Use customized pages or DHTML pop-ups to keep searchers on your site longer

One of the reasons Google is such an effective site from a usability standpoint is that it's able to get users to the information they're looking for in as few clicks as possible, and with as little effort as possible. Your website should strive to do the same, whether it's reducing the user's path to a particular piece of content, or by making suggestions for content that you know a particular user will find relevant.

An idea I've been advocating for quite some time is customizing pages on your website based on the
entry path to your site. So for example, if the person comes to your site after doing a Yahoo search for "widgets", why not show them a page that says "Welcome Yahoo user! Thanks for searching for 'widgets'. Here are several links that might take you to what you're interested in." Of course the content on that page itself is usually going to be relevant to their search on widgets, but why not customize the experience and offer them more information that might help?

Back in March I stumbled upon a great example of this. Forbes serves a dynamic HTML (DHTML) pop-up for traffic that's originating from a Google search. The pop-up offers a welcome to Google users and links to several stories that are related to the user's search on Google (probably powered by Forbes' own site search). This image shows an example. I did a Google search on "logistics" and clicked the Forbes link, and here's what I saw when I reached the Forbes site.

I don't know how long Forbes has been doing this -- perhaps it's something they've been doing for a long time and I've never seen it before. But I tried it again today and it still worked, so they haven't given up on the tactic. So that leads me to believe it's effective at extending the visit length of site users, since I'd imagine they would have discontinued the practice by now if it wasn't.

You could easily implement this practice for traffic that's originating from other major sources -- perhaps a partner's website, someone who links to you and drives a lot of traffic, other search engines or directories, etc. Forbes is doing the same thing for Yahoo search traffic, and possibly others as well.

Should we be producing LESS content on the web?

Scott Karp wrote a fascinating blog post about cutting down on the amount of content you produce, to avoid polluting the web. He advocates that writers reduce the amount of "stuff" they put out there, using effective linking strategies instead so as not to duplicate something that's already available on the web. His reasoning is why should you regurgitate, when a simple link will suffice?

It's something I've never thought of before. There's unlimited space on the web, right? (Ignoring things like the cost of storage, server costs, etc.) But Scott is saying there is a cost involved, and that cost is the amount of time people waste when they're trying to filter information.

It reminds me of a lot of the spam I used to get a few years ago. I haven't seen one of these in a while, but perhaps some spammers might still use this. The footer of the spam message would say,

Please Save the Planet, Save the Trees! Advertise via Email. No wasted paper! Delete with one simple keystroke! Less refuse in our Dumps! This is the new way of the new millennium.

Yes, that's true -- spammers don't waste paper to print direct mail. But countless hours of productivity are wasted each year by spam. (I'm sure someone has a study out there somewhere that quantifies how much time the average person spends weeding through spam, but honestly it's going to be such a big number that it's near meaningless anyway, so I'll conserve resources by not trying to find a link!)

So just like countless hours are wasted each year fighting spam, Scott asserts that since there's so much content out there, it's wasting people's precious time to go through it. Wow...producing less content? Can our Internet society handle such a radical idea?

So here's another way to look at it:
The answer isn't writing about less things, it's simply writing less about the same amount of things. According to Jakob Nielsen's recent column, users are reading at most 28% of the words on the average web page.

So if content creators identify the 72% of wasted words and don't write them, the problem is solved and everyone is happy! Everyone still gets to communicate, but there's no waste. Brilliant!

But like the old advertising adage goes, "I know half my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don't know which half," how will writers know which 28% of their content people are reading?

(If you haven't already figured it out, this comment is at least 28% tongue in cheek...)

Why Google's Gmail is able to overcome data and privacy concerns, to become the darling of the email world (and what we can learn from them)

Yesterday I migrated my personal email account to Gmail. I set myself up with Google Apps, so instead of having an @gmail.com address, I can continue to use my own domain name but have all the email managed through Gmail. (It's really a very good solution -- I'd encourage anyone who owns their own domain to look into it...whether you're a small business, an organization, or just someone who likes their own domain name for your email, like me.)

