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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Interesting and sticky
By appealing to these customers with an interesting and 'sticky' site (one they stay on for long periods of time), the web site can replace some of the direct marketing budget. But how do companies make customers come to - and stay at - a web site where they can't buy anything?
Guinness, of course, gained considerable word-of-mouth attention by producing a screensaver of one of its adverts that could be downloaded from Guinness.com. (They are also offering online the punch lines to jokes started in offline adverts.)
According to Booth of Deepend Design, even the best web site will need an offline marketing campaign to attract visitors, while Fraser Hay, CEO of Strategic Marketing Ventures, suggests that original viral marketing can also be beneficial. Hay, in fact, has set up a site called hitsnclicks.com to advise small businesses on how to attract people to their sites.
“You can never have too many reciprocal links,” he argues. “You can set up hundreds if you put the time into it and they will drive traffic to sites over and over again.” Businesses can also encourage traffic through affiliate programmes and by submitting their web site details to as many search engines as possible.
Sapient's Gibb worked with Homebase on building a sticky web site for the DIY supplier. “Homebase appreciated that it would be competing online with TV interior design programmes, with consumer shows like Ideal Home, and with many home design and lifestyle publications. As a result of user research, Homebase established that men want to be informed and educated about DIY - and they can do this online without embarrassment. So the Homebase web site features DIY guides and practical advice that provide this education - and which also build the value of the Homebase brand by making it more relevant to customers.”
Gibb has encountered some interesting attempts by companies to produce sticky web sites: “Kodak.com has a 'light calculator' area, where users can get accurate information about daylight clarity and duration for any part of the world. And BT.com has a free phonebook service, where you can find out a person's number and then send a message to them through the site. These 'added value' elements can be a useful bargaining tool between what customers want and what you want to tell them.”
Muranyi believes these 'quasi-portals' work best when there is at least some connection between the promotions or functions and the products. “The whole point of the exercise is to make the web site act as a powerful advertising medium by making it genuinely useful to the valued customer. If there is no connection, even just by theme, to the product range, then it becomes commercially redundant.”
Even if the marketing budget will not stretch to purchasing news-feeds or portal content, it is possible to take advantage of sites that can offer those facilities, says Tom Reid, director of brand and communications at market research company Morpace International. “Set up your own community of like web sites - such as The Food and Drink portal which has everything from recipes to wine growers - as well as your site and partner sites.”
Paul Edmunds, technical marketing manager at IT services provider Calleo, says that an area ripe for development is customer feedback into product development. “In my experience, customers appr-eciate this kind of personalised service.”
Hay of Strategic Marketing Ventures also advocates the use of surveys and polls relevant to visitor interests, the results of which are published on the site. Giving visitors something free, such as a newsletter, can also work. Companies can even give customers the opportunity to control various parts of a transaction through an online process, Gibb of Sapient suggests, even if it is not one they could have started online. FedEx.com, for instance, allows customers to track packages in real time. And that is when a web site really needs support from the IT department.
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