At it’s simplest level its about presenting the people with rational, sensible and best-solution defaults as people can be persuaded to accept defaults if they seem sensible. At a deeper level its about firing the sub-conscious automatic elements in our thinking to create a desired outcome. The theory is gaining a lot of credibility as an approach for running large organisations such as governments as we saw in 2008 when Richard Thaler visited Britain to promote his theory. He met David Cameron, and made such an impression that for a time he acted as unpaid adviser to the Tory leader.

The philosophy of approach to designing systems of choice is often referred to as “libertarian paternalism”or “choice architecture”, a concept implying that an organisation can be the architect that arranges personal choice in way that nudges customers in the right direction. This might seem all a bit high-brow for a web-site but you’d be wrong.

Planning how and what the site visitor sees and the order in which it happens is all choice architecture and with modern, personalise-delivery web-site platforms such as VITES  it really is quite easy to implement. Examples?

a. We want to encourage people to visit our flagship outlet in Bristol. The default choice for venue then become Bristol, regardless of where you are in the UK. All the supporting content talks about how good Bristol is, the photos are from Bristol etc…people automaticallt make a connection with Bristol and as Bristol is the first default choice then a higher-than-normal percentage of people will go there.

b. We want to encourage people to request an email version of our information pack, that becomes the default choice and whilst the visitor can still request a printed pack that route requires the visitor to go through one extra hoop. In this hypothetical case it’s simpler, cheaper and more effective for the visitor to receive an electronic pack so we have nudged them down a more successful route.

c. We want people to call us on the phone rather than fill in a contact form. Everyone in the online enquiry process is off-ramped to a call-back, stating “We need to talk to you to clear up xxxx before we can confirm your booking”. The visitor is not to know that everyone is off-ramped, they will think it’s just them.

It is worth reading Richard Thaler’s book, available from Amazon and costs a fiver.

Here is the current list of features we expect to be in the public version:

1. 4 stage booking process
2. Autoresponder email confirming place/date with details and map link (Google Maps) to location.
3. Automated SMS sent 1 day prior to appointment with link back to a client-defined page
4. iCalendar interface for adding bookings, sent via an ordinary email address
5. Standard choice of 3 themes
6. High-quality soft-erroring on all stages
7. Reporting, covering number of people entering/completing each stage
8. Remember function to recall visitor details for repeat bookings
9. FAQ /Helper system
10. EU compliant privacy policy
11. Custom defined contents/fields/text/images

We’re pretty excited about this new application as it will be the first of a new family of standalone VITES applications that can be installed and used by non-technical staffers. It’s going to be a breeze to install and we’re sure you’ll see myBookingWizard generating the highest quality enquiries and bookings possible. Get signed-up now. Or follow the release on Twitter.

This is enormously helpful as we no longer need to rely on knowing your postcode before we can suggest what products and services you might buy. In fact, that notion just looks plain stupid now despite it still being widely used in traditional marketing. So longer do we see groups of 17-24 year olds or C2 demographics or single mothers or people living in EH13 postcode. Now we see people across all spectrums who share a love of cars, dark humour, 1980′s gadgets, rambling etc. This is going to make our life as marketers a great deal easier, we just need to tap into those loves and apply them appropriately.

Would be really useful if we had a web platform that recognised those communities and talked to them in a consistent manner…oh yes, that what VITES is used for

As time went by and as I learnt more, and learnt quickly, I received more in-depth answers on Big.TOE but they were still vague; it was never defined to me in the simple terms of ‘Big.TOE is this’. But over time I built a picture of what Big.TOE is or – more to the point – what it is going to be.

Big.TOE is going to be the best use of the data from VITES. Specifically it’ll be a reporting tool.

So, recently, Big.TOE was kicked off by inviting most of the guys for a meeting to discuss the ideas and goals of Big.TOE and to push it into production, I raised my hand to be the ‘project sponsor’, and I was selected. As this is my first project it was suggested that I write a diary… so here we are. The diary will follow in weekly installments.

Ideally, marketers need to see the whole journey and therefore every visit – we need “multi-touch”. Usefully, our VITES platform records just such activity and gives a rather unique insight into the type of searches and clicks a visitor makes during her journey to conversion and beyond. There are some challenges using anything but last touch but with a bit of education and learning it can very illuminating.

