The result was Logan being able to take his completed site live merely 5 days after signing up for the trial!  Logan’s experience exemplifies Eden’s ease of use. I asked Logan how his experience has been with Eden so far and he was more than willing to provide me with the following feedback:

“Thanks you for taking the time to provide me with a personal tutorial on the Eden Platform during my trial session. The Eden interface is incredibly easy to use, especially with the online support articles provided by Eden. I was able to transfer my web site to the Eden Platform and immediately begin upgrading my site within a few hours of beginning my trial session. Your interface allowed me, a complete novice, to build a professional looking website that is SEO optimized without spending a fortune on a web designer. I have upgraded my account and look forward to utilizing Eden to keep my site optimized. Thanks for providing such a great, productive and easy to use web site builder.”

Logan, on behalf of the entire Eden Platform staff, thank you for such a positive review and for being an Eden customer!

If you’re in need of legal representation in the Cumming, GA area, here’s a link to Logan’s Eden website – loganbutlerlaw.com

Speed is a bit of an obsession for most web users, and we at Preation are no exception. We fret over our Internet connections’ and mobile connections’ perceived slowness, and we go bananas for a faster web browser. This is why we released the new speed improvements to all Eden customers last summer and are continually thinking of ways to improve it further.

Given this better-faster mentality, the consequences for slow-loading pages can be dire for site owners; most users are willing to navigate away after waiting just three seconds, for example. And quite a few of these dissatisfied users will tell others about the experience.

What’s more, our entire perception of how fast or slow a page loads is a bit skewed. While we’re waiting for a site to materialize in a browser tab, pages seem to load about 15% slower than they actually do load. The perception gap increases to 35% once we’re away from a computer.

But for the precious milliseconds site owners can shave off page load times, they can see huge returns. For example, Amazon.com increased its revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of load time improvement. And Aol said its users in the top 10% of site speed viewed around 50% more pages than visitors in the bottom 10%.

Site optimization firm Strangeloop has provided us with a slew of graphically organized stats on just how long pages take to load, why they take as long as they do, and just how long the average Joe or Jane is willing to wait around for your site.

Check out the infographic to the right (click to see it at full size), and in the comments, let us know about your experiences with site speed.

Even with huge budgets, customer discovery is more than art than science.  I’ve listed the five basic steps below.  The most important part of this process is to be very methodical in your approach.  Knowing where you’ve been is the only way to improve and repeat successes.  Be sure to pay close attention to the details and record everything in a consistent format.

1.  Classification Structure

This step is also known as segmentation.  You might have a product in mind, or a general concept, but sometimes, you might just be fishing – looking for a problem to solve in a market that seems attractive.  What makes a market attractive?  Maybe your see alignment with your idea or product.  Or, maybe something about a segment strikes a chord and gets your creative juices flowing, knowing what you know about your company’s capabilities.

The segment selection process can be intuitive or it can be driven by highly sophisticated segmentation tools that carve up the total market into standardized groups.  In emerging industries, segmentation can evolve quickly.

2.  Hypothesis Testing

With your evaluation structure in place, you now need to determine, one segment at a time, if there is really an opportunity you can address.  You search from a research standpoint, paying particular attention to competitive offerings.  There’s a range of tools you can use.  A consumer products company might do a formal, quantitative study, and a company selling to enterprises might set up personal meetings with senior executives.

What are you looking for?  You’re identifying customer problems.  They should be big ones – “pain points.” If a problem isn’t urgent and important, it’ll be difficult to create a meaningful competitive advantage.  At the same time, you’re looking to see how your solution solves the problem.  Is it dramatically better?  Is it “demonstrable”?

If you’ve found a pain point in a large market you can address and there are no competitors (yes, it happens), you’ve stumbled upon an “unmet need,” one of the holy grails of new product development. Segment by segment, you are testing a hypothesis related to fit or alignment: that you have something of value to offer a customer group.  You’re not just collecting information.  This process never stops, even after you introduce your product. In fact, the best is yet to come.  Once a product is in the market, learning based on actual usage will flow in.

3.  Nuance Testing

This step is easy to overlook.  All problems have context. In other words, when customers solve problems, they are affected by circumstances associated with timing and physical surroundings, and by the nature of the task itself. As a marketer, you won’t understand context by doing a survey, conducting a focus group, or talking to senior executives.

You understand context by experiencing customer problem solving yourself. To do that, you turn to customer immersion techniques. Did you know dairy farmers use tablets? To elegantly solve their problems, you better be willing to get up at 3 a.m. on a freezing morning. Some consumer goods companies even live with customers in their homes for a short period of time. Procter & Gamble, considered one of the best marketers in the world, uses such an immersion program called “Living It.”

4.  Customer Stories

Hypothesis and nuance testing findings get captured as stories. They’re much more descriptive than use cases in that they focus heavily on problem/solution decision making.

5.  Solution Iteration

Tight product alignment with a customer is a matter of iteration. You put something out there (an idea, a prototype, an actual product), and you get feedback, and you go away and improve and refine. Your customer stories get more refined as well.

It’s highly unlikely that you’ll identify a pain point and address it perfectly in one fell swoop. In fact, to even try is highly risky, especially if you’re building hardware.

Most of the time and money wasted in new product development is related to late-stage rework, but you can avoid it by developing in small steps, ever tightening the alignment. This is what agile development is all about, and why it’s gaining so much in popularity in and outside Silicon Valley.

