No purchase necessary
- Article 6 of 77
- Information Age, April 2001
How does an organisation that does not sell goods or services online attract visitors to its site and keep them coming back?
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In early 2001, ebusiness consultancy Rubus commissioned a survey from research company ICM. The findings raised a few eyebrows: only 52% of the Times Top 1000 companies have web sites that allow for online transactions, be they business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C).
The survey misses an important point, though. While many of these companies are moving more of their B2B trading with suppliers and distributors online, many make or sell products that do not lend themselves to B2C web commerce. These companies include food and drink manufacturers, for example, where, typically, distribution is handled by a third party.
For such organisations, corporate web sites have not moved beyond the role of a marketing bulletin board - and, arguably, they do not need to. In fact, the sites themselves are often driven by marketing departments, to the extent that the CIO plays a peripheral, infrastructure support role in their development.
But consumer-focused organisations that cannot sell their products online still require sophisticated and well-visited web sites. When these web sites can cost in excess of £1 million to build and hundreds of thousands to run, they need to be exploited as powerful marketing and branding tools. In the absence of online sales, these businesses must create compelling features that draw consumer traffic to the site. And CIOs are being drawn into corporate-wide discussions about site features, functions and content - such as an online quiz or chat room - that are far removed from their traditional territory.
According to Ethan Segal, digital marketing group director at web site design company Agency.com, organisations like cosmetics company Ponds Institute, and food and drink manufacturers such as Pepsi and Heineken, use their web sites to enhance relationships with customers. “They're all non-product-focused communications, aimed directly at impacting sales,” he says. Through their web sites, such organisations can provide “contextually relevant experience to the brand that adds functional, personal and financial benefits to the customer”.
Open and accountable
Petroleum company Shell, recalls Neil Gibb, director of content strategy at ebusiness consultancy Sapient, wanted to use its web site so it could be seen to be more open and accountable to its shareholders. “A key content element of its Shell.com site is a facility for discussion groups, where Shell posts its views on issues, invites responses from allies and critics alike, and then uses these opinions to help refine and adjust company policies.” According to Shell, these forums “provide an area in which people are free to comment on any aspects of Shell's policies, practices and principles”.
It is interactive functions such as these that stop marketing web sites from being simple 'brochures on the web'. Michelle Booth, business development director at web design agency Deepend Design, says that as companies link their forward-facing web sites to CRM systems, they are able to exploit more meaningfully their full value in developing customer relationships.
But to take full advantage of integrated systems, the CIO must be involved, argues Booth. “It used to be the case that I would initially only see the head of the marketing department when discussing what the site would be like. But they didn't understand the technical side of things and would ask for things that couldn't work, or the system wouldn't be integrated with the rest of the IT infrastructure. Now I tend to meet both the head of marketing and the head of IT.”
With the CIO involved, it is possible for marketing departments to expand their aspirations beyond a pure branding web site. Some fundamental 'due diligence' is required for any organisation embarking on a major ebusiness project, says Neal Muranyi, a director of IT consultancy The Database Group. “A basic piece of work involves using third-party data to analyse which of your valuable customers are already online and how many say they will be in the next year or two. Any CIO worth their salt should check that the marketing department has done this - if they haven't, then having a sophisticated online presence at all may be a complete waste of time.”
Customers, continues Muranyi, can be split into two categories. “There are those who are likely to remain loyal, purchasing offline at the same level forever, and those who may be modest-value customers, but who have major potential to take other products that they currently don't - maybe even products that aren't sold yet.”
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