What does a short fat squirrel, a spare 5 minutes and a vanishing missus equate to? Yes it’s my affiliate highlight of 2009! On the surface spending a few minutes with the Conversion Rate Experts at A4UExpo may not seem that exciting to most people. But, it literally opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about how things work for our users.

Those of you who were at A4UExpo couldn’t have missed the squirrel who was handing out leaflets. Jude had gone AWOL and so I thought what the heck let’s go and have a go. It’s not something I’d usually do (too shy usually) but in all honesty the 10 minutes spent doing it have probably been the most useful conference minutes from all three expos.

Just watching the eye tracking analysis, which was free, made me realise how important it is to see the site through our user’s eyes rather than our own. When you work, as we do, on a site day in day out it becomes easy to assume everyone knows where they are going.

The analysis was just basic although it did reveal quite a obvious coding error which could result in user confusion. But beyond that, just watching someone do this basic process was enough to spark lots of new ideas and improvements we could make to Loquax. Sometimes you just need a push to get the “epiphany” moment… and it happened there and then.

I always felt that terms like “customer journey” were just pretentious marketing mumbo jumbo, like “facilitating the conversation”, but yes I was wrong and understanding the journey is important. And so, since the above took place at Expo we have made a variety of changes across the site. We’ve looked at our welcome emails, automated response emails, error messaging and plenty more.

I don’t want to reveal too much as competitors do read this, but for example one rule on our forums is that you must “say hello”. This notion was sign posted if a user went in the expected direction. But, if they deviated a message would appear saying “there have been no posts in the last 60 days”. That’s not a conducive way to get people to join in a forum now is it? So that has been fixed and all roads lead to where the user needs to be plus they get the right information.

Of course all is not perfect and there’s still plenty of improvements to do.

Can we gauge success?

Without giving too much away, let’s just say we’ve improved things socially and also in site to site relations. New users seem to also know what they’re doing (well mostly) so that in itself is a major plus. More importantly those few minutes helped spark energy and motivation to do mundane, yet critical, things which perhaps would have been left.

The driving day with Cashcade was a close second, but as I didn’t win a trophy and Jude did and has made sure I know about it every day since, it just missed out to the short fat squirrel at A4UExpo!

So what was your affiliate marketing highlight of 2009?

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