e-MARKETING CHALLENGES
Part One
Attracting e-Shoppers

by Sue Nugus and Dr Dan Remenyi

The first great challenge is the visit. A visit is definitely not the same as a purchase but without the visit by the e-Shopper there is no chance of anything being bought. Having your website easily found by the major global and local search engines and web directories is an important factor in attracting visitors, but it is by no means sufficient to generate a sound e-business. Attracting visitors to a website is not a simple matter of keeping the search engines up to date with the appropriate keywords. There is far more to this than search engines.

Web-enabled or the web-enhanced business has not been around long enough for the web to be the first choice of shopping for many people. Websites need to be promoted and they have to be made attractive to visitors. Thus the e-Business needs a carefully formulated strategy, which will bring in e-Shoppers to the website and ultimately convert them to e-Buyers.

The established, well-known players such as Yahoo, Amazon, Altavista and Dell have spent hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars on repetitive high-density broad-based advertising in an attempt to build up a high level of awareness in the user of the web. This has been done by a combination of different types of advertising ranging from billboards in railway stations and on the sides of motorways, to television and radio commercials to banner advertisements on the web itself. By and large this advertising has not been highly targeted, but rather has been aimed at as wide a group as possible. For the big names on the Web this has been an area of major expense and it certainly contributes quite significantly to some of these organisations’ long, steep and precarious curve to profitability. This sort of money is not available to many web-enabled or web-enhanced businesses. In fact with the cool down of the venture capitalist money, finding large sums for advertising a website has become harder and harder to find. Advertising effectiveness is thus a critical success factor for any e-Business.

Fortunately extensive, costly, repetitive, high-density, broadly aimed advertising is not the only way of attracting e-Shoppers. There are alternative strategies for getting one’s business name about in the right places.

Before discussing these strategies it is important to understand one of the key drivers of web usage. Although a wide range of people uses the web, it is used more intensively by some than by others. The intense users tend to be those who are most familiar with it and what it has to offer, and these people are increasingly referred to as being Internet or Web Savvy.

A good example of Internet savvy people is university students. Today when anyone registers at a university they are immediately given an Internet ID and e-mail address. Every university campus has hundreds of personal computers or work stations which are generally connected to the web with wide bandwidth lines available to all. Furthermore they soon learn that e-mail has become the first means of communication between students and that the web is a source of learning material that can support their studies and their research. Web usage from this group could be expected to be very high indeed. To emphasis this point, Internet savvy students can be contrasted with single parents, who as a group would not naturally not have access to personal computers or workstations, who would not have e-mail addresses or be especially interested in learning how to use the web. Web usage from this group could be expected to be much lower.

The development and subsequent sale of the website student.co.uk demonstrates the importance of the concept of Internet Savvy people. In a few short months three students from Nottingham Trent University in the UK built up the usage on this website to the extent that they were able to sell it for approximately £10 million. No big repetitive high-density advertising was required. This website had a natural constituency and they flocked to it. Contrast this with a website like ZedZed.Com, an independent travel website aiming at the general public who were not web savvy, and that after months of struggle just had to close down.

The lesson to be learnt from these websites is that if your target market is Internet or Web Savvy then getting e-Shoppers to your site is very much easier. You target the Internet Savvy group with highly specific advertisements at a fraction of the cost required to attract the attention of a general group. Then if you have a compelling and preferably unique reason why people will want to buy from you or engage in the activity you are offering etc., you will convert the e-Shopper into an e-Buyer and the revenue stream starts rolling in.

Besides repetitive high density advertising there are other approaches to getting e-Shoppers to visit your website. One of the most important of these is affiliate programmes that deliver visitors to a website at about half the cost of traditional advertising. An affiliate is another organisation’s or individual’s website from which there are direct links to your website. The affiliate agrees to have a button located on their site that directly connects to an order form or processing system of you’re e-Business.

