Changing from an ugly and ill-formed email-based system into a simple, fast and cloud-enabled application has reduced costs, increased control and brought a whole host of really important improvements to how we work.

It’s not just us!

Seth Godin, a kind of visionary in this new world actually makes the radical suggestion of “Do not approve any project that isn’t run on Basecamp“. That is, I’ll grant you, a little extreme but as the the post is aimed at “catch-up” audiences he’s probably right – we’d certainly agree with him.

ps: If you do sign up using the link above then, thanks, we get a small reduction in our monthly bill, ta x

Why journey management?

Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organisations from a current state to a desired future state. The current definition of Change Management includes both organizational change management processes and individual change management models, which together are used to manage the people side of change [Wikipedia]

Organisational change is carried out as a policy handed out from on high and normally has the highest moral, ethics and intentions. This policy then has to be implemented at the people level and all people respond to change differently and at a different pace. It’s quite clear that moving an individual working in a manner type A to type B requires a number of processes, systems, feedback loops and measurement systems together with an infrastructure to deliver this change.

Change often equates to loss and forward-thinking organisations are seeking to use psychological / Neuro-linguistic programming approaches to dealing with, sometimes, huge upheavals that occur in organisations. Examples of these methodologies include the traditional grief cycle and more focused models such as Lewis-Parker and John Fisher.

Each of these methodologies is based on a journey from A to B via a number of personally significant stages such as denial, depression and acceptance. This journey can easily be mapped in an online environment with personal delivery of content, actions, assets, applications tailored to each of the various steps in the process. Rather than being a fixed-time linear process, journey management allows the visitor to move around the cycle and the system recognises what stage the visitor is at and deals with them in a way specific to the stage they are in, all automatically, all seamless and with the ability to report on the flow of individuals and groups.

It’s quite a fascinating subject and a particularly good use of a journey management platform.

The reality is this is really no different from a traditional sales cycle, consumers engage at different parts of the cycle and move around to completion (sales) or drop out of the cycle with lots of additional helpers along the way to make the transition as smooth as possible for as many of the people as possible. In the commercial model as many as 30% of the final sales comes from people who actually dis-engage during the process to re-engage later either by themselves or brought back into the cycle via other communication mediums such as email, direct mail, forums, twitter, facebook etc.

Theoretical in practice (example)

Take a traditional organisation that is moving to flexible working, striving to get more agility and performance from it’s staff and at the same time reduce the cost of space and communications. This is a fairly common scenario and a great deal of resource will have been spent designing the “new” shape of the organisation and how it will operate. Now it comes to start to deploy this change process and this requires the buy-in of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of individuals – all with different agendas, ideas, motivations, fears and engagement.

Enter “My Journey”. An application designed for all the people in the organisation, available 24×7 online and with the ability to assist the psychological and emotional needs of the transitioners as well as the basic nuts and bolts operational stuff.

The online application has a unique login for every person and starts with a simple series of questions to establish where on the transition curve you currently are. Once established, the individual then has access to the most relevant information and applications to support him or her or their journey. A set of rules will dictate when the user is “tested” again to establish if they need to move onto the next stage. This would normally be based on a set of behavioural rules applied to what the user is doing and how they are interacting with the application.

Very often mentoring is a powerful aid to assist people during times of change and a forum would provide this mentoring, targeted to just the stage that the individual is in, so people who have been through the process before or professional coaches and mentors can help the stages as a targeted segment.

There would a hierarchy of change agents overseeing and engaging with the users, providing online guidance and help through community-type functions and also uncovering people that need that little extra help along the way. This help exists outside of the online environment to include classroom/workshop and team-building activities at one end of the spectrum, to one-to-one personal mentoring at the other end.

Each stage is truly multimedia-enabled and assets available to participants could include information, pdf libraries, images, video shorts, training courses, forums, webinars, booking systems, technical support areas, purchasing/ordering, time and holiday management, tests & evaluations, video conferencing, IP telephony, live assistants, FAQs etc. The list goes on and on.

These assets do not (and should not) be all contained within the journey management application; the key here is use the journey management system as a way to access these resources, applications and information. This avoids duplication, out-dated content and the need to have a huge, complicated, system to manage the thousands of assets that would be needed.

Some key pointers

To successfully deliver this needs engagement from all the change agents and also a really friendly and easy-to-use environment for the application to work inside. Engaging the thousands of potential users of the system is very much like a snowball, so requires key people to engage first and then spread the word and, importantly, the community to the other individuals.

The application needs to constantly evolve to improve – much of this could be self optimising and also should provide the framework to test the efficacy of all the elements in all of the steps (people in the commercial context call this conversion rates).

