A single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half
London: Poor spellings in shopping websites is costing Britain millions of pounds in lost revenue, experts have said.
Charles Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group that runs travel, mobile phone and clothing websites, said an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.
Duncombe said he was "shocked" when recruiting staff at the poor quality of written English, according to BBC. Sales figures suggest wrong spellings put off consumers who could have concerns about a website's credibility, he said.
"I know that industry bemoaning the education system is nothing new
but it is becoming more and more of a problem with more companies going
online," he said. "This is because when you sell or communicate on the
internet 99 per cent of the time it is done by the written word."
Duncombe said it was possible to identify the impact of a spelling mistake on sales. He measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.
"If you project this across the whole of internet retail then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes," he said. Spelling is important to the credibility of a website. "You get about six seconds to capture the attention on a website."
William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, said that in some informal parts of the internet, such as Facebook, there is greater tolerance towards spelling and grammar.
"However, there are other aspects, such as a home page or commercial offering that are not among friends and which raise concerns over trust and credibility," said Dutton. "In these instances, when a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a misspelt word could be a killer issue."
READ MORE - A single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half
Charles Duncombe, director of the Just Say Please group that runs travel, mobile phone and clothing websites, said an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.
Duncombe said he was "shocked" when recruiting staff at the poor quality of written English, according to BBC. Sales figures suggest wrong spellings put off consumers who could have concerns about a website's credibility, he said.
Duncombe said it was possible to identify the impact of a spelling mistake on sales. He measured the revenue per visitor to the tightsplease.co.uk website and found that the revenue was twice as high after an error was corrected.
"If you project this across the whole of internet retail then millions of pounds worth of business is probably being lost each week due to simple spelling mistakes," he said. Spelling is important to the credibility of a website. "You get about six seconds to capture the attention on a website."
William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, said that in some informal parts of the internet, such as Facebook, there is greater tolerance towards spelling and grammar.
"However, there are other aspects, such as a home page or commercial offering that are not among friends and which raise concerns over trust and credibility," said Dutton. "In these instances, when a consumer might be wary of spam or phishing efforts, a misspelt word could be a killer issue."
Should there be an app for that?
By Patrick Gray
Summary
According to Patrick Gray, there are several opportunities in the mobile space for a CIO to increase his or her visibility within the organization.
As the cheeky advertisements on television indicate, there seems to be a mobile application for just about everything. From calorie counters to witticisms from your favorite Jersey Shore characters, no stone appears to have been left unturned.
Despite this seeming glut, there are several opportunities in the mobile space, and mobile provides a great opportunity for a CIO to increase his or her visibility within the organization.
When most people in corporate IT start thinking about mobile applications, they tend to think about internal applications first. Perhaps there are CRM or order entry systems that would be great in the hands of field sales representatives, or internal collaboration sites that would be compelling on an iPad. These are all great ideas, and worthy of some experimentation with the caveat that building platform-specific mobile capabilities may not be the best investment as the mobile space is still very much in a state of flux. Rather than focusing primarily on internal mobile apps, the true "gold in the hills" for most B2C companies is the consumer space.
Mobile applications present a unique marketing opportunity that we haven't seen since the early days of the Web. Marketers still haven't quite figured out how to fully leverage the mobile format, and consumers are far more forgiving than the jaded bunch that seems immune to banner ads, and adept at ignoring anything that smacks of online advertising. Mobile is also one of the few areas where you can get intimate with your customer, traveling in his or her pocket and, if you can build enough trust, even knowing his or her location down to a few meters.
This relationship of trust requires applications that provide some form of value to the customer, through some combination of entertainment, information, or financial benefit; perhaps in the form of discounts or coupons. While this is usually the domain of marketing, the CIO who can provide expert guidance to their colleagues in marketing takes on the guise of trusted advisor and business leader, rather than tech gatekeeper to be avoided until absolutely necessary.
As CIO, you bring several critical experiences to the table that can help your company get the most of its mobile advertising dollar. While marketing tends to be quite capable of working with third parties, CIOs have often spent entire careers outsourcing technical development. You can provide valuable guidance on the application development process, suggest ways to use existing mobile technology that are quick and cheap, or even capabilities your colleagues in marketing never knew existed.
In addition, you bring knowledge of the company's existing systems and data. Getting a compelling mobile application in the hands of your target customer is great, but if you never garner and analyze any information about that customer, the effort does little other than build mercurial "goodwill". By bringing your expertise to bear early in the application design process, you can ensure marketing's creative brings hard, measurable data into the company. A cute game that excites your customers is nice, but a cute game that integrates that customer into your existing promotions builds a relationship and "converts" them to your brand is far more exciting regardless of which corporate function you hold.
If you find customer-facing mobile applications might be valuable to your organization, spend a few hours brushing up on some of the technologies, and get a couple people within your IT shop to do the same. In all probability, there are already developers moonlighting on their own mobile apps, who would be extremely excited to brief you on what is going on in the space. Reach out to your colleagues in marketing. If they're worth their paychecks they are probably already making a move in the mobile space, and your expertise will be welcomed early rather than grudgingly engaged at the last possible moment.
Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of "Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology". Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies.
READ MORE - Should there be an app for that?
Summary
According to Patrick Gray, there are several opportunities in the mobile space for a CIO to increase his or her visibility within the organization.
As the cheeky advertisements on television indicate, there seems to be a mobile application for just about everything. From calorie counters to witticisms from your favorite Jersey Shore characters, no stone appears to have been left unturned.
Despite this seeming glut, there are several opportunities in the mobile space, and mobile provides a great opportunity for a CIO to increase his or her visibility within the organization.
When most people in corporate IT start thinking about mobile applications, they tend to think about internal applications first. Perhaps there are CRM or order entry systems that would be great in the hands of field sales representatives, or internal collaboration sites that would be compelling on an iPad. These are all great ideas, and worthy of some experimentation with the caveat that building platform-specific mobile capabilities may not be the best investment as the mobile space is still very much in a state of flux. Rather than focusing primarily on internal mobile apps, the true "gold in the hills" for most B2C companies is the consumer space.
Mobile applications present a unique marketing opportunity that we haven't seen since the early days of the Web. Marketers still haven't quite figured out how to fully leverage the mobile format, and consumers are far more forgiving than the jaded bunch that seems immune to banner ads, and adept at ignoring anything that smacks of online advertising. Mobile is also one of the few areas where you can get intimate with your customer, traveling in his or her pocket and, if you can build enough trust, even knowing his or her location down to a few meters.
This relationship of trust requires applications that provide some form of value to the customer, through some combination of entertainment, information, or financial benefit; perhaps in the form of discounts or coupons. While this is usually the domain of marketing, the CIO who can provide expert guidance to their colleagues in marketing takes on the guise of trusted advisor and business leader, rather than tech gatekeeper to be avoided until absolutely necessary.
As CIO, you bring several critical experiences to the table that can help your company get the most of its mobile advertising dollar. While marketing tends to be quite capable of working with third parties, CIOs have often spent entire careers outsourcing technical development. You can provide valuable guidance on the application development process, suggest ways to use existing mobile technology that are quick and cheap, or even capabilities your colleagues in marketing never knew existed.
In addition, you bring knowledge of the company's existing systems and data. Getting a compelling mobile application in the hands of your target customer is great, but if you never garner and analyze any information about that customer, the effort does little other than build mercurial "goodwill". By bringing your expertise to bear early in the application design process, you can ensure marketing's creative brings hard, measurable data into the company. A cute game that excites your customers is nice, but a cute game that integrates that customer into your existing promotions builds a relationship and "converts" them to your brand is far more exciting regardless of which corporate function you hold.
If you find customer-facing mobile applications might be valuable to your organization, spend a few hours brushing up on some of the technologies, and get a couple people within your IT shop to do the same. In all probability, there are already developers moonlighting on their own mobile apps, who would be extremely excited to brief you on what is going on in the space. Reach out to your colleagues in marketing. If they're worth their paychecks they are probably already making a move in the mobile space, and your expertise will be welcomed early rather than grudgingly engaged at the last possible moment.
Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of "Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology". Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies.
Unraveling the CAB
By Patrick Gray
Summary
A Change Advisory Board tends to get overcomplicated when it's implemented at many organizations. Here's how to avoid that.
A Change Advisory Board (CAB) is another good idea that tends to get overcomplicated when it's implemented at many organizations.
At its core, the CAB exists to provide a balanced analysis of any changes to a company's systems and processes and to provide a final "ruling" on whether a proposed change moves forward or is shelved. The CAB concept is promoted by some of the popular IT management methodologies, which overlay the conceptually simple concept with layers of formalities and a veneer of unnecessary complexity.
Scope changes are generally the only way to control costs on an IT project, with seemingly minor changes made by junior analysts often carrying six-figure price tags. With this fact in mind, the CAB is your best defense against these changes dragging your projects deep into the red.
With this objective in mind, consider the following two keys to implementing an effective CAB.
Representation and transparency are key
If a CAB is seen as primarily an IT function, it will rapidly become a bureaucracy to be avoided, sabotaged and dodged.
In all but the most mundane infrastructure projects, most of your IT projects will be done to impact your company's business. As such, many of the change requests will be business-related and impact finance, marketing, sales and operations and often are fundamentally business decisions of how to allocate scarce resources rather than purely technical decisions. Therefore, your CAB must have representation from each business unit that is respected and empowered to make decisions.
IT gets the same vote as other business units and, save for articulating part of the costs of each change and guiding the process, does not gain any additional power to influence the CAB.
With the right people on the CAB, an arbitrator is required for any stalemates that arise. Depending on whether your company is more operationally or financially oriented, this might be the COO or CFO or in some cases even the CEO. In any case, each person on the CAB has voting power and is at a high-enough level that the buck stops with them rather than their decision being subject to reevaluation and overriding by a superior. It should be clear who makes the decisions, and each item that comes before the CAB should be allocated a rapid time frame in which it will be evaluated.
At the end of the day, when change requests come to the CAB you want them to be decided quickly and the people and process behind the decision to be respected by the company, even if it is disagreed with.