I’ve found a great framework for building elevator pitches. It’s just like Mad Libs in that you have specific blanks that you will fill out with the appropriate information. Here’s what the framework looks like:

“My company, (company name), is developing a (a defined offering) to help (a target audience) (solve a problem) (with secret sauce).”

What we want from your one-sentence pitch is to learn what your company name is, truly understand what it is that you’re building, who you’re going to sell or offer it to, what specific problem you’re trying to solve, and how your solution makes you unique.

To avoid at all times: vagueness (“we’re building a platform for SMBs who want to sell more stuff by using our software”), meaningless buzzwords (“we’re developing a post-PC, people-centric mobile app”) and empty, irrelevant words such as ‘innovative’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘award-winning’, ‘amazing’, ‘premier’, ‘fantastic’, ‘patent-pending’, ‘next-generation’ and the like.

Try it out!  Post your elevator pitch using the guidelines above in the comments below!

As an early New Year’s present, we’d like to share an awesome infographic with you. The infographic shows you what gifts you can give your web site this holiday season to help you focus your attention on keeping your site traffic and sales up through next year. Click on the infographic on the right to expand it.

To all of your Eden customers out there, be sure to focus on Days 1, 2, 3, and 5. The advice conveyed in those items directly correlates with the functionality you have available in Eden.

Have you created a Google+ brand page for your business?  Are you receiving a lot of +1s?  Do you think this will catch on and be a valuable asset to businesses?

This is perfect for the upcoming New Year as we know that adding offers to your website can increase your marketing conversions by 400%+!

To enter the competition you just need to 1) be an Eden customer and 2) comment on this blog post and tell us why we should pick you. What would more leads and customers do for your business? Go ahead, post a comment below and you’ll be entered to win. This Wednesday, December 14th we’ll pick our lucky winner.

Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to take your web marketing efforts to the next level in 2012. Happy Holidays!

Now, don’t you wish you could have an email sent to your inbox immediately after a form is submitted on your Eden marketing site? Of course you do. That’s why we created the email handler feature within Eden’s forms module.  The email handler allows you to follow up with new leads quickly, giving you a higher probability of closing them.

You can even set up the email handler to include the form submission data directly in the email so you won’t ever have to log into Eden to view form submissions again!

Want to see how to set up the email handler within Eden? Check out the instructions here.

Online conversions aren’t just for ecommerce websites. In fact, most businesses use their websites to initiate one-on-one conversations, which is what we’re helping our Eden customers focus on. By personally engaging a contact, you are more likely to turn that contact into a customer. So, what’s the trick?

First, you need to understand that most people don’t want to give their phone numbers or email addresses to yet another website — the thought of spam is horrifying. And it’s not just privacy hawks who shy away from contact forms; most websites only achieve a 2-3% conversion rate. Furthermore, people don’t want to have to worry about waiting for a return phone call to address their problems or questions. They want to get the answers they need with as little effort as possible.

Follow these nine tips to make your website design and customer service more approachable, and thus, gain the trust of more customers.

1. Use the words “Contact Us.” It may sound boring or generic, but the phrase works. (There’s a reason exit signs don’t use the words “leave” or “depart.”) People don’t read your site — they scan — and they’ve been trained over time to instantly recognize those two words.
2. Place contact info and phone number at the top, right corner of the page, where it’s expected. Also, make sure to include your phone number as an HTML, not an image. That way, a mobile user can tap the phone number link and launch into a call immediately. When mobile browsing eclipses desktop browsing in two years, nearly everyone will need that instant access. While you open yourself up to potential spamming, the benefits certainly outweigh the risks.
3. Keep contact forms simple. While it may help to get a full profile of your visitor by asking pre-qualifying questions, it can be very intimidating for that user. Ask for as little information as possible and require only that person’s name and email address. If you seek other information, such as phone number and address, make it optional.
4. Create one-column form fields for quick contact. It helps to put form labels directly above form fields. Usability studies show that users who filled out these types of forms saved time by only having to move their eyes vertically, not laterally.
5. Don’t be afraid of large input boxes. While considered a design trend, large input boxes are not only more fun to fill out, but also force you to limit the number of fields on a contact form.
6. Give visitors a clear action button. Because people read from left to right and top to bottom, place the final action button in the lower-right of the form. Give the button plenty of weight with a standout color.
7. Have some fun. Nothing eases people’s worries better than good humor. Why not spice up your contact form with some personality? Not only will it give your users a laugh, but it will also make your contact page more human. Consider a witty introduction or quirky photo.
8. Make a promise. Tell your users that their information is safe, that you won’t share it with any third party. Place this promise right next to the submit button; that way they’ll experience a nice aftertaste upon opting in.
9. Offer instant chat. Perhaps the lowest website threshold is instant chat. It requires the user to supply little, if any, personal information and allows you to provide quick and personal customer service. Consider giving one of these services a chance.

How has your company improved its contact forms and its customer service? Has it strengthened your business?

Last year, Cyber Monday sales topped $1 billion in the United States, making it the biggest day for online retail to date.  Yet many businesses are increasingly discounting their goods on Black Friday as well, and consumers are responding. Online sales this past Friday were up 24.3% compared to last year, according to an IBM survey of 500 retailers.

For a look at Cyber Monday’s inception and how the movement has grown during the past half decade, click on the infographic in this post to view an expanded view.

Are you offering any sort of retail discount to your customers today?