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Web operations software drives more success conversions
It's a bold headline, but it's true. Using a content management system to drive your website content enables you to be much more flexible about A/B testing of landing pages, publishing your new blog and adding RSS feeds. Any good content management system should also make your site more search engine optimization friendly. A good CMS allows you to optimize the content based on user experience, and it allows you to continually drive more and more content out to your website, which creates more "Google food" and drives more traffic.
Then, creating loyalty programs using email campaign management systems and RSS to communicate with your customers will also drive more conversions. By feeding relevant content to your frequent visitors/customers, you'll create more "customer evangelists" (to borrow from Guy Kawasaki), which drives more success conversions.
Finally, utilizing web analytics to measure and segment all of that traffic is the key to completing the 360 degrees of the content lifecycle. And, today, good web analytics, email campaign management systems and content management systems work together so you can automatically take action based on how users are utilizing your content.
Okay, now it's time for some math...
Certainly your own mileage will vary, but let's say you can generate even a modest 15 percent lift by using web operations technology. This is a significant bump to your success. And, I bet you can easily beat that number. Add to that the argument (above) that you are 30 percent more efficient, and you've now got an amazingly compelling argument. You can walk into the presentation and say, "With this re-design and new web operations software, we can boost success conversions by 15 percent and be 30 percent more efficient."
Any executive -- whether they hate it or not -- understands that math.
Putting it all together
So, when the request comes down that says, "Let's redesign our site," take that opportunity and build your business case for adding in a new operations center.
Here is some advice to get you started:
1. Consider operations technology from a "best-of-breed" approach, rather than investing in a one-application-fits-all approach. Software should and will be the least of your concerns from an investment point of view. The biggest expense to consider when building your business case will be the services needed to support whichever solutions you choose. So, by diversifying your investments, if one aspect (e.g. web analytics) doesn't meet the needs of your organization or ends up costing too much to support and maintain, you can replace it.
2. When considering Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, or open source solutions supported by a third party, make sure there is support, maintenance and SLA that guarantees your costs over the life of the contract. While no one can predict the next time the CEO will want to redesign the site (therefore introducing new unexpected costs), any solution provider should be able to guarantee all upgrades, patches and maintenance costs for the life of your software support contract with them.
3. Don't forget that internal resources also cost money. When building your business case, it's often easy to fall into the trap that, "Bob, the developer, is a sunk cost so I can't count that." That's true, Bob is a sunk cost, but Bob's "value" is variable. So, when Bob is hand-coding HTML pages for a press release, he's not nearly as valuable as when he's building a new web application that gives your organization a competitive edge. The cost to the organization for not maximizing the value of Bob is just as real as hard dollars out the window.
The bottom line is, as you build your business case for web marketing operations, you don't always have to rely on the argument that you can be more efficient. In today's digital marketing landscape, you can use efficient web operations to build a better marketing engine, and that creates much more opportunity for your business.
Rob Rose is vice president of marketing and product strategy for CrownPeak Technology. Read full bio.
