such a setup, you have an asset– not just a site– one which will draw real search rankings and traffic, and which can potentially be sold to a further user. Yes, it’s a long-term strategy, but one which can pay out much more than a 96-cent monthly parking commission.