Web Development & Design | Online Marketing
Unsolicited notes, links and advice from an online development firm in Kansas City.
This article is mostly pseudo-science: lots of charts that (nicely) illustrate the author’s opinion, not data. But when you get down to the bottom, there’s a great little data-driven marketing idea in there:
My recommendation is something called metric of the month. In metric of the month, you choose a problem area for the next month. Then you try to find the best metric which is connected to that problem. Run with the metric for one month, try to improve the reading as much as you can, and then throw the metric away. Start over with a new metric for the next month.
This way you can maximize on the excitement of the fast initial progress with a new metric. Our compilation warning chart is no longer useful to us, for example. It has lost it’s mojo. So, it makes sense to change focus as soon as that happens, and pick the low hanging fruit from a new area. It keeps things improving, and helps keep things interesting.
Whatever you do, don’t tell developers to improve on a metric like the corporate operating profit, EBIT, the stock price, or anything like that. You could just as well tell them to control the weather.
37 Signals AB Split Testing
Jason over at Signal vs. Noise is sharing some really interesting data from an copy writing A/B split test.
Writing Decisions: Headline tests on the Highrise signup page.
They basically discovered that short, punchy copy, combined with assurance of a low-cost of adoption spurs more sales. These are things that any copy writer worth their salt knows anyway, but now they have empirical data that proves it.
Sometimes we have to send sensitive information online. Stuff like PIN numbers and passwords that we don’t really want sitting in the recipients email folders forever. So how do we send one of those “This message will self destruct in 5… 4… 3…” notes like in Mission Impossible?
It’s easy with Privnote. Privnote is one of those super-simple “Why didn’t I think of that?” web services. I use it when I need to send info that I don’t want filed away on an email server for the next 50 years. Over the last few months Privnote has earned a permanent bookmark in my browser’s “Web Tools” folder.
If you want to send a Privnote, just go to Privnote.com, type up your message and hit “Create Note”. It will provide you with a secure URL you can mail to whomever you want. The url links to your note, which is will be destroyed after it has been read. It’s fast, simple and helpful. Just a like a good web-app should be. (And it’s free.)