The Tafford Uniforms brand has sold nurses’ scrubs and other medical uniforms to healthcare workers for nearly 25 years. While other brands focused on a b-to-b model by negotiating bulk contracts with healthcare facilities, such as hospitals, Tafford remained committed to selling directly to the individual worker.

Catalog once made up the bulk of its business, but today Internet purchases account for 70% of Tafford’s sales, according to David Kaplan, VP of marketing. Recognizing the continued shift in customer behavior toward online, the brand wanted to improve the sophistication of its e-commerce site and the marketing around its
online channel.

“With postage increases and the Internet, we had to right-size catalog [strategy] with online,” he said.

Tafford was purchased in late 2006 by new management. The new team, including Kaplan, continued to lessen the catalog’s dominance in favor of
online marketing.

“We did email marketing, but had virtually no online marketing,” explained Kaplan. “There were no other channels to get people to the website besides email and the catalog. There was no search marketing. One of our big initiatives was to diversify.”

Tafford works with a number of
vendors to coordinate its marketing. Silverpop is its email services provider; RR Donnelley prints its catalog; Alterian provides social analytics; and consulting firm Lenser handles database marketing.

STRATEGY: Two years ago, Tafford began working with Monetate, a marketing technology company that helps retailers optimize their e-commerce sites through segmenting, testing and targeting.

“We wanted to be able to test on our website,” said Kaplan. “The technology we had was antiquated. They gave us the ability to test on the website, and we can make these changes quickly through the marketing department rather than going to the IT department. [Now] we test virtually every change we make to the website to show how it affects conversion or average order size before we roll it out.”

One of the first things Tafford noticed was that conversion rates were lower at night. Nurses working the late shift were perusing the site, but not buying. That knowledge allowed it to run a nighttime promotion to grow revenues during a part of the day that generally saw weaker sales.

Separately, it also found “meaningful lift” in its conversion rate by showing location-based testimonials. In this way, a dental hygienist shopping in North Carolina would see reviews of Tafford Uniforms from someone in Durham rather than Seattle.

It also brought back a “bill me later” feature to the site after its removal set off a conversion rate drop of “a meaningful percentage” (less than 5%), Tafford said.

More recently, it began adding product videos to the website.

This February, it started testing product videos on the site with Monetate. Pleased with the initial results, Kaplan said the company increased the number of product videos for March by “two or threefold.”

RESULTS: The order size among new customers who viewed the videos increased by “double-digits,” while the conversion rate also improved. A split test that showed videos to 50% of returning customers and a non-video product page to the other 50% of returning customers, netted a 5% lift in conversions for those who had viewed the video, but not the same increase in order size.

“For new customers it was an immediate win,” Kaplan said.

Tafford expects to continue using the Monetate platform, including monthly split tests of homepage creative and landing pages, such as its plus-size landing page. It has an email acquisition test coming up and it is experimenting with the badges it displays next to products on the site, such as “best seller” and “new.”

Overall, Tafford has tested and altered hundreds of site pages to deliver more targeted marketing.

“We love Tafford as a client because they really are using the product,” added Stephen Cobb, marketing evangelist at Monetate. “They come up with ideas for our team, which challenges us and allows us to provide some input. Testing has become part of the culture at Tafford.”

Integrating social media conversations with other customer contacts can be tricky, requiring cumbersome integration with a company’s CRM application. When ExactTarget was building a custom extension to integrate its CoTweet app with Microsoft CRM, it turned out to be unusually flexible, allowing integration with legacy systems to be done very rapidly.

CoTweet, a social media management application that ExactTarget developed when it realized that email marketing recipients often continue a conversation about a brand in social marketing venues, now has stronger integration for CRM legacy systems.

The company recently unveiled new extensions that allow users to integrate conversations that originate in social media with such CRM platforms as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Dynamics CRM 2011 and Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM). Now it is making available an extensions module that can work with just about any legacy CRM system, Jesse Engle, general manager of the ExactTarget Social Media Lab, told CRM Buyer.

CRM-Agnostic Extension

The company developed it when it was building the Microsoft CRM extension application, Engle said, but it turned out to be unusually flexible.

“What it does is allow for these integrations to be done very rapidly. A lot of our customers have legacy CRM systems that may be out of date or operating on old releases,” he noted, “and these require custom integration to serve up the necessary data.”

