Marketing your web site for optimal effectiveness
3/14/2002
One of the most overlooked aspects of web site ownership is the most important, and that is the ability of the site to generate leads and sell products. No matter what business you are in, chances are that one or both of these objectives are important. So why are so many sites failing miserably at this fairly obvious goal? I consult with clients regularly on this topic and there are a number of things that come up time after time, so although writing this article may seem like I am giving away great information, its actually more a case of wanting to educate my clients BEFORE we talk about improving their site's effectiveness. Ok, let's begin.
Site Statistics
Before we even begin to understand the effectiveness of your site we must look at how many people (unique SESSIONS) are viewing your site each day. A good statistics package (the best by far? Stats Server by Media House) will tell you so much information that it may take an expert to explain what's going on inside your site. Don't just look at HITS, this is a meaningless statistic that is much less important than Page Views (how many total pages were looked at by all visitors) and Sessions. A good stats package will allow you to change date criteria on the fly so you can see the effects of marketing strategies and overall fluctuations in site visits. An experienced web marketing firm can help you wade thru all the stats and make sense out of them, in order to provide a number of recommendations as to how to increase site visits, and/or how to get people to stay longer on your site. A big tip here: A good "REFERRER" report will tell you where your hits are coming from, which is very valuable. But even more valuable would be information on where the people who BUY from you are coming from. For this information you will need a combination of a well-placed cookie and some programming logic./p>
Cookies role in marketing
Once a customer buys from you, it's a wonderful thing. But how did this customer find your site, so you can tell where your serious visitors are coming from? The only sure way to tell is to set a cookie when people first enter your site. In this cookie you can include "free" valuable information such as browser, reverse DNS (ISP name), and the web site that referred the visitor. This data can be stored on a database on your web server and, once they buy from you, can show you some valuable stats on who is buying and where they come from. Without this information, your marketing will be hit and miss, using guesswork instead of facts.
Why people buy, and why they don’t
When people are on a web site, or when they are in a real store, there are generally 3 things that influence whether they take out their cash or credit card or keep walking or surfing. Confidence/Trust, Product Quality, and Price.
Price
This is the easy part. Deemed as the number 1 reason people buy on the web, everyone is looking for a better price these days, and comparing prices of products on the internet is getting easier all the time, thanks to improved search engines and sites that compare different vendors. However if you do NOT have the best price, fear not, because very often price is not the number 1 factor which decides whether people buy from you or not. Amazon.com is the best example of this; they usually have one of the highest prices for books and CD's but consistently beat the competition, because they have the Confidence/Trust factor.
Confidence/Trust
This is the most important ingredient in a successful e-commerce site, and it is also the most difficult to attain. The difficulty is mainly because its hard to put your finger on what it is that creates trust on a web site. The one fairly obvious one is the quality of your design. If your site is shabby looking, not professional quality, or worse it looks like it was done by an amateur, the vast majority of people who may have otherwise bought from you will look elsewhere, or will not buy online at all. I recently went into a camera and computer store on Broadway and although their prices were very good I had no inclination to spend 50 cents there; no confidence to buy. A web site needs to inspire even more confidence that you are not a fly-by-night operation and will stand by your products. However, there are always exceptions: www.hoteldiscounts.com is a good site that I have used regularly, and it works great. But the site is god-awful ugly and if it hadn't been for a friend telling me he had used it successfully, I would definitely not have used the site. But…would they be bringing in more business if they invested in their design? Absolutely without a doubt.
Product Quality
If you are selling a recognizable product on your site, proving product quality is a bit easier, but your presentation of the product, no matter how known it is, is very important. Off-the-shelf shopping cart software is known to display products in a confusing and non-user friendly way, making it harder for people to make a purchase. If you have not put your products search and/or displays through a usability test (get at least 5 people in a room and watch them surf your site) then you'll never know how hard it is to find products or realize how you may be losing prospective customers.
If your products are NOT a recognizable product, then even more emphasis must be places on the design and layout of your product descriptions. In dealing with an ever-educated public, its very easy to lose a visitors interest if your products are displayed in a boring or unprofessional manner.
Selling vs. Telling
If your site does not sell anything directly, your goal is still, I would think, to create new business relationships and sell your company to others, and to provide quality information so that your firm maintains a solid reputation. But marketing techniques such as cookies and statistics review, as well as taking the Confidence/Trust factor seriously, can make a huge difference in how others perceive your company.
The design and layout of your e-commerce, e-business, or even your brochure-ware site, along with the back-end functionality and ease of navigation, are the most important features of a site that is marketed properly. If you are doing all of these things well, your site is truly doing all that it can to continue growing your business.
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