5 Website Must Haves

Whether a marketer is building a brand new website or looking to improve the website they already have, there are a few key elements that are critical make a website the best it can be. Not only are these pieces important, they are essential to any that could engage a potential customer. It can be easy to get caught up in the overall look and feel of what a designer wants the site to be and forget to include what customers and search engines need. Customers need easy to skim content, comprehensible text, and fast load times. Search engines need to know how to decipher the site and what keywords to focusing on.

The first important element is an easy to use homepage and clear navigation. The navigation on a commercial website tells customers how to find the information they need. It is imperative that navigation is easy to use and very clear. The homepage is a large part of this. 

By keeping the homepage simple and visually appealing, a visitor comes away with a good basic understanding the business and what consumers can find on the site. 

The next imperative key is prominent contact information. Even in this online world, sometimes customers will want to reach out to a real person. They could have questions, concerns or complaints; all of which should be easy for customers to do. Any website should have easy to find contact information.

I believe that a third important piece is an easily accessible FAQ page. Especially if the website relates to products being sold, it is smart to include an FAQ section to help customers easily find answer to questions about products and services. This can also help keeping down the influx of emails full of questions because customers could potentially answer their own questions. 

The next essential point is to make sure it is clear to visitors what a marketer wants a consumer them to do when they get to a site. If the intention is to drive sales with a site, a marketer should include special pricing, promotions or offers and make it easy for customers to buy. Additionally, a site should educate visitors about a business.

The last important piece has less to do with the appearance of the site and everything to do with search results. Each page of a website can either be a treasure trove or a confusing mess to a search engine. Every page should me meta tagged to help increase the relevancy of the search and the rank on a results page. The title tag is a very important element that basically describes what the page is and shows up in 3 key places, the top of the browser, in the search results and when other sites link their page to the original site. The second important tag is the meta description. This 150 character depiction of the site shows up underneath the search result title tag and could be the deciding factor in whether or not a visitor clicks on the link. 

Tide’s Halloween Mobile Marketing Campaign

In August, the Wall Street Journal reported that Proctor and Gamble, the owner of Tide, is spending more than a third of its U.S. budget of marketing money on advertising and development of digital media. This represents an aggressive shift as Americans are spending less time watching television and more time online. The average time that consumers spend with digital media per day is expected to surpass TV viewing for the first time this year, according to research firm eMarketer, which estimates the average adult will spend more than five hours per day online, on mobile devices or with other digital media this year. By contrast, the average person will spend four hours and 31 minutes watching television, eMarketer estimates.

"The bottom line is we need and want to be where the consumer is, and increasingly that is online and mobile," a P&G spokesman said.

Other company executives have reported that in many cases, digital media is a faster and cheaper way to reach consumers. So, what are they all spending this money on? Here is an example of a fun mobile marketing campaign that debuted around Halloween of this year. 

You would normally think that brands that make candy and costumes would launch the most aggressive campaigns during Halloween, but this year, Tide launched a smart way to stay relevant. Through their Twitter account, they featured seven spoofs on horror films that included bottles of detergent portrayed as scaring stains. Click here to see some examples!

This was a smart way for a brand that makes items not related to Halloween be included in the festive buzz. As marketers, taking advantage of everything we can is vital to our survival. Tide took advantage of the time of year, as well as mobile marketing and the popularity or Twitter. 

Sources: 

Digital Set to Surpass TV in Time Spent with US Media. eMarketer. 8-1-13. <http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Digital-Set-Surpass-TV-Time-Spent-with-US-Media/1010096>

P&G Shifts Marketing Dollars to Online, Mobile. Wall Street Journal. 8-1-13. <http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323681904578641993173406444>

Forrester VS Tide

A March 2012 release from Forrester blog reported some alarming statistics. Their review of 1,500 websites for user experience finds that only 3% of sites earned a passing score. The rest had problems ranging from text legibility and use of space to task flow and links to privacy and security policies. These are revealing numbers, and today, we're going to see if www.Tide.com passes the test, based on the Forrester criteria. 

Value: This section deals with the basics. Is the content there? It is clear how to use the site? This is the easiest part to evaluate. It is obvious how to use the site and the essential content and functions are all there. 

Navigation: This is pretty self explanatory. Do the search boxes function properly? Are hyperlinks easy to use and useful? The drop down menus on the site are a little annoying; they are huge and personally, I think they linger too long after the cursor moves on. 

Presentation: Can you read and understand the site? Do images make logical sense? In general, the sites is easy to read. some pages, however, could be set up in a more eye-pleasing way. The image below depicts this:

I think that the space could have been used more effectively, perhaps the video link could be bigger and in the center. 

Trust: Essentially, does the site make you feel supported? Yes, it does. The site has a reinforced message that makes me inherently feel good about using it. 

This message appears in graphics, in small lines at the bottom of pages, and even has a page devoted to the warning. This makes Tide appear caring and compassionate, to me at least.

