The clock is ticking…

Following up on Cassandra’s recent post about mobile commerce, we’re excited to announce our new relationship with Cadence Watch.  Check out their site for some very cool and unique watches.  We’re helping them with email marketing aimed towards conversion optimization and combined with our landing page optimization services.

The difference between Conversion Rate Optimization and Product Management Services

We recently had the opportunity to present Sepiida at our first expo – the Philly Startup Leaders’ Entrepreneur Expo event.  Great time for us to get out there what we do for our clients.  Quickly and succinctly.  Think 30-second elevator pitch x 150 times.  We provide Conversion Rate Optimization and Product Management services for businesses who use the Internet to acquire, convert, retain, and/or reactivate customers.  Easy right?

Depending on the person I was talking to, either Conversion Rate Optimization or Product Management seemed to resonate more (in fact, it was really interesting to hear the people I talked to formulate a way to talk about our services on their own).  That’s tough, because as someone who has been leading “product” teams for Internet tech and e-commerce companies for over 10 years, I think of it all under the umbrella of Product Management.  Every business has a product (services are products too), and that product needs to be managed.  What guides that management ought to be two things – strategic needs and data/metrics.

(And not simply the kind of metrics that you just pull up in Google Analytics and throw into a PowerPoint for your investors or the press, but the kind where you have to dig into the data across multiple sources – including your own internal teams – and then figure out how to act, how to do something small and measurable, and when to use your own gut instincts.  There’s no formula here – it’s a healthy combination of expertise, experience, risk, and curiosity that gets you there.)

Great Product Management services – whether rendered internal to an organization or by companies such as Sepiida – ought to be able to consistently do the following:  ride the never-ending roller coaster of defining a product or web roadmap (based on strategy and metrics); simplify the big vision into small measurable pieces that can be tested before too much money and effort is put into them; translate between marketing, business development, customer support and community management, and engineering; write feature specifications that think through and document customer/user experience (the pretty stuff) and technical constraints and business rules (the not-so-pretty – although I love that stuff); shepherd a feature team through QA to launch; measure how the feature did – both quantitatively and qualitatively; and still manage to forge ahead on improvements to the feature that just launched while the next one is on deck and being worked on.

Whoa – that’s a mouthful!  But that’s what Product Management is to me and the rest of the team at Sepiida.  Sometime in the last year, I called it “West Coast-style Product Management” which struck a chord with a potential client.  Since then, the more I’ve said it, the more I think it’s truly borne of the way that Internet companies sprung up on the West Coast.  This is in contrast to how East Coast companies added technology or Internet teams to their staff.  Too often, on the East Coast I see a web roadmap that is being executed by a team comprised of project managers, business analysts, web managers or producers, UI and visual designers, and marketing managers.  So who is thinking of the whole thing from a centralized, product-oriented perspective?  Who is the hub on a wheel of spokes?  Not to be the sole decision maker, but to be responsible for great decisions being made. Rather, I see a lot of hand-offs, a lack of whole-oriented thinking and execution.  More functions than true product execution.  I think, but am not sure, this is because big large companies like IBM had a certain kind of structure on the East Coast that permeated organizational philosophy.  I do see it changing with the new startups though, especially in NYC…which is awesome.

So how does a web Product Management team know they are doing a great job?  Well, the numbers are moving forward and customers are happy.  Yes, the NUMBERS.  It does come down in part to the numbers.  Are usage rates high?  Are features being launched on schedule?  And…are conversion rates in line with or better than the industry?

Which brings me to talking about Conversion Rate Optimization.  This terms resonates so well with marketers and anyone who clicks on the E-Commerce tab of Google Analytics.  It’s important to be focused on the conversion rate – the % of people who visit your site who buy your product.  This number is high up in the funnel – and increasing this can have wonderful ripple effects across a business…including the ultimate goal of increasing revenue.

But here are the problems with simply focusing on Conversion Rate Optimization – both from the perspective of how we talk about what we do at Sepiida, and from the perspective of how a business improves its online revenues.