How VITES™ provides journey management

Designed as a platform to recognise who you are and what stage (in life/sales/change) you are at and then with the ability to deliver custom content, applications and information VITES™ is ideally placed to provide this framework. With a track record of successfully delivering personalised content since 2003 you are safe in the knowledge that you can access a highly sophisticated, stable, scaleable and flexible platform pretty much off-the-shelf.

Talk to us to take the next step.

The dynamic web understands better what the visitor wants and provides a vastly improved experience, an experience that is largely personalised to the visitor and one that better matches the needs of both the web-site owner and his or her visitor.

The silent salesperson

With flat web sites having to meet the needs of anyone who might stop by, the key sales messages that you would want to get across to certain groups cannot be given their appropriate space. With VITES™ you can identify the target groups and tailor the message, the content and the path though the site. It’s like having a silent salesman watching every visitor and gently guiding them down the most appropriate path.

Web statistics are poor

The current crop of session and page reporting systems are very complex, very powerful reporting systems. Some can even make sense of real people and try to give you statistics and value rating. But the learning you get from them can be time consuming to understand, possibly misleading and ultimately only tends to explain why something happened in the past.

You have to translate these “findings” into recommendations and then implement them on your (different) web platform. Also these changes can, in their own right, ruin any reporting you might have. A better solution, surely, is to segment all the visitors into groups, report on them and then tailor their path so it improves the value to your business.

Radical?

Not in the slightest. Behavioural techniques have been used in selling since the middle ages – in fact almost all selling has behavioural understanding at it’s core and the best selling is done face to face or one-on-one. VITES™ gives you the opportunity to perform that one-on-one selling role in the world of new media.

Amazon does it, Ebay does it and Google does it a little more subtly so it’s pretty commonplace. But because it happens “behind the scenes” you do not see it as a visitor. These are all very large in-house developed solutions; for the first time VITES™ offers you a commercial product available off the shelf and which is straightforward to implement.

Overview

Break your visitors into groups of any size (1-1,000,000) and serve them their own version of the web-experience, now and every time they visit. Personalised calls-to-action (CTA), web 2.0 functions, layout, navigation, content and design. Automatically move your visitors from group to group using simple rules. Restrict what the groups see and can do. Communicate via email, ICQ, dmail & social networking according to the needs of their group.

End of the “one-size fits-all” web?

The “one-size fits all” web is a compromise, a general-purpose attempt to deal with all the potential combinations of types of visitors. By way of example, the benefits of creating creating custom landing pages by simple keyword groups is widely documented as hugely improving online conversion rates. Despite this, even the most savvy organisations don’t carry this any further than the first landing page and certainly look to learn from this when the visitor returns to the site. This represents a huge loss in conversion rates.

Compounding this loss is the increase in visitor expectation. No two people have the same needs and need to be dealt with in an intelligent manner or they well simply go somewhere else.

Web III? (sic)

Personalised, adaptive and tailored content goes a long way to answer the need of this new breed of customers and the results speak for themselves. For most organisations this means that they can successfully dominate their Internet marketplace with a reduced cost of marketing and increased visitor value.

An organisation showing a 20% reduction in cost per enquiry could use the marketing spend to fund the driving of an additional 30% of revenue, this is a powerful reason to chase the goal. This is not chump change, this is a seriously attractive and compelling goal.

Web plus (sic)

Interactions don’t just exist in a single online space anymore, other mediums are frequently used to talk and drive the site visitors (call centres, direct mail, physical meetings, email, ICQ, social networking, off-site interaction). These are all source of intelligence and information [and covered in-depth here] and can be used to either feed to personalisation engine or be fed by the engine. The relationship is bi-directional and so it should.

The sky’s the limit

When considering tailored or personalised content there is really no end to it’s uses; it really is a marketers dream tool. Any item of information available anywhere can influence what a visitor is shown. Some examples of the triggers for content change are shown below:

• Macro environment. Time of day, day of week, season, weather, public holiday, event, share price of BP, lead news story.
• Visitor environment. Geo location, browser, operating system, ISP, IP address, iphone.
• Visitor history. Last visit, first visit, frequency, pattern, number, relationship period.
• Visitor engagement level. Place in sales cycle, previous actions completed, next planned actions, off-site interactions, email interactions, telephone, face-to-face
• Source. Ad type, keywords used, product/service interest, ad network, demographics learning
• Demographics. ACORN type, income, peer-group learning

What’s next?

If you want to learn more about how you can utilise this element of the VITES™ platform then contact Liam, Nick or Martin or you can learn more about the other 4 key functions and benefits of VITES™.