By data, Engle means any conversations that originate on Facebook or Twitter. The CoTweet application converts these into leads or cases within the CRM system, giving the firm a wider view of customer interactions.

Rapid Push Into Social Media

The application was designed with larger companies or brands in mind — firms that were rapidly extending their customer service into social media but weren’t able to adequately capture or keep track of these conversations, Engle said.

CoTweet supports out-bound marketing-related messages and in-bound customer support requests.

ExactTarget began developing this app when Twitter had only a couple of million users.

“We discovered the need for it ourselves,” recalled Engle, “when we set up a social media account for a client and realized we had no good way of managing the messages across these various channels.”

Everything in One Place

The early iterations focused, not surprisingly, on the fundamentals — capturing a conversation in, say, Twitter and then importing it to the customer record. Later, the application grew in scope as the company added more-sophisticated features such as added enterprise controls over the social media engagement and the integration ties for CRM legacy apps.

Now the app can define work groups and their roles in the marketing process, as well as across different accounts and platforms, for example. A good illustration is provided by Citigroup (NYSE: C), which has a number of social media accounts, Engle pointed out.

“Through CoTweet, everyone has visibility into the various messages,” he explained. “Citigroup can assign messages to other people on the team for follow-up.”

With the CRM integration, a company can store all of the conversation history with a customer record, he said, which can then be accessed by a rep in real-time during a customer call.

“We are thrilled to add such a recognisable and trusted brand like Acronis to our software portfolio,” said Tonia Velasco, General Manager – Sales and Marketing at Mindscape Asia Pacific. “Aligning ourselves with one of the best solutions for backup and recovery extends our business into a growing market which we are very excited about.”

Karl Sice, General Manager – Pacific at Acronis, said, “The decision was easy with Mindscape’s diverse portfolio and years of experience in consumer software distribution and republishing. We look forward to working with Mindscape to continue to grow and build on the success of the Acronis brand in ANZ through the retail and reseller channels.”

This week Boston based venture capital firm, OpenView Venture Partners, hosted a two-day workshop on product management for its portfolio and prospect companies. The event was led by Marty Cagan, partner at Silicon Valley Product Group. Throughout the forum, Cagan discussed key best practices in product management and user experience for growing technology companies. Participants of the workshop included CEOs, CTOs, and Product Managers of OpenView’s portfolio and prospect companies.

“For expansion stage companies trying to break through the crowd, it’s all about the ensuring that you have created a product that your customers love. The OpenView portfolio companies are all working hard on creating category leading products,” said Cagan.

The workshop stressed several best practices from Cagan’s book Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love. The workshop emphasized product organization, planning, discovery, and optimization. Cagan’s latest techniques and best practices from agile/scrum, lean startups, customer development, user experience design, and design thinking were shared.

“I have really enjoyed that Marty has stressed the importance of user experience when it comes to product management. The heart of product management is discovering products that are valuable and that your customers will love to use. It is really nice to see that important tie in,” Steve Ballard, Director of User Experience Design at AtTask.

The Product Team Leaders Workshop marked the formal opening of OpenView Studios, a new space designed to organize forums and workshops for up to 100 people from OpenView’s portfolio companies and network. The new space also boasts a podcasting and video studio. The recording rooms are currently used to produce podcasts and videos for the firm’s content site, OpenView Labs, in addition to being available for OpenView’s portfolio companies.

“Zmags is really excited about the new OpenView studio space. It is a great resource for the portfolio companies. We have already taken advantage of the space by filming customer testimonials and a product launch video with our marketing team. We are looking forward to utilizing the space more in the future,” said Jens Karstoft, co-founder of Zmags.

About OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.

As with most collaboration apps, Central Desktop is a general-purpose tool, trying to pack in all the features that every organization needs. But what if it could be focused on a specific industry or niche?

Central Desktop, But for Creatives

SocialBridge is, essentially, the Central Desktop app if it had been built only for use by creative and marketing agencies. Central Desktop Inc. was working with a large broadcast firm that had started out with the usual Central Desktop setup. The company worked with its client closely to meet the special needs of an organization whose collaboration involved large media files and other needs that went beyond the app’s original capabilities. This focus led the Central Desktop team to consult with its other existing customers, conducting surveys and customer interviews to get a better picture of the internal processes and client interactions that were key to helping this particular niche.

The result is SocialBridge. It’s an app that eliminates the need to juggle multiple communication methods and can handle the big files that typically would otherwise require the use of FTP.