1.  A Conversion Rate is just one piece of the puzzle.  There are so many other metrics that can potentially have a much higher ROI.  For example, if you are long-sales-cycle type of product, then increasing your Visitor-to-Lead Conversion (% of website visitors that turn into a marketable Lead) may have higher impact.  If you’re doing relatively OK with gaining customers, then perhaps the focus should be on Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) through cross-sells and up-sells.  Maybe the real area for ROI optimization is in getting back lapsed users, in which case pulling levers that reactivate users is far more worthwhile.  When a company gets too focused on Conversion Rate Optimization, it can miss the forest for the trees.  When we talk about offering Conversion Rate Optimization services, we neglect to talk about how we look at all of a business’s metrics, figure out where the opportunity is with the highest ROI, and then actually deliver on capturing that revenue.

2.  Conversion Rate Optimization is not always just about optimizing ads, landing pages, and purchase flows.  Don’t get me wrong – we often make huge improvements for our clients (check out our work) just by focusing on landing pages and purchase funnels.  Nevertheless sometimes, to really boost a conversion rate, the best thing to do is to add a new feature or to change pricing structures or product bundling (not necessarily margins).  Maybe there needs to be the ability to do a trial version of the service?  Maybe a Wishlist feature needs to be added.  Who knows…  But wait, now I’m talking about adding to the web roadmap, defining features, writing specs, and making customers happy.  Just what I said Product Management is all about.

And herein lies why I think of Conversion Rate Optimization as being part of Product Management services.  Who is to say when Conversion Rate Optimization ends and great Product Management takes over?  If you ask me, it takes the latter to know whether you need the former.  And the former may need the latter in order to be realized.

Most businesses are leaving lots on the table with their current landing pages, purchase flows, homepages, email campaigns, etc.  Simply focusing on optimizing them will grow their revenues significantly, and we’re happy to do that for our clients.  But once most of the juice is squeezed out of that orange, you need to go back to the garden and get more fruit.  Product Management is that garden.

And great Product Management is knowing what can be done with the resources, personalities, and proclivities within an organization.  Often, focusing on one metric like Conversion Rate and throwing everything at it is what a company is most comfortable with and/or the most able to do.  It’s also often the best way for us to introduce (and explain) to a client our services!  We’re happy to do it because we love growing our clients’ web businesses in a highly measurable fashion.  What I’m saying is that any company providing conversion rate optimization services ought to be more than just that a barrel of oranges – it ought to have a whole garden of fruit behind it.

Facebook Game Applications – approval is easy…too easy

A couple of weeks ago we helped one of our clients, Ohanarama, get ready to submit to Facebook’s application directory.  They are in the social gaming space and we make social gaming optimized.  So we were thrilled when their lead architect let us “push the button”, so to speak.  This isn’t the first time we’ve submitted applications to Facebook.  After all, we were part of Zynga‘s PetVille launch, and before that, worked to launch the Facebook apps Cool Cards and Party On!

But this time was different…it took us a few days to get past Facebook’s strange rules around minimum numbers of users.  Talk about stops and starts.  (They say you need 10 MAUs, or Monthly Active Users, and your numbers show that you have them…but their reporting back-end doesn’t update to know your latest numbers  until what seems like every Wednesday.  Ugh.)  This wasn’t something we had to deal with in any of our previous experiences.  But lo and behold, a few days later when we did get to submit to Facebook, we were approved in less than a day!

But that made us think back to our trip to Inside Social Apps 2011 (read our post about it) and how Bret Taylor (CTO, Facebook) said that they improved their spam scoring for game developers and are now letting the technology take care of the app violation process, rather than their army of policy relations folks.  This makes me suspicious…is it easier now for Facebook game applications to get approved, only because one of their infamous algorithms will find ways to deny, or worse yet, push down content in the future?