The art of improvement is simple; make a change and then test it. If it’s better then use the latest version as the best and then cycle round again. The compounding effect of making lots of small improvements gives a number of key benefits:

• Continual improvement drives the performance up, relentlessly
• A frequent change culture encourages the testing of lots of ideas, sometimes the daftest or smallest of ideas have a major impact on performance
• Reduction of risk, a poorer performing idea is quickly and efficiently scrapped
• Much wider pool of thinking, more ideas from more people adheres closely to the concept of “the wisdom of the masses”
• Avoids the “Highest paid persons opinion” (HiPPO) quandary where decisions are made at the wrong level by the wrong people
• Compounding small improvement generates a huge improvement over time
• Real learning is possible and this helps the feedback loop for the next test
• No idea is right or wrong – it simply generates learning

The downside of kaizen in the digital world is that most web-site environments are simply not built to allow the kind of rapid change, test function that is required to get the most from this approach. VITES™ at it’s core is built around this philosophy.

Trial and error culture

Connected adopt a Kaizen approach to ongoing development and conversion rates where staying agile and making lots and lots of small changes – each time testing them to measure success – and then moving on again. Connected offer a number of services to help make this happen:-

• Fixed Kaizen contracts. A fixed number of tests or hours in a given period with a planned target to reach.
• A/B testing suites. Utilising the VITES™ platform to provide accurate, reliable A/B testing.
• Profile/persona-based testing. VITES™ supports unlimited profiles and profiles types, each can be tested independently or raced against a “banker”.
• Micro-site build & development. Avoiding the need to completely re-develop a client web-site and provide much of the improvement via a micro or landing-page site.
• Business Intelligence reporting. VITES™ Passport ™ provides a huge mine of data that can be accessed to provide unique learning. Provided as a service or as an API.
• Landing-page heavy lifting projects. The key first-wins for most commercial traffic sites, provided as a service, turnkey or consultancy.
• Performance contracts. Fixed target-based contract rewarded around specific goals and milestones.

Connected provide these services either standalone or linked with existing build-and-manage contracts.

What results can you expect?

Depending on the start point most clients can expect to achieve a doubling of conversion rates during the first year. The law of diminishing returns can apply and often the major advances are made in the early part of the project. Pushing down the “long tail” still has great value and the ongoing refining of the solution frequently uncovers surprises and big jumps on online conversion rates.

Keen to find out more?

Thinking of entering this world? Talk to Liam, Nick or Martin on 0845 051 4228 and he’ll sit down with you and go through the various options available and how to best approach improving your digital offering.

• Web-site specification and build
• Dynamic and personalised delivery (via VITES™)
• Data interfaces to CRM and other third-party systems
• Compliance testing
• A/B testing
• Customer journey management
• Bespoke application build
• Widget development
• Social networking platform development
• High-availability server management
• Holistic and event-based alerting systems

Projects include Ultralase, Age Partnership, Q8 Oils, Barratts Shoes, Hardys Wines, Safestyle Windows, Skn Clinics, MINI, HBOS, Gray Nicolls, Sash Windows and Manchester Airport.

We are all different. No two groups of people have the same aims, thinking, attention span, decision process, fears or barriers to interaction. On-the-ball organisations are starting to realise a new approach and methodology is required in order to better manage visitors and to out-think their competitors.

The “one size-fits all” web that we see today has worked pretty well for the first 10 years of the web. It is, however, a rather poor fit for most business models with it’s rigid structure, resource intensive deployment and general-purpose operation.

Long gone are the days of simply creating a web assets and leaving them untouched, the drive for continual and relentless improvement now haunts most web and marketing departments. The current crop of 1990’s tools and old-world marketing thinking is proving to be a very expensive and flawed route for many organisations.

The role of web-site traffic in generating a successful site is starting to change, organisations now plan “multi-touch” campaigns across a wide range of complimentary media using a range of methodologies. Consolidating this understanding into a single, client-centric, view of traffic that is integrated into the heart of client systems and decision-making processes has become critical to success to competitive marketplaces. Say good-bye to collating reporting from page-based analytics, old-fashioned traffic and conversion reports : Say hello to integrated business intelligence. A new dawn? You betcha

A unified platform

The idea was to create a platform that allowed organisations to optimise their operational functions, brand messaging and information flow in such as way as to create a substantial competitive advantage. Whilst all of these features can be found in different platforms you quickly realise the benefit of integrating all of the key elements into a single, easy-to-use, platform.

This turned out to be a pretty big job, from a seed of an idea in 2002 the early prototypes released in 2004/5 showed promise but were hampered by relatively high deployment costs, limited performance and high R&D costs. In 2006 the the decision was made to re-write the platform from scratch using the learning from the previous years. A new roadmap was created and approximately £250k was invested in the development of V2.0 which turned out to be far easier to deploy, much higher performance and added crucial new features such as proper A/B testing and great API support.

Now on version 2.4 (released June 2009) Connected have re-defined the next generation; a flexible and powerful web platform available commercially to all. The platform provides a simple system to provide tailored, adaptive & personalised content; A/B and multivariate testing; platform independent inbound/outbound traffic management and integrated business inteliigence.