So don’t get stuck looking at the very end of your clients journey and focus on the whole of the journey and discover every route and method to conversion. Contact us to find out more.

We all appreciate the huge benefits in conversion rates that personalised content brings and most organisations also appreciate the long-term value in continual testing and improvement. So what’s stopping every-day companies from joining this revolution is the lack of a simple and commercially-available platform to deliver this nirvana.

End of the flat-web society

Our clever and rather cool personalisation and test platform, VITES™, has been used in beta form by a number of leading online organisations since it’s inception in 2004. For the last year we’ve been busy behind the scenes re-writing the core application and adding a number of client-requested features.

So, coming in Q1 2011 is our latest release of VITES, Version 3.0. Packed with new features, improved client interface, better scalability and much faster performance. All this adds up to a better and easier way to join the exclusive world of a personalised web through personalisation, behavioural management, server-side A/B testing and visitor profiling.

Want to be a candidate for the latest release? Speak to Nick or Martin and we’ll give you the low-down on what you can expect to get and how it can help your business.

This is the third major release of our personalised web platform and is a major step forward in functionality, performance, interoperability, speed of development and simplicity. No longer do you need highly-skilled development teams to realise the benefits of a personalised web site; VITES 3.0 utilises a template-driven environment to speed up and simplify deployment, allowing marketers to get on with what they are good at.

Priced on a supported-license basis from £500 a month, VITES offers a highly affordable way to provide Amazon-type personalised content delivery and testing.

Centralised visitor database

The key element in managing a visitors flow through the site and the sales process is the central store. This database records every action, every source and every (useful) piece of information that can be gleaned from the visitor across the whole of his or her life. Keeping this database in-sync with your back-end CRM system is critical and a number of tried and tested plugin modules ensure the correct and timely replication of the right data across all your platforms.

Building the history of the visitor’s behaviour and actions opens the door to a high level of personalisation that in turn supercharges your conversion rates, decimates your bounces and dramatically increases the value per visitor.

Traffic profiling

All inbound traffic can be assigned a profile to monitor each stream and serve unique content to the visitor. Full reporting is provided and a robust inbound/outbound API system is deployed to ensure data is reliably moved throughout the visitor transaction chain.

Profiles form the cornerstone of how content and actions are deployed on the sites as every profile can have it’s own unique or shared content and actions.

A/B testing

A/B testing is a fantastic baseline product that every site should use. It is the fastest and most accurate way to determine which content and actions work best with visitors. Position, copy, CTA, width, colour or image changes have dramatic effects on conversion rates and VITES can help you test these modifications anywhere on your site. With the VITES A/B testing plugin , you can:

• Run unlimited tests simultaneously
• Queue up tests into your own magazine and let VITES “lock and load” the tests automatically
• Define the traffic splits across the test
• Configure any number of elements or actions on the page
• Identify winning content for each test created using a statistically robust report
• Automatically live the winning test

Segmentation

With the unique segmentation capabilities of VITES, online marketers serve different messages and content to traffic groups based upon attributes such as geographic location, traffic source, referring keyword, visitor history, time of day and much more. Once you’ve created your segments, you can run A/B tests within those segments to prove what works best. Segmentation gives you:

• Simple set up and management
• Segments matched to visitor profiles
• Incorporate useful information, including visitor history, environmental variable, day/week and many other variables
• Read and write back-end CRM and external data for improved granularity

Behavioural Targeting

Onsite behavioural targeting enables you to customise your web site to create the most welcoming, enticing destination for your visitors by utilising a wide data set and automatically making decisions about what image, text, CTA or content to show at a personal level. VITES technology powers our behavioural targeting solution and provides a strong foundation for continuously improving your conversion rates.

• Simple testing – lock and load the variations and set the tests running
• Learn in real time using statistically correct tools as visitor behavior and activity patterns emerge
• Compare the performance against the banker to accurately verify results

VITES 3.0 is targeted for Beta launch early in 2011 but if you wish to have access to the limited Alpha release then please contact us.

