That’s what happened last week when I spent a couple of hours training a client, a firm of solicitors in York, on their new website’s CMS and email management application.

The website CMS allows non-techies to easily modify the text and images on their site’s web pages in a simple to use “Word™ like” interface. The email management application we’d installed, allows the client to send out sophisticated, branded emails on a regular basis to their clients and other subscribers who may sign-up directly from their website: a vast improvement on their current method which involves sending out hundreds of emails with large PDF attachments though Outlook™.

However, the real light bulb moments started to go off when I showed them the level of reporting or ‘analytics’ that was available to them.

Firstly there was Google Analytics™ which is the sophisticated visitor statistics monitoring package that offers reams of data to a site owner about the activity of visitors on their website, where they’ve com from and the route they take to achieve predetermined ‘goals’ on a site such as the completion of a feedback form or the purchase of a product etc. The client was genuinely surprised at the amount of data available to them from the Google Analytics package we’d installed on their site and they could immediately see how the data could be used in their normal, offline marketing activities as well as determining the typical user profile of their site visitors.

The second light bulb moment came when I showed them the amount of tracking data they could get at within our email and subscriber management application, SendMail. Aspects such as the number of email opens, bounces, deletions and unsubscribe’s for each mail campaign were easy to determine. Digging a bit deeper, more light bulbs started to switch-on in the room as people realised the degree of data, right down to individual subscriber activity and link popularity, that could be accessed for analysis and how such nformation could be used.

“That level of information really helps us determine if our eshots are being sent to the correct people, are being read and which elements are the most popular sections. Really useful”. The firm’s senior partner said to me.

If you’d like your own light bulb moments and want to measure the effectiveness of your website uing Google Analytics or you’d like a free SendMail email broadcast and subscriber management account, please get in touch.