Nick Ezzo

HubSpot, one of my favorite marketing websites, sent me an email today that I want to repost here.  It’s pretty simple, but hugely important to keep in mind.

Top 5 Website Redesign Tips

Going through a website redesign? Keep these 5 tips in mind and use HubSpot to help you through the process .

1. Goal = more visitors and leads. The reason you are redesigning your website is to impact your business, not because you or your CEO are bored with the design. So, focus on the results you want: more visitors, leads, and customers and make decisions based on these goals.

2. Avoid pitfalls. Inventory your assets and protect them. A website redesign can negatively impact your results by unintentionally removing the assets – website pages and links – that are driving the most leads for you. Make sure to figure out your most powerful pages and links and protect them during the redesign process.

3. Invest in remarkable content that attracts visitors and converts them into leads. A fancy design does not necessarily bring results. Focus on function over over form. Create an ongoing content creation strategy (this means blogging!) to add more content to your website over time.

4. Create conversion opportunities with calls to action and landing pages. Once you have visitors coming to your website, give them the opportunity to give you their contact information in exchange for content. This means using landing pages – and having control over your landing pages – as you build out your new website.

5. Measure the impact on visitors and leads. At the beginning of your website redesign process, you decided you wanted to increase visitors and leads. Did it work? Make sure you have the website analytics in place to measure your progress towards your goals.

A business website is a business tool and should deliver business results. Leave the works of art to the galleries and museums. Your career and your company will thank you for it.

If you browse my work, you’ll notice that a lot of the demand generation techniques I’ve used successfully have a few features in common.

1. Provocative
2. Humorous
3. To The Point

The reason for this is simple: decision-makers and VITOs are inundated with poorly targeted marketing campaigns and sales offers.

Think about the last time you received a cold call from someone who had no clue what your needs were.

Then think about the last bland, boring piece of spam or junk mail that you picked up and thought “Wow, they really wasted 50 cents on that.  I’m not even in their target market.”

Both cold calling and direct mail blasts are an example of what I call Net Fishing.  You cast the net far and wide and haul in a bunch of random fish.  Then you pick the ones you want and throw the rest back in the water.  This is a very inefficient way of marketing any kind of large, complex enterprise solution.  What ends up happening?  The same little fishies jump into your net every time, while the whales happily swim free.  And let me tell you something — you want to land a whale, not a bunch of guppies and the occasional carp.

On the other hand, Spear Fishing takes the point of view that there are a limited number of companies that are worth going after — only a few whales worth hunting.   They need to be studied.  Understood.  Analyzed.  And once you know the spot on the underbelly where that ONE single whale is most vulnerable, then you craft a highly targeted and precise marketing spear intended to hit that whale and make an impact.

Let me give you a few examples of well-crafted marketing spears:

Read the remainder of this entry »

My friend Marco Marini posted an excellent article on his Blog at ClickMail Marketing.  Here’s a copy of the email he received:

Hi Marco Marini,  I’m writing to tell you that we’re just putting the finishing touches on your order # X55555. It looks terrific and will be on its way to you very soon. I’ll be sending you an email to let you know when it ships.

FYI, you can check your order status, view, share or re-order your PhotoBooks anytime at MyBookshelf.

Talk to you soon,

Frank
MyPublisher Service Team
frank@mypublisher.com

Read more about why a timely and personal email can make the difference between good customer service and awesome customer service.