Overview
"Web Engagement provides an interesting and accurate picture of National Semiconductor's approach to personalizing its website. National's site is driven to 'delight the design engineer,' our target customer. Whatever it takes, we do it! We are successful because we get them to always remember us as the one site that saves their precious time. Bill's book unlocks some of our secrets."
—Phil Gibson, VP, Web Business and Sales Automation, National Semiconductor Corporation
Every e-business professional acknowledges that connecting with customers is a good idea, but few have figured out how to make it happen. The web has changed the way companies do business; the difficulty in connecting to customers can be traced to a collision of new technology and new business models. Managing a successful web business—one that engages, delights, and serves the customer—requires mastery of both technology and business.
Web Engagement is the ideal introduction to understanding the key concepts necessary to engage, and ultimately retain, your web customers. This book explains proven strategies that allow you to understand what your customers need and how you can use your website to meet those needs. Detailed case studies and examples illustrate what other web businesses have tried—successfully and unsuccessfully—and what they have learned.
The book answers new and important business questions, such as
- What is "personalization" and what does it mean for your customersand your company?
- How can you use personalization and customization in a business-to-business web engagement?
- How can you use web server log files and browser cookies to understand what customers are doing on your website?
- How do you divide customers into segments and groups so that you can better meet their needs and increase sales?
- What are your web business objectives? How can you tell whether you are meeting them?
With this book as your guide, you will learn how to build a web business model, and an accompanying website, that connects your business more directly to your customers. You will also learn how to instrument your site so that you can change it as your market changes. Web Engagement helps you gain a working knowledge of the core issues, key technologies, and essential business models that will help you devise a winning e-business strategy for your organization.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewThe heart of e-business, what makes it potentially so powerful, is its ability to connect with customers in deeper, more profound ways than most bricks-and-mortar businesses ever could. In order to do that, however, you need to understand the technologies of web personalization and tracking, as well as the unique business issues associated with the Web (how do you maintain margins with zillions of competitors a click away, as well as what motivates your web visitor — a different breed of cat! Bill Zoellick's Web Engagement is one of the first books we've seen that can help with all three of these challenges.
The book opens with a look at a typical e-business site, designed to illustrate several essential points: most web businesses aren't quite sure where they're headed yet; web visitors may have a very different view of your site than you do; and creating effective crossovers between freebies and paying business is tougher than it looks. (To start with, you need to make sure the people interested in your free offer are the same folks who'd actually pay for what you sell!)
Next, Zoellick offers the best overview of web log file analysis you're likely to find anywhere, clearing up a passel of myths along the way. How much use is your site getting? Where do your visitors come from? What pages do they visit most often? What's the last page they visit (and why do they leave immediately afterwards?) Are people using the site as you expect?
The book includes a practical guide to cookies — andtotoday's controversial techniques for collecting information across sites. That leads to a common-sense discussion of privacy, focused on making sure you keep your customers on your side, and that you give "fair value" in exchange for the information you seek about your customer.
In the final few chapters, you'll learn how to use personalization and profiling effectively: what works, and what spectacularly doesn't work. Zoellick presents the key questions any site manager should ask up-front about personalization; techniques for estimating costs and benefits; coverage of recommendation engines and software-assisted customer segmentation; as well as a detailed personalization B2B case study from National Semiconductor.
WEB ENGAGEMENT demystifies more crucial e-business issues and techniques than any other book we've seen in a very long time. This is a book for people who are doing it, not just talking about it.
—bncom editor