Are you blanking your customers?

Is it difficult for customers to understand what you’re trying to communicate on your website? Are you showing them a blank screen, or hiding key sections of your site from them? It can happen to the best of companies without them realising …

I can think of a couple of reasons why you might decline somebody’s custom: but only people that you no longer wanted to have as customers. You surely wouldn’t refuse to serve those people you do want to retain or exclude them from your corporate communications.
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Search the FTSE 100 - if you can

Do you think that having a search facility on your site is a fairly standard best practice these days?

I do.

And yet 17% of the FTSE 100 do not have a search box (or link to a search page) on their home page. Why is this?
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2 share price trackers - and more

What tool could you offer your visitors that is of benefit to both of you?

I’ve known about the Reckitt Benckiser share price tracker for a while … it opens in a tiny new window from the Reckitt Benckiser site, and it monitors the Reckitt Benckiser share price for you until you close the window.

Unicredit have gone one better. Yes, their Desktop will track the share price for you. It will do this in real time, providing you with an intraday chart. Iit will also act as a feed reader for whichever Unicredit feeds you’ve signed up to, show you the company’s event calendar, and provide you with their latest press releases. It is completely independent of the website, so you don’t need to open your browser to get the information - definitely a timesaver.

And more: you can add up to 10 external feeds to the reader, which makes it even more useful. After all, you don’t want a desktop widget for each company in which you have an interest. My only quibble is that 10 external feeds aren’t very many, and probably wouldn’t be enough to replace the average feed reader (I have over 100 in my feed reader, which is way too many) but it is certainly better than nothing.

Unicredit definitely merit a round of applause for this little tool.

Give your annual report readers what they want

People browsing an annual report want to see the financial spreadsheets and find out about the dividends paid.

Investoreports recently collated some interesting data about the popularity of different areas of the annual report, based on nearly 30,000 searches of online reports …

It turns out that the most common searches are:

• shareholders
• dividend
• balance sheet/ income statement

Read the rest of this article …

Provide analyst estimates for a level playing field

Are you sharing information with your retail investors as well as your professional ones?

Institutional investors should already know the market expectations, but providing analyst estimates on your website enables retail shareholders to consider their options with the same information to hand. Surprisingly, this isn’t done on many corporate sites, though the numbers are increasing. Examples of those that do provide such forecasts are Prudential, Carphone Warehouse and Petrobras. All provide a variety of different measures.

But why not go a step further, and provide an automated feed of broker forecast information? This would mean that your investors can have the latest information very easily - and don’t have to keep returning to your site.

RWE does this very neatly: they provide broker forecast information on their site in some detail, and have archives going back to 2003. If requested, they will email the latest information out to you every 2-3 weeks.

I think that is a great service.

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