(photo from Abbyworld)
It wasn't too long ago that even big retail stores looked at
website marketing as a stand alone program, completely different from their
offline marketing. Internet marketing was looked at as a new opportunity, but
one that was confusing at best.
Selling products from a physical store is an accepted and
understood business practice. For hundreds of years, merchants have gone
directly to customers to facilitate a sale.
Integrated Marketing
Strategy
All the college business programs are set up to educate
students about how to do business offline, but what's been missing is the
Internet marketing approach. We are just now seeing business open up to the
idea that companies need both an offline and online integrated marketing
strategy to do business effectively.
According to Chantal Tode, of DMNews.com, "Companies
such as JCPenny, Lowe's and Best Buy are just a few that have integrated their
offline and online businesses into one marketing organization over the past
nine to 12 months."
The Internet is giving companies more opportunities to be
creative and reach out to customers in ways they never could before. Customers
may not be physically coming into their stores, but retailers have a huge
opportunity online to continue the sales process.
Create a Positive
User Experience
Rather than concentrating on making the sale or driving
traffic to the website, companies should focus on improving the customer
experience on their website. It does no good to gather tremendous traffic if
your website does not offer a positive user experience.
Here are three ways to improve the customer experience:
(1) Don't Make Me
Think
Website navigation needs to be intuitive and require very
little decision making. Moving from one page to another should be simple and
hassle-free. The buttons or tabs to move you from one page to another should be
clearly marked and visible. Put the most important information as bullets or
lists that are easy to scan. Use internal links to logically move the visitor
to pages where they can get more information if needed.
(2) Don't Overload
the Homepage
The homepage is not a dumping ground for information. It
should only contain the bare minimum amount of information that is needed for
the customer to make a decision as to whether or not to do business with you.
The ideal homepage will liberally use bullets, headings, and internal links to
connect to pages that contain more detailed information.
The idea is to get the visitor to move throughout your
website to get the information that is interesting to them. Let them make the
decision of where they want to go when they arrive at your homepage. Give them
logical routes to find the information they seek.
(3) Be the Customer
If you have a shopping cart on your website, take the time
to go through the buying process yourself. How easy have you made it for
someone to make a purchase?
The industry average for shopping cart abandonment is 70%! In
other words, only 30% of the people who start to buy something online will
complete the process.
Anything you can do to improve the shopping experience will
increase your odds in completing the sale. Simply reassuring them that their
purchase is safe and secure by posting security icons, is a good start. Also,
let people know what the shipping charges are before they place an order.
Conclusion
More than ever, in this economy, companies need to implement an integrated online marketing and offline marketing campaign to reach their customers. "A lot of multichannel merchants are trying to figure out how to grow their Web sites and take advantage of the one channel that is growing," said Sucharita Mulpuru, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
People may not be visiting stores as often as they used to, but they are still using the Internet to shop. All it takes is some clever marketing to generate demand.
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