IN THIS ISSUE: May 24, 2000 To Archive Index How To Give Your Site A Marketing Edge.: First Get Your House In Order - When the customer experience on a site is confusing, or just plain bad, all the advertising, PR, search engine placement and other marketing tactics in the world won't mean fudge. Our Readers Write - about the futility of press releases How To Keep Double Click From Selling Your Personal Info

HOW TO GIVE YOUR SITE A MARKETING EDGE:

First Get Your House In Order

As recent web failures like boo.com's have proven, all the fancy features in the world won't make up for a basically difficult shopping experience and lousy customer service.

Too often, Internet companies mount expensive ad campaigns and hire PR firms before they put their house in order. That's why a lot of glitzy ads lead people to sites where the customer experience is confusing, or just plain bad. When that happens, all the advertising, PR, search engine placement and other marketing tactics in the world won't mean fudge.

The most important features you can create are the ones that lend themselves to a great customer experience. Spending money on market research often makes more sense than spending it on advertising. Develop a community that addresses the real needs of visitors and you not only give them reason to return again and again, but also to bring their friends.

For an e-commerce site, the most basic measurements of marketability are conversion rate - the ratio of buyers to visitors- and average order size. A low conversion rate or a drop in order size should be a red flag about more serious problems with the site. Customers want your site to be easy to use. Take that away from them and they're not coming back. Ever. No matter how much advertising and PR you do.

Build the Business Around the Customer
Smart marketing starts with good site intelligence that helps develop better site personalization, more targeted focus, easier shopping and stronger partnerships with other e-commerce players. The web makes possible a new business model that depends on merchandising ease. If a site writes about something, it can sell it too. It's possible to provide a depth of information online that is not possible in a bricks and mortar environment. People can be persuaded to buy products online without touching, tasting or trying them first. To paraphrase the great Blues singer Sippy Wallace, you can make customers do what you want them to, but you got to know how.

A Good Customer Experience is Marketable

Let's look at some sites that have built a marketable customer experience into their concepts:

www.biztravel.com promises to do more for airline passengers than airlines have ever done themselves. Biztravel is offering customers unprecedented refunds for late or cancelled flights anywhere in the world on five big airlines - Air France, American Airlines, British Airways. Continental Airlines and US Airways.

Purchase your tickets on biztravel.com and you can apply for a refund of $100 if your plane is more than 30 minutes late to its destination and $200 for a delay of an hour or more. For flights delayed more than two hours, or canceled on the day of departure for anything besides a mechanical problem, and biztravel will give you a full refund.

Marketable: Biztravel is betting that its customer-centric program will boost traffic to the Web Site and improve its ratio of customers who book, instead of just browse, tickets. The move has resulted in a flurry of publicity, including an article in The Wall St. Journal.

www.wholepeople.com a site founded by Whole Foods as an Internet community that meets the needs of the millions of Americans who pursue a healthy, positive lifestyle. It gives visitors the opportunity to read articles about food, health, natural living and a variety of other healthy topics, offers ways one can make a difference by adopting healthful practices, and also sells products. Marketable: This site is obviously built by people who walk the walk and talk the talk.

www.hungryminds.com is an online learning portal. Besides courses, it features experts for hire and how-tos of all descriptions. A search on photography returns 1 expert, 30 web sites, 27 distance learning courses, 5 discussion groups, 22 how-tos, 61 books, and 15 "other media" by which they mean books, videos and periodicals. I am a happy camper, soon to spend a few hours on the subject. Marketable: Complete, intelligently organized, information on every topic listed. People remember this kind of good treatment by a site.

www.bet.com The Black Entertainment Network doesn't just give in-depth information about entertainment. This lively site addresses its target audience's political concerns, career goals, health, social lives, personal finances and other lifestyle issues that affect their lives. This is a true community. There is so much good quality information on the site that one could easily spend a day there.

Marketable: What's this got to do with marketing? Everything! With such a treasure trove of lifestyle and entertainment content, bet.com is set up for reciprocal linking and cross promotion with a variety of sites that address the same demographic. Bet.com is a magnet both for advertisers who want to reach their audience and for viral marketing by friends who just must tell other friends about this great site.

www.americanleather.com American Leather has nothing to hide. It tells me right on the home page that I will get four-week delivery on my custom-made furniture. No waiting six months for delivery! It shows me remarkably clear little photos of its many styles. I click on "Havana" and I'm shown the couch and chair in a room setting.

The site shows me how the furniture is constructed, tells me about the tanning process, explains why a leather couch will last seven times as long as a fabric version. It's clear, bright, and easy to use. Marketable: The site is thorough and easy to navigate, forthright about delivery times. Since the site saves me having to ask all these questions in the dealer's store, I forgive them for not letting me order online.

www.dell.com Dell lets you configure your new system on the site and place your order. Andthen their real customer service kicks in. Their post-purchase service can't be beat. You are given a URL http://support.dell.com/ordstat/for tracking your order in every possible detail. You get a personal Dell order number and customer number.