Only time will tell…

Notes from Inside Social Apps – January 2011

For those of you that weren’t able to make it to Inside Social Apps in San Francisco last month and don’t have time to read all of the really in-depth articles and watch the videos from the session, we thought we’d give you the highlights of what struck us.  As you know, we are in the business of optimizing metrics for folks – especially Facebook gaming apps.  So there’s a clear eye towards that info in the below…

User acquisition for Facebook apps and other stuff

• Facebook is tough to break into now…but if you are a high ARPU (average revenue per user) app, then Facebook is great.  You almost need to think of niches.
• On the other hand, Android is a wide distribution space with no clear “first-to-market” winner.  If you are venture-backed and have advertising dollars, then yea…go try to break into the crowded iOS arena.
• Wondering why your DAU curve on Facebook looks more like your mattress than a hockey stick?  Read this:  http://bit.ly/eMjg34
• Latest trend in cross-promotion…getting a partner to show which of the user’s friends are playing YOUR app
• Look to see more and more offline events tied into online games – like contests
• What are people using private groups for?  Video and photo sharing.  Um…isn’t that what you can do on your profile anyways?  Oh that’s right.  It’s the old walled garden problem.  Wait until there are groups to manage folks within groups.
• Shout out to developers – expect to see a big increase in Facebook documentation in the next 6 months
• The average user on Facebook has 130 friends
• Don’t design a core game mechanic around a social channel.   This is important.  If you do, your game’s metrics are going to be dependent upon how Facebook decides to utilize and display that channel.
• Folks ought to start thinking about fraud and risk in virtual goods.  Just because the goods are virtual doesn’t mean the fraud and risk aren’t real.

Facebook Credits

• ARP-DAU is down with Facebook credits, but ARPU is up
• Facebook Credits works well if your payment flow is really optimized.  (Hey – call us!  We’ll help you get optimized.)
• New stuff coming with Facebook Credits – they are increasing the payment options; if you integrate Facebook Credits into your game as currency, you will get additional promotion in the Games dashboard;  launching a frictionless (UI-less) page soon – first with Arcadium;  launching “buy with friends” where the application can have the user share the purchase with friends (friends unlock the deal for others – a la Groupon)
• Credits is built for virtual goods, not physical goods
• Facebook is not planning another promotional Credits seeding campaign again
• One guy said that the whales in their game are consistently only choosing PayPal (over Facebook Credits).  Uh oh!
• Credits is for the canvas only.  But they don’t want developers to price up the canvas option

Mobile games

• 15-20% retention on Facebook canvas is good.  Mobile is much harder
• It’s all about the app store for mobile
• To achieve what you have on the canvas, you have to have an army of apps on mobile and nail cross-promotion.  However, mobile will monetize 5-7x higher (with much lower audience size)
• It took Bejeweled about 3 to 6 months to get its iOS monetization to be like the Facebook Canvas.  Technical reasons (latency) were some of the big reasons why.
• Did you know…Facebook mobile users are 2x as active as the web users.  TWO TIMES.
• Even crazier…120 million of Facebook’s 200 million mobile users are HTML 5-enabled.  We’ll be posting more about HTML 5 in the next few days.

What does Sepiida mean? Or, What’s a Sepiida?

Forget that!  How do you even pronounce it?  It’s se-PEE-dah.  Not too fun to have to put the word “pee” in all caps, but it let’s you know how to pronounce it, doesn’t it?

Today, I met with a prospective new client.  I hope they come on board with us after they get farther with their funding.  But, as never fails, they asked “what’s Sepiida”?

So I’ll take a minute to explain why I chose this name.  When I first started this company in September 2009, I was not concerned at all with a name.  I was still thinking about the direction the company would take, and just needed a name to start taking in clients like Zynga and Coveroo that were knocking on the door (yay!).  So I named it Infinity Web & Software Services LLC.  (Yuk – not consumer friendly at all!)

But as we got our groove and decided the direction for the company, it was time to come up with a new name, a logo, and all of that.  It was really important to me to find something that would SEO well.  (See?  It’s all about the metrics.)  And I wanted something that would convey our core values – being flexible, being intelligent, adjusting our recommendations to fit our clients’ needs and what the data says.  My husband reminded me that Cuttlefish and other animals like the chameleon change their colors to fit their environment.  With a little research, I came upon Sepiida and loved it.

So…what does it mean?  It’s the Latin name for the Order of species that includes Cuttlefish.  Why cuttlefish?  Well, they are some of the most intelligent invertebrates and they change their color to fit their environments.  We at Sepiida fit our recommendations and strategies to fit the needs and resources of our clients.  We are flexible.  We go where the data takes us, much like fish go where the water takes them.  And…yes…we do think we’re intelligent!

And trust me…it SEOs well.  We’ve got some more to do there though.

So there you have it!