But when I was reading through documentation, blog posts, forum posts, etc. about setting up Gmail within Google Apps, I uncovered a major drawback to any person taking the Gmail plunge and storing all their email with Google:

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to migrate all your messages away from Gmail, should you decide one day that you don't want to use Gmail anymore. That's a pretty high "switching cost"...way worse than just having to tell all your contacts that you have a new email address. On top of that, Google has lost some users' mail, according to many reports.

But I still did it. I still decided to use Gmail. Why? Because Google has created a user experience that is vastly better than anything anyone else is offering. And this is where marketers can learn from Google.

A little history first: Previously I had been handling my mail through GoDaddy with a simple POP mailbox, and it did a nice job. I never had any problems, they had a webmail interface (although I tended to use Mail2Web instead), and I used Outlook Express at home to download and store all my email on my hard drive.

But the experience Google promised through Gmail was superior, and that's why I switched. Gmail's threaded conversations and tags make mail so much easier to manage. Its spam filter is so good that I've seen plenty of people who forward their POP email to a Gmail account just for the spam filtering. Now with Google Apps, you can get the Gmail interface but with your own domains and integration with Google calendaring, spreadsheets, etc. And Gmail also supports POP and IMAP, so they let their users check email in whatever way they feel is most convenient. (Although Gmail's interface is so good, I've been using the web version.)

So back to my "no way out of Gmail" concern. I did lots of searches yesterday and found plenty of people talking about migrating their messages out of Hotmail or Yahoo into Gmail, but I never found anyone trying to move away from Gmail. (Probably because Gmail is in style now, but I'm still a little surprised I didn't find anyone talking about going the other direction, from Gmail to another system.) There are all sorts of scripts and programs and techniques for getting your old stored mail into Gmail, but none for getting it out. Interesting, and a little scary.

I always liked knowing that I could export old mail out of Outlook Express, or Outlook, or Netscape Mail, or the various email clients I've used over the years. After all, when 2010 or 2011 rolls around and the next big thing in email arrives, maybe I'll want to make a switch. (And by then, hopefully someone will have figured out a way to easily get stored messages out of Gmail and into the next big thing.)

But look at the beauty of Google's underlying business philosophy here:

• We'll build a better email system, changing the paradigm for how people interact with their email. We'll make it so good you can't help but sign up.
• We'll serve ads alongside it...which is how we'll make our money.
• To expand our footprint and challenge the well-established Hotmail and Yahoo Mail brands, we'll extend our support to corporate users too.
• We won't make it easy for you to leave.

For most businesses, this final point could be a huge obstacle. Customers usually don't like being locked in like this. But why can Google get away with it? I think it's because what they're offering -- the vastly better email experience -- is so good that people don't mind giving up some flexibility. (Quick plug for one of my favorite blogs: If you're interested in the topic of how companies can create a better experience for their customers, check out Good Experience by Mark Hurst.)

So the lesson for all the marketers who want fiercely loyal customers (the kinds of people who will, for example, entrust years' worth of old email to Google without any way to easily get it out), the key is creating a customer experience that is vastly superior to what others can provide. Innovate to deliver a vastly better product at a significantly better value (which may or may not always mean a better price) than what your competitors are doing. If you can do this, you might have the next Gmail.

Developing personas for your web audience

Here's a link to a good video about developing personas for your web audience. How can you design a site, or add new features or content without knowing who you're targeting? Granted, personas are more art than science, and well-designed surveys and usability tests are other things you should be doing to learn more about your audience. But they can still be helpful.

Last summer, one of my colleagues and I put together a set of personas for the IndustryWeek.com audience. Unfortunately we didn't have the benefit of watching this video first, so it was a little more painful since we had never done it before and didn't know some of the helpful pointers covered here. But it was still a good exercise that helped our sales team (and even us) internalize some of the key attributes of our audience.