Time is money
A CAB's value comes from two areas: respected and fair people and process, and timelines. If you have painstakingly recruited the right people, but your CAB takes four months to reach a decision, it will rapidly lose its value.
While some recommend quarterly CAB meetings, this is generally too long, especially if you are implementing large-scale projects like ERP or CRM systems. Monthly meetings of the CAB should be the baseline objective, and with some forethought, each can be short and effective. Send a summary of each change request, the facts around the issue, and any background in advance of the meeting, and actually CAB meetings can be about final fact finding, analysis, and decision-making rather than endless debates.
A good decision is often better than a great decision two months from now, so in the case where information is missing or the environment is unclear, document the assumptions that went into a decision and document any triggers that might cause the board to reevaluate the decision and move on. Major organizational projects can burn significant amounts of cash just waiting for a critical decision, so be sure to convey the very real cost of inaction.
With the right people, a transparent decision-making process, and a focus on making good decisions as rapidly as possible, the CAB can be a very valuable tool. Rather than an administrative hurdle, it becomes a tool for ensuring money is spent effectively, changes are evaluated in light of the company's core business, and projects are able to move forward in the face of competing priorities rather than spinning their wheels (and burning cash) waiting for decisions.
For the CIO, an effective CAB shows his or her peers that the CIO understands that IT exists to facilitate the company's business and also demonstrates the value an effective IT organization provides to the larger company. Each member of the CAB will see IT efforts tied directly back to their business benefit and grow to understand that IT is about far more than servers and software.
Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of "Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology". Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies.
READ MORE - Unraveling the CAB
Summary
A Change Advisory Board tends to get overcomplicated when it's implemented at many organizations. Here's how to avoid that.
A Change Advisory Board (CAB) is another good idea that tends to get overcomplicated when it's implemented at many organizations.
At its core, the CAB exists to provide a balanced analysis of any changes to a company's systems and processes and to provide a final "ruling" on whether a proposed change moves forward or is shelved. The CAB concept is promoted by some of the popular IT management methodologies, which overlay the conceptually simple concept with layers of formalities and a veneer of unnecessary complexity.
Scope changes are generally the only way to control costs on an IT project, with seemingly minor changes made by junior analysts often carrying six-figure price tags. With this fact in mind, the CAB is your best defense against these changes dragging your projects deep into the red.
With this objective in mind, consider the following two keys to implementing an effective CAB.
Representation and transparency are key
If a CAB is seen as primarily an IT function, it will rapidly become a bureaucracy to be avoided, sabotaged and dodged.
In all but the most mundane infrastructure projects, most of your IT projects will be done to impact your company's business. As such, many of the change requests will be business-related and impact finance, marketing, sales and operations and often are fundamentally business decisions of how to allocate scarce resources rather than purely technical decisions. Therefore, your CAB must have representation from each business unit that is respected and empowered to make decisions.
IT gets the same vote as other business units and, save for articulating part of the costs of each change and guiding the process, does not gain any additional power to influence the CAB.
With the right people on the CAB, an arbitrator is required for any stalemates that arise. Depending on whether your company is more operationally or financially oriented, this might be the COO or CFO or in some cases even the CEO. In any case, each person on the CAB has voting power and is at a high-enough level that the buck stops with them rather than their decision being subject to reevaluation and overriding by a superior. It should be clear who makes the decisions, and each item that comes before the CAB should be allocated a rapid time frame in which it will be evaluated.
At the end of the day, when change requests come to the CAB you want them to be decided quickly and the people and process behind the decision to be respected by the company, even if it is disagreed with.
Time is money
A CAB's value comes from two areas: respected and fair people and process, and timelines. If you have painstakingly recruited the right people, but your CAB takes four months to reach a decision, it will rapidly lose its value.
While some recommend quarterly CAB meetings, this is generally too long, especially if you are implementing large-scale projects like ERP or CRM systems. Monthly meetings of the CAB should be the baseline objective, and with some forethought, each can be short and effective. Send a summary of each change request, the facts around the issue, and any background in advance of the meeting, and actually CAB meetings can be about final fact finding, analysis, and decision-making rather than endless debates.
A good decision is often better than a great decision two months from now, so in the case where information is missing or the environment is unclear, document the assumptions that went into a decision and document any triggers that might cause the board to reevaluate the decision and move on. Major organizational projects can burn significant amounts of cash just waiting for a critical decision, so be sure to convey the very real cost of inaction.
With the right people, a transparent decision-making process, and a focus on making good decisions as rapidly as possible, the CAB can be a very valuable tool. Rather than an administrative hurdle, it becomes a tool for ensuring money is spent effectively, changes are evaluated in light of the company's core business, and projects are able to move forward in the face of competing priorities rather than spinning their wheels (and burning cash) waiting for decisions.
For the CIO, an effective CAB shows his or her peers that the CIO understands that IT exists to facilitate the company's business and also demonstrates the value an effective IT organization provides to the larger company. Each member of the CAB will see IT efforts tied directly back to their business benefit and grow to understand that IT is about far more than servers and software.
Patrick Gray is the founder and president of Prevoyance Group, and author of "Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology". Prevoyance Group provides strategic IT consulting services to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies.
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