Once your computer is shipped you can track where it is at all times.

Marketable: Says my friend William Johnson who just ordered a Dell computer, "These guys are doing it right. Something about the way they do it makes me feel TOTALLY CONFIDENT and TOTALLY SERVED."

www.drugstore.com Drugstore.com has a very quick and easy signup and shortcuts like "Shop by brand" and "Your list." Marketable: Your List fills up automatically as you shop, keeps track of your prescriptions, reminds you (via email) to stock up on anything you ask it to, lets you check items you want to re-order and promises 24 hour Customer Care. And they reward repeat purchases with discounts.

www.guess.com Guess.com has situational merchandise. It responds to the way people really shop. Omigod, I'm going on vacation and I need everything. OK, here it all is.

Marketable:"Getaway essentials" suggests items good for a weekend away or ones to buy before a vacation.

www.costco.com At Costco.com the merchandise descriptions are a marvel. Marketable: Pages with product descriptions actually show shipping charges instead of surprising you with the huge charges at the end, and also gives approximate delivery time as you order. They also offer personalized content and collaborative filtering-that is, when looking at item X, you are told that other people who bought item X bought items Y and Z to go with it.

Sites That Bite

Now let's look at some sites with features that blow it by making the customer experience unpleasant:

www.justballs.com Just Balls set out to be the best at one thing and to become the ultimate source of news, information and products in just one one category. They've received a lot of awards and quite a bit of media attention as a result of their sharp focus. The site not only sells and imprints balls for every imaginable sport, but also contains game rules, a ball encyclopedia, and tips for ball care.

Bad marketing: However, when you try to order, things fall apart. On the home page, we're encouraged to "Serve Up Savings" by ordering a case of tennis balls. Great idea. But when you click, you get to an order form where a case is not an option. Tiles along the side of the page offer links to "Deal of the Day," and "Quantity Discounts." Neither link takes you to the case price for tennis balls. Goodbye Just Balls.

www.netFoundation.com Net Foundation makes you wait forever for a pretentious, self-absorbed and slow loading flash presentation to load. My hair grew an inch while I was waiting. Who cares what's on the site after that. And what about second time visitors (if any had the wherewithal to come back) Why would they want to see that flash presentation again? This site is not designed for users. Nuff said.

Bad marketing: Avoid using flashy technologies that eat up server space and slow down page loading times, such as unnecessary Flash, streaming video or audio. Don't use graphics that are purely decorative unless they load very quickly. Sure you want to give an aesthetic "feel" to the site, but don't do it at the expense of quick downloads.

www.reflect.com Reflect is a custom beauty products site that makes visitors fill out a multi-screen registration before they can shop. Customer experience doesn't get much worse than this.

Bad marketing: Before I saw a product I could buy, I had to fill out a lengthy and stupid questionnaire which asked me to choose: "If I were a house I would be a beautiful mansion filled with art from the hottest artists; a penthouse apt in the heart of a big city; a maintenance-free townhouse with an exercise room; a cozy house with a meditation room and a garden; a historic home in an established upscale neighborhood; a ranch in the country." (and this has WHAT to do with make-up?)

"The person closest to me would say that I am most likely to dream about living a glamorous life, going for a sunrise walk on a secluded beach" And, get this: "My personality is best represented by a peacock, a swan, a hawk, a dove." Then they actually asked my ethnic background. Hey! I thought that was illegal.

After several more equally vapid queries, it turns out the result of this third degree is that they've selected colors and illustrations for my personal Web Site. But they still have not shown me any products. What do these people sell anyway? Why is it a secret? Are they ashamed of their products?

Yikers! Now an obnoxious cartoon character named Alice pops up and tells me she is my guide and shopper throughout the site -- go away! Good-bye. Forever.

So what's the bottom line? The best way to give your site a marketing edge is to think about what your customers want and then give it to them. What? You thought I was going to tell you something complicated?

Our Readers Write

"yes, Yes, YEs, YES, YESSSSS! There are more trees axed, more stamps sold and more time wasted mailing out press releases than any other "direct mail" effort I've witnessed. In 20 years of PR practice, I've gotten an average "response rate" - i.e. pick-up -- of about 0.5% for releases. I'm not convinced Internet News Bureau has any better success. What DM effort would be repeated on the basis of those results?? Tailored, individual pitches are the only things that work; but of course you have to have a real story to sell!

Stephanie Seacord

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Don't Want Doubleclick to Sell your Personal Surfing Information?

Opt Out!

In response to public outcry, DoubleClick has set up a mechanism that allows you to opt out of having your personal information sold. You set a cookie that indicates you have opted out. Just go to http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy_policy/privacy.htm click the "opt out" button and then follow instructions.

You will need to do this separately for every browser you use. So, if you sometimes use Explorer and other times use Netscape, you have to do this for both browsers on every computer you use.

BTW, it doesn't matter if you never visit the DoubleClick site. If you visit a site which uses DoubleClick for their banner advertising (which means a *lot* of sites), you can be affected.

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