The Features Creatives Need

SocialBridge focuses on those needs peculiar to creative agencies: on top of its lightweight project management tools, users have  access to an intranet that syndicates social updates, and easy-to-use tools that allow clients to check in on the status of their projects or submit tickets for new projects. The file management features are particularly robust, offering cloud storage of the large media files (videos, images and so on) that go along with creative projects, as well as tools for reviewing and approving project materials. But it also includes the more humdrum features common to other collaboration apps, like the ability to communicate with teams and track time.

Two plans are available; pricing isn’t disclosed on the website.

Central Desktop isn’t the only app that’s been customized or built for the creative industry, of course. We’ve previously reviewed ProofHQ, an app that’s designed to help the design signoff process, and CreationFlow, an app that can handle project and task management, client review, version control and task history, for example. As the collaboration web app market matures, it’s likely that we’ll see many more apps tailored to specific industries or niches.

“Cloud…” “collaboration…” two buzzwords you hear swirling around in the air. Which naturally raises an important question: What about cloud collaboration? And is there an app for that?

Glad you asked. Yes, in fact, there are quite a number of cloud collaboration apps. Information Week has a good list. Let’s run down a few:

Basecamp. By 37signals. It’s a bare bones Web site, but the client list isn’t, with the likes of National Geographic, Patagonia, Warner Bros. and Fox Sports using its project collaboration tool. Basecamp has about five million other users, supports multiple languages and was also designed for mobile devices such as iPhones and Android (News – Alert) smartphones. Available with a free 30-day trial option, 37signals sells Basecamp under three plans: Plus for $49; premium for $99, and max for $149.

OfficeMedium. Based on Drupal CMS open source software, it’s aimed at giving small businesses a tool to collaborate and manage projects “without spending unnecessary resources buying and managing proprietary software,” since it’s well-known how much small businesses hate doing that sort of thing. The product has contact management, events, tasks, calendars; file sharing and client integration for about six bucks per month per user, and a $1 per gigabyte fee.

SocialText. Founded in 2002, the company’s software integrates traditional customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP) software with its social media platform. The cloud collaboration tool includes activity streams, user profile pages, instant messaging, group creation, workspaces, blogging, and user-defined control panels.

Central Desktop. More than 400,000 people use Central Desktop’s eponymous collaboration and project-management software to work on documents, share calendars and agendas, team-up on projects, and manage assignments. The software comes in free or basic, workgroup (with free 30-day trial) and enterprise.

Onehub. Claims more than 700 customers and 90,000-plus users. The tool has online collaboration and file-sharing software, specializing in creative industries and client service organizations. Sign-up for the application is free, and there’s a paid version ranging from $29 a month for the individual plan to $499 per month for the enterprise program.

If you work in website marketing and conversion rate optimization you’re probably aware that there’s no shortage of advice on how to do your job. You hear this advice from the boss/client or get it from a whole slew of blogs, newsletters, online magazines and webinars.

Sometimes, if you can tear yourself away from the screen, you might even encounter a book full of CRO advice printed on paper. And sometimes that book is worth reading.

Such is the case with “Convert!” by Ben Hunt, the best book on website conversion I’ve read in a long time. Why? Because it looks at all facets of your web presence from a conversion perspective, from how you organize your web pages to the content you place on them, from how you craft your search engine strategy and build your funnels, to the way you nail the call to action.

Hunt even includes field-tested advice on copywriting. For example, the headline on this software site used to shout “ZEFYR–ONLINE ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE” but conversion improved by 15.4 percent when it was changed to read “Complete Online accounting Package for Small Businesses.”

The Awareness Ladder

At the heart of the book are several key concepts that drive Hunt’s conversion-centric approach to site building. One of the most important is the Awareness Ladder, which Hunt describes like this:

“The Awareness Ladder is a simple model that can help you pitch every page on your web site at its target audience with precision.”

This ladder is indeed a simple device, but I think it you might find it to be an effective way of getting a fresh perspective on what your site is selling and the people to whom you’re trying to sell it. Indeed, the Awareness Ladder has important implications for both your search engine strategy and your website design.

The ladder starts at “No Problem.” This reflects the fact some people have no idea of the existence of the problem to which your product or service provides a solution. These people aren’t likely to be searching for a solution, so your website content needs to educate them about the problem.

