Marketing Operations Blog

As a marketing operations lab we try hard to keep up with the technology options our clients can use to merchandise and promote their products or services.

Demands on those promotional tools, the most common being a website, usually extend to incorporate other business-processes the team wants to support. The goal for a company technology stack inevitably widens to more efficiently run their ongoing social media, sales, service and back-office operations.

So if Websites are the #1 category of technology we are asked about, I have to say that ecommerce is the particular flavor that raises the most questions. 

Why? Websites can be a powerful marketing tool to attract customers and the right ones can help support other business functions like sales programs, customer handling, and direct-to-customer transactions of ecommerce. So the software you choose matters.

One of the biggest lead-killers on the web is having a slow website.

In 2009, a study by Forrester Research found that online shoppers expected pages to load in two seconds or fewer — and at three seconds, a large share abandon the site. Only three years earlier a similar Forrester study found the average expectations for page load times were four seconds or fewer.

How much of a difference can 1 extra second of load time mean? Ask Amazon.com. They ran a study in 2014 that found that one extra second of load time on their website would cost their company a total of $1.6 billion dollars, which even for a company as robust as Amazon isn’t just a simple rounding error.  

Marketing, Sales and ServiceTechnology is a complicated thing. Learning how it likes to dance with everything else you’re already using is even harder. And that’s not even scratching the surface of trying to find out what technology you’re still missing and need to add. Sometimes it feels like it’s a full time job just to keep up with it all!

So today, we’re going to boil this down to your basic nuts and bolts and discuss the kinds of things out there that can help you get a better handle on your business and paint a clearer picture of the things you need to do offline to make it work better.