Thus the affiliate website acts as a conduit for business to your site and in return receives a commission from you. The most celebrated affiliate programme is that run by Amazon.Com who have more than 400,000 direct links. This contributes substantially to their business.

Even with the most favourable combination of Internet Savvy and Information Intensity there is still a need to incorporate specific tactics in the Website design to attract e-Shoppers. These Website design tactics are referred to as attractors.

There are at least six significantly important ways to attract e-Shoppers to a Website:

1. Professional advice (or historical and background information)
2. Calculators
3. Sponsorship
4. Conferences
5. Free gifts
6. Entertainment – games and contests

One or more of these so-called attractors may be incorporated into the Website design and this will increase the number of e-Shoppers visiting. Furthermore the more original the attractor the more difficult it is likely to imitate it the more effective it is likely will be. A successful e-Business will plan ahead and incorporate changing attractors.

Looking at each of these attractors in turn provides an understanding how they work.

Sites such as the RAC depend on offering professional advice as a key attractor. BCG.Com and MySap.Com are other examples of professional advice delivering sites. A virtual museum displaying the history of the product, service or organisation can also be an attractor to e-Shoppers. The Ford Motor library of photos, Boeing’s information on the aircraft industry, and Sainsbury’s history of how the grocery shop and supermarket developed are good examples.

Calculators can be an effective way to attract e-Shoppers. Such Websites include SeaFrance, which offers an instant fare calculate and the AA, which allows visitors to calculate the distance between two places.  Moneygator.co.uk will calculate mortgage interest and repayment schedules. Pap.fr allows visitors to value their own home on-line. These websites need to supply immediate information and offer a solution to a problem.

Sponsoring an event such as a chat show or a rock concert, which will be held on a website can be a powerful attractor. Events will produce high traffic to the website for a limited period of time. Examples of such sites are IBM who sponsored the Sydney 2000 Olympics and Texaco, which publishes the radio schedule for the Metropolitan Opera in New York on public radio. Mars Confectionery uses their Snickers product to attract large numbers of visitors due to their sponsorship of football. Other organisations that use sponsorship effectively include Johnson & Johnson, The Coca-Cola Co., and Hewlett-Packard etc.

Hosting a prominent speaker or group of speakers on a topical subject is a useful attractor. This allows people to interact with individuals they would not otherwise be in a position to meet. This can increase an organisations’ credibility in the industry by providing access to experts. An example of this is the Financial Times’ business chat-room or the on-line conferences hosted by the Open University.

The giving of free gifts and samples can be an effective attractor. Of course, digital gifts are the easiest to deliver. Guinness.com offers free screen savers. A number of gambling sites are offering $25 of free chips to visit their website. Another aspect of this type of marketing is web-based loyalty schemes of which there are a growing number. Probably the best-known is the Beenz points programme where these points may be traded in for goods. There is also Free-PC.com, which periodically gives away computers for completing lengthy customer surveys

Some websites use entertainment as an attractor by means of games and contests to help promote a product or service. Examples of such websites are GTE Laboratories Fun Stuff

.com, Guinness.com and Barbie.com. These websites need to be interactive, recreational and challenging. They need to promote an image of a dynamic, exciting and friendly organisation, which in turn will bring e-Shoppers.

Different web-site situations will be able to take advantage of different methods of attracting visitors and the method is likely to change over time in order to maintain a degree of intrigue to attract visitors back to the site.

Being able to devise and implement a strategy that gets e-Shoppers to your site is central to e-Business success. Unless this is successful it doesn’t matter how smart the business model is or how good the product or service is. The success of the e-Business first and foremost revolves around being able to attract e-Shoppers and this needs to be handled efficiently and effectively. 

Sue Nugus is one of Europe’s leading trainers. Over a period of 20 years she has conducted numerous courses and seminars on a wide range of topics related to how to improve business performance though the use of information technology and telecommunications. She has been working in the Internet, Web and  e-Business field since it first became an important issue some five years ago. Sue can be contacted at  sue@mcil.co.uk