The Yolk is a new digital agency that is the result of a merger between specialist agencies Sticky Panda (Digital strategy and online performance) and Blue Hat Technologies (Web and software development). My role in this new exciting venture will be as the Customer Engagement Director. I'm very excited about the new prospects and will update people on forthcoming news.

The Yolk is due to officially launch in January 2010 (straight after the New Year) so if anyone has any questions, please let me know. Alternatively, visit The Yolk's website to sign up to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter.

Related links:

• The Yolk
• The Yolk on Twitter

I've added a new resouces page which now contains a glossary of terms being used within my posts, as well as a downloads area for useful whitepapers and resources. This area will be constantly growing so if you need a digital library, remember to check here first!

If you have any recommendations, requests or questions, then please leave me a note!

I'm not a fan of the phrase "Conversion Rate Optimisation" as I think to be successful online you need to look at the entire ACR model (Acquisition, conversion and retention). WIthout looking at all the areas of the customer lifecycle, it is very difficult to look at the bigger picture of success. With that in mind, we need to account for the way that the market is shifting towards hybrid engagement & commercial websites and look at a larger process; the ACER model.

Acquition - Getting users to your website
Conversion - Converting those users into customers
Engagement - Getting them to engage with your product, website or service
Retention - Customers revisit because of the successful experience from all of the above stages

The ACER model is important because engagement is a key factor for all online businesses. This engagement is what can make a real success of even a mediocre business offering by connecting with your customers.

Despite my small rant about the short-sightedness of the above phrase, I noticed a post on Econsultancy that I think sums up the basic steps to success to maximise conversion rates. Econsultnacy focuses on the Acquisition - Conversion part of the model and give some good rules of thumbs to improving your website. There are a few things that can take you to the next step, but there isn't much missed so if you follow these guidelines, you should see improvement to your site:

A is for Accessibility

B is for Brevity

C is for Customer Intent

D is for Differentiation

E is for Ease of Use

F is for Forms

G is for Good Service

H is for Help

I is for Incentives

J is for Jargon

K is for Key Information

L is for Labelling

M is for Merchandising

N is for No Good

O is for Options

P is for Persuasion

Q is for Quality

R is for Repetition

S is for Speed

T is for Trust

U is for User Generated Content

V is for Value Proposition

W is for Where Did They Come From?

X is for The X Factor

Y is for YES

Z is for ZZZZZZZ

 

See the full article to get a full description of the above examples.

Related links

• A-Z of conversion optimisation article
• A-Z of online persuasion (By cScape)
• See how you can improve your performance online

I was recently asked a good question by a client with regards to Social Media and how customers choose their platform. The question was after a customer registers and then decides that they are not happy, where do they finally settle and why? After some extensive Googling, I was still unable to find this information. Therefore Sticky Panda have put together a short survey to find out this information and will produce a final report.

If you would like a FREE copy of this report (or would just like to help!), please take a few minutes to complete this survey and forward to as many people as possible to get accurate results:

Take the survey >

As some of you will know, I recently started a new business called Sticky Panda with my business Partner Alex Bailey. Sticky Panda is a digital strategy and user experience agency designed to support other specialist agencies in their field. Sticky Panda works with a number of different agencies top help increase their client retention by increasing their clients' return on investment online. How do we do this? Contact us and we're more than happy to let you know!

Sticky Panda works with a number of agenices around the UK, with clients that focus both locally and nationally. We aim to be a specialist agency in online performance and provide our services in different approaches - from a 3rd party specialist to a white-label option (used in the loosest form of the term). We hope to increase which agencies we work with in different locations around the UK, but these are a few of the award winning agencies we've worked with:

• Blue Hat Technologies
• The Click Design Consultants
• Further Online
• Firecast
• BluSky Marketing
• GBDN (Global Business Development Network)
• Breckland Print

As part of my personal re-eingineering, I have once again chosen the Webjam platform, due to it's flexibility and scalability, to host my rebranded blog so that I can share my digital experiences in this exiting time. 

Please feel free to join me and either create, add or discuss the future content of digital online. Alternatively, please take a look at our online performance agency Sticky Panda