Categories
article ecommerce emarketing

How to use Popup domination, aweber or mailchimp for mailing

BIG UPDATE : April 2012 , My own company acquires a competitor of Popup Domination, we are welcome to check it : http://www.wpsubscribers.com , it’s a good alternative to consider to build your mailing list with wordpress

What all these names ? it’s email marketing tools. to create mailing list and campaigns and send your crap to your visitor. I m not very fond of these tools but I don’t want to spam them, I want to notify them, and it is all the difference.
from some friends and contact, I have been recommanded 2 tools to power the mailing list :

Aweber logo

http://www.aweber.com or http://www.mailchimp.com

I selected mailchimp, because the monkey was fun :) , it is not only the reason, there is a free plan, and I have heard of a bug with aweber concerning the post and validation message to be in english only, which will not be suitable with my users database. Also because they have a free app for iPhone and the trend of popularity of their service seem to be pretty good

If you check at the popularity of the 2 services with Alexa

In order to get new subscribers or notify existing customers, I choosed this plugin for wordpress :

Popup Domination plugin which is supposed to work well with wordpress and compatible with either aweber or chimpmail as a backend.

stay tuned, you should see the popup to try it in a few seconds if you didn’t see it already


And now, the new reference is really WPSubscribers, because it is more complete and contains more methods, and because I can make sure development includes new requirement and suggestions for bloggers and users

logo of WPSubscribers

 

Categories
article marketing

what is UX – User eXperience – definition and practice

What is UX ( User exPerience ) ? what is the gain, how it works ? what it is covering ?
User eXperience is the term to define how the user of a product or service will feel about the experience to discover, understand, choose, buy and use the product or service of a company.
Everyone is concerned, and feel it as customers, a visitor, a buyer.
the purpose is to “fix” or improve each parts of the whole process to make the experience of the user as positive as possible. but it is subjective, as it may depends on each persons. nevertheless, the art of the User eXperience is to maximize the quality of the user, by both collecting feedback from the users, and offering the best practice.
Imagine a customer in a shop, he find a product filling his need, expectation and just look about how to pay it, but the registers are hidden in the corner of the shop. Do you think he will be happy, will it give up the process, buy or not ?
if he succeed to buy, will it affect his opinion about the shop ?
Buying process is only one sample and one step of a process, but do you know only 20% of the willing purchase process are completed online ?
Why ? it may be because of the buy button isn’t visible, because the purchaser is hesitating, and doesn’t have the confidence in your web site ( we consider he has really decided to buy this exact product ).
With the same product, 2 different web sites may offer a different User eXperience, it can be because of the price, the payment method ( imagine you don’t accept the american express ), the easyness to register a new account, the easyness of the way to remember your account information ( recurrent purchase ), the incentive and special offers you may add and which can confuse the user if they need to make another choice.

there are so many little steps which can make a difference. each step , each details can play on 3% of the decision to continue or not. it is not critical, but if you multiply this small lost on each sales, you will quickly understand about how a UX expert ( the guy which will help you to build a better UX offer ) will make great return over investment on it.

How it works ? that’s the nice part, you have absolutely nothing to prepare on your side, the less information you give, the best return and benefit you will get. Simply give the web site, or address of your real shop, and the UX expert will do both a testing and a review of the process.
The UX testing part is here to check how it works , what part are easy to use, and which one require additional information, or update to be suitable to the current standards.
Once he will do the full experience of the product usage, or product purchase, he will provide a list of things to improve. At this step you can continue alone to fix the problems, and submit a new validation with the same expert or another. Or.. you can work with the UX consultant to improve each part. It’s where ergonomics and design could be consider as tools used by the Usability eXperience experts.

– Could be a new position of information – new layout

– Using different words ( call to action optimization ), it can be as well for the purchase process, as well the product name, or how the user could consider your company from the words and values you promote.

– Create and define the brand. That’s the long term strategy any company should define, but I consider this part more specialized, even if the user experience needs to fit your company values ( … so it means you need to have define company values ). If you promote easyness with a complicated shopping cart.. it won’t let you have the best conversion ratio ( the amount of sales completed over the number of visits )

I can help you to discover all the other aspects of the user experience, just let a comment or contact me, don’t tell me about your problems or what you will like to improve, it is my job to find that, send me your web site link, and an email, and I will return you a link to a video with my live experience of your service, and where I m hesitating, where I m lost, or where I will be convinced to not purchase your service.

Categories
article emarketing Neuromarketing

Limited offer : Free Neuromarketing webinar

About 6 months ago, I was lucky enough to be accepted in a Stanford Graduate School of Business entitled “Strategic Marketing Management” ( aka SMM ). One of the key subject was Neuromarketing, something I was sensitive already, as I was interested into NLP ( Neuro Linguistic programming ), but NeuroMarketing was getting straight to the point or very simple rules, which is changing your mind, and make you communicate, market, sell, or even create products and service a better way. I would like so much to share my mind with all the samples and all the actions and experience I ran since the last 6 months, and I need to thank again Baba Shiv and all the others faculties I have met ( and the participants )

Funny facts are my consulting company is named “brainfight”.. and the new company name is ObviousIdea, but in a contest where I received 1226 logos, the final winner was a logo with .. a brain.

You can watch a screencast I did  about how people behave to a choice of 8 selected logos, and how to select a logo ( in french sorry )

Today I received an email from a neuromarketing specialist, in exchange of a 5 minutes survey about your Twitter habits, you can watch a 1-hour webinar about Neuromarketing, and the basics rules which could turn your marketing skills and results to the next level. The webinar you will be able to watch is awesome, it is really a nice summary of the Neuromarketing secrets, and even with extensive class about it, I enjoyed the video at lot. If you understand it, you would be able to say too, it can definitly influence your mindset about how to communicate and market your products.

Fill the survey and watch the free webinar

Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts about the topic

UPDATE : I found a copy of this excellent video of the webinar on Youtube , watch it , it could change your life and the way you are doing business.

this Webinar is animated by Patrick Renvoise from SalesBrain, french founders based in silicon valleyr, and my favorite neuromarketing agency