Other people are aware of the problem but don’t know that any solutions exist. This affects the search terms they use to learn about the problem and the kind of content that will capture their interest when they find it.

Among the people who are aware that solutions exist, some don’t know about your solution. This will affect the way you craft content and target search terms to get their attention and present your solution. If people do know about your solution then you need to inform them of its benefits and convince them to buy your solution over the others that are out there.

A Testing-Based Culture of Continual Improvement

This is sound marketing theory, but the real value of “Convert!” is the very practical way in which Hunt relates this and other concepts to the website design process. The chapter on funnel modeling with Google Analytics is excellent, combining step-by-step instructions with clear explanations of the marketing rational for going through this process.

What might surprise you about the book is the relatively small number of pages devoted to A/B testing. Indeed, treatment of the subject is largely confined to the final chapter where Hunt takes you through Google Website Optimizer and the basic principles of testing. This is not because Hunt doesn’t put stock in testing and content optimization. Indeed, he’s a fellow believer in the testing-based culture of continual improvement:

“…optimization delivers the best results when you do it as an iterative process. When you switch from the “first best guess” approach to a culture of optimization, whenever a change is made and tested, you get to see–and then chose to keep–only the things that are proven to work better. Every cycle builds on the previous successes, creating a culture of continual improvement.”

Convert!

However, the main thrust of “Convert!” is conversion-centric site design, in other words, building a site informed and structured according to how conversion happens for what your site is selling. Get that right and your optimization efforts will have a head start on maximizing conversion rates. Additional gains from testing and targeting content will then be gravy.

eEye Digital Security, a provider of IT security and unified vulnerability management solutions, will exhibit at the SecureWorld Expo in Atlanta, Georgia, May 3-4, 2011. The company’s CTO, Marc Maiffret, will participate as an industry expert on a network security panel discussion. The conference brings together the security leaders, experts, senior executives, and policy makers who shape the direction of security across Information Security, Physical Security, Compliance, IT Audit, Computer Forensics, Enterprise Risk Management, Business Continuity, and Security Management.

eEye invites the media and SecureWorld Expo attendees to explore the company’s latest innovations, demonstrated in Booth 313, primarily the company’s Retina CS Management solution, Retina Insight reporting engine, as well as add-on modules for Configuration Compliance, Government Regulatory Reporting, and Patch Management.

eEye CTO, Marc Maiffret, will offer insights on the Industry Expert Panel, “Network Security: Finding the Right Management Program,” to be held on Tuesday, May 3, 1:15-2:00 PM during the Open Vendor Sessions portion of the conference.

“It’s part of the eEye philosophy to regularly engage in dialogue with other security leaders and the IT security community at large,” said Marc Maiffret, CTO, eEye. “As a speaker on the Network Security panel, I’d like to open communication around some simple, practical tactics that IT professionals can use to significantly improve the security of their organization.”

At the event, eEye will encourage SecureWorld Expo attendees to take advantage of several free, online resources that the company provides to the IT security community. Retina Community is a free vulnerability scanner for up to 32 IPs, now being used by nearly four thousand organizations. Zero Day Tracker provides a catalogue of the newest zero-day vulnerabilities, instructions for quick remediation, and a historical record of past vulnerabilities. eEye’s Vulnerability Expert Forum (VEF), hosted by Maiffret and the eEye Research Team, is a popular monthly webinar attended by hundreds of IT security professionals seeking insight and information on recently announced critical vulnerabilities from Microsoft and other software vendors.

eEye is participating in SecureWorld Expo’s “Dash for Prizes.” Attendees can register at the eEye Booth (313) throughout the two-day conference to win an Amazon Kindle and a $25 gift card. Winners will be announced during the last break of the conference on Wednesday, May 4. Attendees must be present to win.

About eEye Digital Security
Since 1998, eEye Digital Security has made vulnerability and compliance management simpler and more efficient by providing the only unified solution that integrates assessment, mitigation, protection, and reporting into a complete offering with optional add-on modules for configuration compliance, regulatory reporting, and integrated patch management. eEye’s world-renowned research and development team is consistently the first to uncover critical vulnerabilities and build new protections into our solutions to prevent their exploit. Thousands of mid-to-large-size private-sector and government organizations, including the largest vulnerability management installations in the world, rely on eEye to protect against the latest known and zero-day vulnerabilities. More at eeye.com.