Every company has to make choices when it comes to how it markets and sells, and, in some cases, who it is and what it sells. In an email exchange, Tom Grimes, the owner of a Culligan dealership in Amarillo, TX and a brilliant friend, shared with me what he’s thinking about in terms of business choices. I thought about it and based on his thoughts, here’s a list of the many high-level choices businesses typically make every day. It…
If you do business, online or traditional business, I hope you took the time to read Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos’ 2013 shareholder letter. In it he shares this tidbit: “Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company. ‘Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit…
Last week, my partner and brother, Jeffrey and I were doing an in-house training for a large B2B marketing team. At the end of our training, we had them review a bunch of landing pages across the web to see how they could apply what they learned over the two day training. One source of inspiration for the landing pages they reviewed was this list of 30 beautiful landing pages. There were a few good ones (beautiful isn’t good), but…
With news that Facebook gift sales and revenue are off to a rough start, they are starting to show how desperate they are for people to start buying gifts. Have you noticed their latest offer of desperation (Get $3 off your gift of $5 or more): Maybe they didn’t think people could see that they could buy their friends gifts when you go to wish them a happy birthday from the birthday notifications and below each person they tell you…
A couple of weeks ago, I asked readers how they would optimize the following Hulu.com mobile landing page that I saw when I searched for Hulu on my iPhone’s browser. Obviously, there was an issue with the image loading, but that might not be the only problem on this mobile landing page. Techmirth, a former client and good friend suggested how they could deal with this image not loading: Don’t rely on a single image that may fail to load to…
When you consistently deliver a great customer experience, build a great product and develop a brand people trust you don’t have to try as hard to convert your visitors. Check out an old version of the DropBox home page: Check out what their home page looks like today: What are your plans to deliver that kind of reputation in 2013?
Since my column about the Power of the About Us page (remember 2006 when MySpace was really popular) was written, not a week goes by that I don’t receive a comment about it. Every website needs an “About Us” page, it’s one of the most important but undervalued elements of a company’s website. This is especially true in a world where social media profiles allow us to connect content to people. The “About Us” page needs to show and tell about…
I was in Moscow last week with Jeffrey, waiting in the lobby for a taxi. I passed the time taking screenshots of “promotional” emails and ads with their corresponding landing pages. After clicking through some ads and emails I needed to vent. I posted the following message on my Facebook profile: Frustrated at the state of email marketing. Decided I would look at some of the “promotional” emails whisked away from my Inbox and decided to click through to some…