With Google dominating the US search industry popularity contest, it’s easy to forget about lesser-known search tools and enhancements.  For example, here are a few that regularly make my life easier and my search experience more useful:

1) Google Preview (Firefox plugin)

Google Preview, despite its unilateral name, works for both Google and Yahoo search results. This little plugin inserts a thumbnail screenshot image of the search result page, making the results list dramatically easier and faster to scan. Here’s how it looks in Google:

It also adds in a “popularity rank” bar, which draws on Alexa ranking data. I largely ignore these rankings, and they can be turned off entirely in the Google Preview preferences.

Here’s the link: Google Preview Plugin for Firefox

2) Showing more than 10 search results per page in Google

(Read the full article…)

If you’ve been following our blog posts over the last couple weeks, you’ll already know that we loved the SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive Festival. Here are a few more pictures from our trade booth on the Exhibition Hall floor:

Our friend Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering stops by to chat with Lance Loveday, joined by Jessica Hagy of ThisIsIndexed.com.

We held a drawing for a magnum of Silver Oak Cabernet wine, and the lucky winner was Dave Dauber, pictured here holding the prize bottle (front, 2nd from left). He’s joined here by the CLM team and his friend Gene Rodgers (far left). Dave and Gene produce The Gene and Dave Show, which is “a glimpse into the lives and lifestyles of people with disabilities through entertaining, interviewing, and informing.”

John Evans and Amy Greer talk with Nikki Silva (far right) of The Kitchen Sisters - “offbeat, original, award-winning storytelling.”

Lance greets David Glenn (right) of Small World Labs, and enterprise social networking provider.

OK, We Promise That’s It For SXSW

All in all, a terrific time was had at SXSW! Next week we’ll get back to our regular, informative blog posts on topics pertaining to online marketing.

Greetings from Austin, Texas! The Closed Loop Marketing team has arrived, ready to meet, mingle, and have an overall great time at the SXSW Interactive festival. So far we’ve…

• set up our trade booth. Stop by and see us! 
• gone out to dinner
• seen a super hero in a green cape walking down the sidewalk.

A few photos from today:

Laura gets us all organized, Roger offers support

Scott gets a UK update from Amy

Lance and Amy try to figure out the “Table Guac”

Sandra and John plot behind innocent smiles.

Google’s trade show booth arrives!

We check out our new trade show booth - #616

If you’re at SXSW, we hope to see you either at our booth or one of our other SXSW events!

This post is part of a series examining some oft-neglected online customer touch points and exploring ways to optimize them.  Today, I’ll look at a type of page very similar to thank you pages - the logout confirmation, or logout thank you page.

As appealing as a loading dock?

Logout thank you pages are utilitarian, and often overlooked. Similar to an e-commerce confirmation page, a logout page appears after a completed transaction, so it’s outside the sales or conversion funnel.  Also similar to other types of thank you pages, logout pages are typically starved for design and marketing attention. All that creative attention is focused on the site’s interior - the cool account management tools, real-time information, or whatever else is provided in the logged-in area.

It shouldn’t be this way. Logout thank you pages can be a prime opportunity to support your brand and offer more ways for your current customers to engage with you.

It’s where and when you say it

I recently re-read Paco Underhill’s great book “Why We Buy” and was struck by how his discussion of store signage and zones could apply to web sites. According to Paco, it’s important to take every opportunity to communicate with customers, but communication alone is not enough.

The message must suit its environment.

Store owners, in Paco’s example, should understand what shoppers are doing in each area, or zone, of a store before placing signage there. What actions are customers taking in that zone? Are they walking quickly past, or are they waiting in line? What else is in that zone to look at, what might customers be thinking? As he puts it,

“Each zone is right for one kind of message and wrong for all others. Putting a sign that requires 12 seconds to read in a place where customers spend 4 seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage.”

(Read the full article…)

Are you ignoring an engagement opportunity?

The way an organization handles a simple email unsubscribe transaction can leave a lasting impression on the audience. It’s a customer engagement opportunity to increase goodwill - and even make a sale.  Think of it as another marketing channel.

[Note: This post is part of my "Every Touch Point Matters" series. See my previous posts on Optimizing Error Messages and Optimizing the Thank You Page.]

“You don’t love me no more…”

Rejection! One of your email newsletter subscribers decides she wants a cleaner, lighter inbox - and that your newsletter is dead weight. Last year, I was that subscriber.

Looking at my email In box, it appeared every online interaction I’ve had since 1995 came with an annoying little brother of a newsletter that has followed me around ever since, waving his hands and yelling, “Watch me! watch me!” Since a swift kick was out of the question, I’ve dealt with the situation by applying filters (as if putting an email in my “To Read” folder made it any more likely that I’d read it) and by hitting the Delete button. And then one day, a particularly irrelevant email triggered an avalanche of stored-up irritation. After calming down, I resolved then and there to tackle the problem at its source:

I would UNSUBSCRIBE.

I unsubscribed from over twenty email newsletters before I ran out of endurance, patience, and caffeine. As you’ll see in the examples below my experiences varied widely.

Why does this matter to companies?

Why does such a minor interaction, far from the glamor and dazzle of the mighty landing page, even deserve a blog post? Why do email unsubscribes matter to companies? There is a one-word answer to this:

Goodwill.

Whatever your subscriber’s motivation for unsubscribing, how you handle this simple request can affect their perception of your company from that moment on. You can either build goodwill or you can burn it.

And another one-word answer:

Opportunity.

Again, whatever the reason for the unsubscribe, the visitor is now ON YOUR SITE (minimally, they’re on your email subscription platform). That’s an opportunity to engage, communicate, and present your brand in a good light. It could even be an opportunity to change their minds or redirect their interest to a different offering.

So!  Let’s look at some guidelines, and then a few examples.

(Read the full article…)