We laugh now but in the mid 90′s, there was this crazy notion that if you put up a web-site, any old web-site, then the money came rolling in. Even more crazy is that it worked…by the bucket load. Then along came “big” marketing and dragged us down some odd “brand-orientated, synergy-busting and paradigm-shifting alley”. Most of us got lost. Lost in banner impressions, land-grab, click saturation and massive paranoia about “giving away the crown jewels”.

Sadly what had happened is that really good personal relationships and transparency got smacked over the back of the head by mass-market tactics and thinking. It was wrong and a few companies avoided the headlong charge into “flash banner pages“, curious navigation and obsessive prettiness. You’ll recognize the companies that stayed away from this party, names such as Ebay, Zappos and Google spring to mind – there are a thousand others.

During what I call the “dim ages” many companies flocked to the outpouring of flash designers and online brand consultants. I feel sorry for them, during that period (2000-2003) we lost a fair few high-profile clients as they created their animated works of art that nobody wanted to sit through (remember the link “skip intro” appear on a thousand home pages?)

The dim ages were broadly a copy of old mass-marketing or 1:x broadcast style marketing. But what made the t’interweb so good in the beginning was the sheer vertical nature of the content, it started pretty much as a 1:1 media and that was it’s success. Thankfully we are now starting to see a shift back towards a 1:1 Internet and that is where its future lies.

You simply MUST focus on the needs of the individual when thinking about your Internet strategy and that means, due to the volume and disparity of people using the web, you must have a web platform that can identify individuals and serve them personalised content.

There are various platforms available but only one commercially available with open APIs. VITES 3.0, code-named 1:1 Superhero, offers everything you need to serve up personalised content to each and every visitor to your site. Regardless of how they arrive at the site.

License costs start at £500 per month and implementation from around £20k for a full turnkey service to slide under your existing site seamlessly and open up a whole new world of sales, data and conversion opportunities.

Here is a brief outline of what you can expect in the next release of the worlds first, commercially available, personalisation and customer journey platform

• Faster core platform, requiring less server computing power and faster serving of content
• In-built AB testing functions, faster, easier testing of content, pages and call-to-actions
• Server load balancing, giving higher system availability, improved fault tolerance and improved performance
• Off the shelf CMS support, de-skilling and speeding up changes to content
• Faster profile management, faster and easier creation of new customer journeys
• Reporting API, simplifying the export of business-critical data giving easier and faster access to real knowledge
• New User Group to support discussions, bug-tracking, feature request and cross-learning between clients

Initially released in 2006, VITES was designed to dramatically improve on and off site conversion rates by providing a scaleable platform that offered proper customer journey management (ala Amazon, Ebay etc) combined with a suite of testing tools that allowed accurate testing of new content, CTAs and traffic streams

Since it’s release, every client using the platform has seen at least a doubling of conversion rates and huge reductions in cost per enquiry/sale

The latest release is a ground-up rethink of what our clients and marketplace needed and part of this was a massive simplification in deployment of changes, testing and profiles

All current clients are on a migration plan to complete the porting to the new version by the end of 2010 and all new clients will automatically get the latest version of the platform

License charges remain unchanged, starting at just £500 per month for the basic 10k users per month version

Contact Liam, Martin or Nick now to find out more about how VITES 3.0 (Rangoon) can supercharge your web strategy.

VITES remains the only commercially available off the shelf journey profile and testing platform

Contact our licensing team (Liam, Martin or Nick) for further information.

System integrators and agencies should contact our CEO (Martin Dower) to discuss how VITES can help your clients

We made the mistake in 2008 of asking our clients what they wanted and the outcome was a long, quite dull, list of me-too type functionality with a smattering of bells and whistles. As a result we probably lost a year of moving the game on. Shame, really. The good news is that we are back on track with VITES 3.0 due for pre-release in the summer. It will be slimmer, more focussed, better and easier to deploy.

Like Mark Cuban, we suffered the fairly common problem of listening too much to our customers. Whilst that would, on the face of it, seem to be a good thing it divides our effort between our vision and what clients (think they) want. By all means listen to what they want to do and come up with a solution.

That might sound arrogant but as Henry Ford once famously said “if I listened to my customers then I would have built a faster horse”.