Enriching Web sites to engage customers better
Other changes have included making widgets more scalable and more functional for people using devices with different screen sizes, and enabling people to download videos.
“We chose UserVoice because we felt that they offered the cleanest, most feature-rich service,” Lipman says. “They allow us to answer customer needs more directly.”
A better dialogue
Jacob McNulty, president of Orbital RPM Learning Solutions, a learning development and marketing consulting firm, touts WordPress as a major factor in the firm’s 150 percent rise in sales in the last two and a half years. The open source blogging tool and a couple of plug-ins have enabled Orbital to more fully engage customers. McNulty sought out WordPress after learning visitors to the firm’s Web site were
“Our visitors were not able to find the information that they were looking for, and we thought we could better utilize the traffic we were getting,” says McNulty. “Our analytics showed us that people weren’t making it past the first two pages.
McNulty adds, “We had a bunch of content, but not an easy way for people to find it. We wanted to be on the most flexible Web 2.0 platform, one that would allow us to organize using tags and categories.”
When a visitor goes to Orbital’s site, he or she sees a tag “cloud.” The more times a visitor has accessed a term on the site, the larger the word in the cloud becomes. That enables Orbital to see what content is the most important to site visitors and provide the appropriate content.
“WordPress is more than just a blogging platform. With the available plug-ins, it can be configured to handle e-commerce or just about anything,” McNulty says. “We wanted to create interaction with our [site visitors] and enable them to dialogue with us. Now they can leave a comment on our site, which enables us to create a dialogue with them and to increase our sales.”
Orbital added a plug-in that enables visitors to upload videos, and the blogging feature allows Orbital to update the content as needed. McNulty credits both the video and the updated content for part of the sales bump.