Key features & benefits

Personalised delivery : Right message, right time

Benefits: Visitors will stay longer, engage better, convert better, convert cheaper, convert faster and spend more money

Features: Break your visitors into groups of any size (1-1,000,000) and serve them their own version of the web-experience, now and every time they visit. Personalised calls-to-action (CTA), web 2.0 functions, layout, navigation, content and design. Automatically move your visitors from group to group using simple rules. Restrict what the groups see and can do. Communicate via email, ICQ, dmail & social networking according to the needs of their group.

A/B Testing : Continual experimentation and improvement

Benefits: Reverse falling conversion rates, reduce your traffic budget, be sure about successes, applied learning is cheaper next time round, beat your competitors, stay ahead of the game

Features: Simple, fast and accurate testing of the effectiveness of pages, functions, copy, Calls-to-Action, layout, design, brand messaging and profiles. Automated 2, 3 or 4-way testing with statistically correct reporting. Encourages the test, test and test again philosophy of continual improvement.

Whole of life visitor management : Business intelligence and simplified brand messaging

Benefits: Accurate information = good decisions, cut wastage, better customer communications, agility in messaging and brand communication.

Features: Supports over 50,000 landing pages with uniquely tracked codes for simple RoI reporting. Visitor value measured across single session, multiple session, multiple session/computer and whole of life. Full duplex API to back-end CRM systems allowing any piece of data or function to be synchronised online, near line or off-line in call-centres, fulfillment centres, logistics and customer services. Move data using XML, FTP, SQL and email. API to fire actions to third-party systems for data capture, processing enquiries and on-line booking systems.

Advertising RoI tracking : Simple management of traffic sources

Benefits: Race different agencies and media companies to get the best bang for your buck, simple overviews allow for quick and accurate decisions, no need to trust/question/review your media partners

Features: Fully featured APIs for Google, AOL/Advertising.com/Platform A, Yahoo!, Blue Lithium. End-to-end, click to sale reporting. Supports multi-network touch points, variable post-impression. Provides matching and synchronisation for real cost per acquisition and cost per sale. [find out more]

VITES is currently available under a license & support contract starting from £195 per month based on traffic volume and also as a complete turnkey service.

With different visitors having wildly differing needs online the provision of a platform that a) identifies the visitor’s needs and b) serves up the most appropriate content is the new nirvana for both commercial and service-orientated site providers. Amazon, Ebay and Google have been doing this for years using in-house technology to great effect. The time is now right for the provision of an off-the-shelf visitor personalisation and journey management tool.

Journey management

It’s a simple enough concept but here is the crux of the new thinking: Recognise and understand the needs of the visitor and where they sit in their journey and then deliver appropriate content to enable or enhance their journey. All the technology tools to do this are already available and it’s only a matter of gluing them together into a manageable process:

• A visitor cookie can index or passport the visitor to a permanent record of journey progress held on a central server
• The visitor’s aims and predicted journey should be calculated via learning, testing and good practice thinking
• Every-time the visitor interacts with the site the journey is re-plotted and the visitor’s “passport” is updated with this new learning
• The site then delivers content based on the probable journey of the visitor. This content could be something as simple as a call-to-action or journey-specific content but should also include other journey variables into the mix.

The approach is not new, it’s how “sales” have been carried out for thousands of years but the application of this methodology on the web is really rather cutting edge, despite being available from developers and off-the-shelf applications such as VITES™.

Re-thinking marketing

One of the great challenges facing marketing departments is this shift away from “one size fits all” mass marketing to personal messaging and journey marketing. This might go a long way to explain why such an obvious approach has been largely ignored in the last 5 years, it’s too different a mindset and too different an approach for a traditional marketing department to embrace. There are new skills to learn and one of the most important ones is to spend more time listening. Listening to:

• passengers that get off before they complete your journey, having completed theirs
• your successful passengers and learning about their journey and it’s key points
• the identification of key “stops” along the way and establishing good strategies for managing these stops
• how people get onto the journey in the first place
• what motivates some passengers to travel faster or further on their journey
• recognise the white noise of tyre-kickers
• the time it takes people to start, travel and end their journey
• the semantic and personal trust networks that exist in and around the journeys

The internet has frequently hailed the death of mass marketing but to the surprise of many the old mass-marketing world is not going slowly into the night – too much experience and knowledge is invested (tied up?) in the old world and too little motivation, skill or bravery exists to drive commercial organisations into this new space.

The next few years will see the explosion of personalisation tools, born from all walks of technology (analytics, testing tools, CMS, behavioural targeting etc) and with no standards in place I expect a wild-west, free-for-all race to develop new tools. Sadly, it probably signals the end of the line for the smaller companies as they simply won’t be able to compete with the muscle of the larger corporations and their software house-sized development budgets.