Why in the world would you hire a consultant to redesign your web site? One of the blog readers recently sent me a question similar to this one, and I think it’s worth a response.

Regardless of whether you have web designers on staff, it’s worthwhile to hire a consultant for a web site redesign for many reasons. Here are 5 things a good web design consultant brings to the table:

1. Outside perspective

A web design consultant can remove the blinders and think from a customer’s perspective. A consultant isn’t familiar with your company’s lingo and jargon, helping you write better content that your customers will find useful. Good consultants can familiarize themselves with the essence of your brand quickly and deliver creative concepts that fit both your business needs as a company and your customers’ needs as well.

2. Breadth of knowledge

Web design consultants likely have worked for many different companies in a vast array of industries, so they can bring innovative ideas to your web redesign project. A good web redesign consultant will become immersed in your business and bring fresh, new ideas to a project. Additionally, a good design consultant will have ideas about more than just the web design of your web site — they will also offer up marketing and product ideas. You can also trust that a seasoned web consultant is at the forefront of their industry and that they know the latest and greatest techniques to help your company achieve success online.

3. Ability to overcome organizational politics

Many organizations have internal conflict which really bog down a web site redesign project. There are often as many ideas as people, so a consultant will propel the project forward by answering many of the “what abouts” and “hows” of the project. For instance, a good web design consultant will be able to tell you how your web customer uses your web site, often answering questions that are raised internally.

4. Empirical approach

While it’s necessary that your web consultant has participated in lots of qualitative research, your design consultant should also have a keen understanding of how to approach the design of your site from a quantitative perspective. Setting objectives and defining success metrics, then measuring those with web analytics tools are critical to the success of any web site redesign project. With so many possible web metrics to choose from, a seasoned professional web design consultant can define a manageable set of metrics and show you how to measure them. A consultant that believes in tracking success metrics believes in the value of their services because numbers evoke accountability and hard proof that the project was a success or failure.

5. Passion and drive

Last but certainly not least, a good web design consultant will be passionate about seeing their clients succeed. The best web consultants will go above and beyond a client’s expectations and are excited and motivated by a challenge.

In a lot of ways, it’s been difficult for the local brick-and-mortar business to market itself to local customers on the Internet. There’s a new development, however, that could help small businesses promote themselves locally over the Web. Yesterday, Google introduced coupons on Google Maps.

If you want to see how this works, click over to Search Engine Roundtable where they have detailed the process of creating a coupon.

This coupon process is available to any company already having a presence on Google Local (or have an account on Google Local Business Center). If you’re a small business and would like to get started advertising on Google Local, you can create an account at their web site.

Big news concerning Google Analytics today. Google has officially opened up instant access to Google Analytics to everyone. Before today, you had to sign up for an invitation and wait for access.

Why is this so important? If you’ve got a small business web site, there’s simply no better web analytics package than Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s very powerful and it’s a marketer’s dream. With Google Analytics, you can analyze your web site traffic at about any level you want, find out how people are finding your site, track conversion rates / goals and even track paid search and e-commerce data.

If you don’t analyze your web traffic, you should. Give Google Analytics a try today.

A lot of companies use web analytics to track how many people open their emails, how many customers click and how much revenue they generate from e-mail marketing campaigns. But how many companies track creative performance of their e-mails? What in e-mail marketing campaigns do customers click on?

I recently created and sent out an e-mail marketing campaign for an ecommerce client, and we sought to measure this like I do with most of my e-mail marketing service clients. This time, I’ve decided to share the results since it is generally indicative of the kind of customer behavior we normally see.

Below, I’ve broken down the HTML version of the e-mail marketing campaign into common segments to show you how the clicks were distributed:

As you can see, over half of all clicks resulting from this HTML e-mail marketing campaign came from the left navigation containing product category links. I’ve seen this for years.

This may be a stretch, but I would correlate the willingness for customers to click simple left navigation with recent research that indicates that e-mail campaigns with fewer choices get better results. While products and offers contained in e-mail marketing campaigns often litter most retailers’ e-mail creative, the left category navigation remains the most-clicked area of the e-mail campaign.

Food for thought.

As you may know, I’m a faithful Virginia Tech Hokies fan. Back in April, I agreed to help re-launch an ecommerce site selling Virginia Tech merchandise. MaroonHelmet.com already had a site and an established customer base, but the owners wanted to make the site even better — more exciting and easier for fans to shop.

Today, we launched the new MaroonHelmet.com. Congratulations to the MaroonHelmet gang for their tireless efforts. The MaroonHelmet folks are extremely passionate about the Virginia Tech athletic program and even give a portion of sales to the University. They’re good folks, now with a great new site. Check it out at MaroonHelmet.com.

Today’s Ecommerce Times has a good article on small businesses called “Can a Small Biz Make it Online?“. It’s certainly worth a read if you operate a small business on the web.

The article stresses that the #1 challenge for small online businesses is getting noticed.

“The biggest struggle young companies face when bringing their business online is getting noticed,” Chris Hall, marketing programs strategist and tactician for Chris Hall Marketing, told the E-Commerce Times.”

Without a good bit of internet marketing knowledge, it is difficult to get noticed online. The best way a small online business can maximize their revenue is using email to retain loyal customers while acquiring new customers through press and search engines.

“Limited marketing budgets are to blame for most of the challenges small businesses face when deciding to go online, acknowledged Sonal Gandhi, SMB marketing analyst at JupiterResearch.”

Start-ups don’t often have the funding that a larger company might have, so they have to find marketing partners on a shoestring budget. If you’re a small business owner, consider asking prospective consulting firms to do work for you under a revenue sharing agreement. By sharing incremental revenue, you’ll pay your consultant only if they lift your sales.

Once established, it makes sense to invest in at least a basic analytics package and understand conversion rates, which pages are the most popular, and what products are the best-sellers, Mulpuru said. “Then companies can look to big competitors for where to expand to next, and which customer-friendly features it may make sense to integrate next.”

I can’t even begin to tell you the importance of web analytics to your online business. Not having web analytics is like trying to take your body’s temperature without a thermometer. A good businessperson can spend 5 minutes per day examining their web analytics and get new ideas for growing their business.

As they become immersed in all of the technological research, SMBs must not lose sight of the basics, however.

As engaging as researching technology on the web can be, rely on your marketing consultant to do a lot of the legwork and research for you.

Let me offer up this as a parting thought. Many of the small business owners I work with devote most of their day to the operations of their companies. Getting packages shipped, dealing with the accounting and books and managing employees can take up a lot of time. I advise them to use their morning or evening commute to think about customer service and the way people buy and use what they’re selling. By understanding their customers, they’ll be able to offer better customer service and keep customers loyal.