I’m not much of a lottery player, in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever bought myself a ticket, and definitely never bought one online. Still, these are multi-million dollar events that garner huge attention and purchase volume.
I was investigating the website and checkout experience for a lottery brand. There was a reported big drop in conversion in the checkout, even among direct clickthrough to buy call to action campaigns.
Headless commerce is a pretty straight forward concept. Separate your front-end experience from your back-end commerce engine, and now you have the ability to implement changes on either more easily.
Simple enough right? That’s why so many technologies exist as stand alone CMS platforms or payment gateways. This empowers companies to choose the right technology for their business, but also supports change in a more efficient way.
Don’t just embrace change, invest in it.
Failure isn’t the risk, that’s a natural byproduct of business. We have to accept there is an inherent risk of failure we can learn from.
The real risk is sustained mediocrity.
It’s the big changes we fear, so we continuously keep making small ones. Over time, we fall further and further behind the competition who release better features, services or products that meet customers' expanding expectations.
I like to fill the walls with printouts of designs. Webpages, emails, ads - both internal and our competition. They’re a good way to make comparisons, stimulate ideas and review work that has been accomplished.
When doing reviews with designers, I get them to point at the wall and tell me which one they feel was a great design. Often the elaborate creations with bright colours get chosen, and yes they are beautiful, but are they great?
This was the response from more than half of participants in a leadership program we had developed years ago. It was eye opening and it changed the way I looked at my team.
As someone once in marketing agency sales, what I had to overcome was not the hesitancy to invest in marketing, but the hesitancy to trust agencies. Everyone had a bad experience being sold something they didn’t fully understand and it failed.
I thought it was a resume trend a couple years ago, but I’m still seeing it. It’s quite common with designers who like to add that extra little crispness to their resumes with graphics, colours and snazzy stuff. You go down the rows: 9/10 in HTML, 9/10 in CSS, 10/10 in excel and so on.
There’s a conversation I’ve had more than once. “Hey, order in a pizza for your crew and get them to crush out the last bit of work tonight.”
Let’s get a couple things straight:
Pizza is awesome.
Good will matters.
A little extra work is sometimes needed.
Once upon a time, I thought having a dozen people in a room deciding everything was normal. It starts innocent enough I’m sure. The boss is needed for some important decision, and he just sticks around. Then that one guy from sales had an idea people liked, so he’s in there too. Accounting? Well, at some point people are feeling left out.
The infamous Business Manger incident, or how we knew when we hit bottom.
Once upon a time when I was working accounts, we had a flurry of quality issues with our ad work. Websites with broken links, brochures with typos, and even a billboard with a big mistake. There was a common knowledge that things weren’t going well, but there wasn’t a sense of accountability.