The one beacon of light in Forrester’s findings? “There was a significant increase in the average score over the years just prior — a trend we hope to see continue,” writes Sage. “There’s a similar pattern when we compare B2C and B2B sites. B2B sites have consistently lagged behind B2C sites in user experience scores, but we’re finally seeing that gap narrow.” With any luck, more sites will follow in Tide’s example. It’s not perfect, but I give it a passing score. 

Sources: Roberts, M. L., & Zahay, D. (2012). Internet marketing: Integrating online and offline strategies. (3rd ed.). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.

http://blogs.forrester.com/adele_sage/12-03-15-lessons_learned_from_1500_website_user_experience_reviews

A Few Words About Target Corporation’s Customer Relationship Management

I have discussed elements of customer relationship management with relation to Target Corporation in previous posts, like personalization of ads being sent to customers. Today, I’d like to delve deeper into the concept of CRM. 

Target has a Customer Relationship Management system which tracks all of the purchases that a customer makes in store and online.  If a person calls customer service, that person will have access to this data as well as notes from all other contacts. This is how Target effectively uses technology to enable effective customer service and to build its brand. 

What's interesting about Target's CRM system is that it is a zero latency system. This means that the second any information is put into the system, it is available almost immediately to anyone else in the system. One of the CRM system’s goals is for consumer service employees to be able to find consumers’ emails to Target and respond on the spot to their questions or concerns. 

This may sound extremely straightforward, but knowing the customer is an important part of customer service. In traditional general merchandising, the customer is anonymous. A person walks in, makes a purchase and walks out, leaving the retailer with no idea who she is. Target uses branded credit cards, has set up loyalty programs, and developed their mailing lists to know their customers better. The Internet adds additional channels to gather information. This kind of a CRM has two major benefits. 

The first advantage is greater customer satisfaction. But, more importantly, a real-time customer intelligence CRM allows Target to perform one-to-one marketing. They are able to offer exceptional value to their most valuable customers, thus increasing their value to the consumer over time, as well as the value of other customers.

By building a customer intelligence system that combines all sources of customer information – point of sale, loyalty programs, online registrations and so on – Target segments its market into customer groups of different lifetime values. It then markets appropriately to each segment. The most valuable customers are catered to so they remain loyal; the moderately valuable customers are given incentives to become more valuable; and the less valuable customers are recognized as such, so that Target won't invest more than necessary in them.

Sources:

1) Roberts, M. L. & Zahay, D. (2013). Internet Marketing: Integrating Online and Offline Strategies. 3rd Ed.  Mason, Ohio:  South-Western, Cengage Learning. 

Meta Tags: What's it all mean?

Today I'd like to talk about search engine optimization, specifically, the importance (or insignificance) of keywords.

When someone uses a search engine, they type in one or more words describing what they are looking for: 'German Christmas market' or 'best online clothing store', for example. These words or phrases are known as keywords. Whatever search engine they are using then comes back with a list of web pages, with content that relates to the keyword used. So, if you are building a business website, you want your website to appear as early as possible in the list of results. That is what search engine optimization with keywords is all about.

Let's compare how two popular merchandizers use keywords. 

This is an excerpt of code from Jeep's website:

<meta content="jeep, jeep vehicles, 4wd, 4x4, jeeps, off road, suvs, crossover suv, jeep.com, jeep models" name="keywords">

And here is the same piece of code from the Spam website:

<meta name="keywords" content="">

The big difference? Jeep uses keywords in their source code and Spam does not. Why could this be? 

People have abused the system by putting dozens of irrelevant keywords in there which made it useless for the search engines. For example, if a watch company wants to get more page views, they could put "Barack Obama" into the keywords, to direct more traffic to their site. So, if as a business you do decide to use the keyword meta tag, make sure you do it right - be sure that they are absolutely relevant to the post.

What do you think? Is it better to use keywords or not, considering you're a huge brand like Jeep or Spam?

Target Knew Too Much: A Tale of Creepy Customer Acquisition

We’ve all had the bizarre Facebook ‘recommended ads’ pop up on our news feeds. The obviously Muslim friend gets an add for Christian singles. It’s definitely something to laugh about, until the recommendations get eerily predictive. This didn’t happen with Facebook, but instead with Target. In short, a man found out his daughter was pregnant AFTER Target knew and sent maternity ads to his daughter. Creepy, right?

Let me back up. Every time you go shopping, you share details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And if those retailers are smart, they study those details to figure out what you like, what you’ll buy, and which coupons are most likely to use. 

Target has figured out how to data-mine its way into the uterus. They figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers. 

A Minneapolis father was outraged when his daughter received an ad in the mail that contained promotions for maternity clothing. While the manager of the store apologized several times, it was the father who ended up apologizing after a serious talk with his daughter. It turned out that she was indeed pregnant, but how could Target know this? Newly pregnant women buy certain kinds of vitamins. But it doesn't stop there; Target can determine which trimester a woman is in. For example, mothers in their first trimester tend to buy more fragrance free lotion. 

New parents are serious spenders, and Target is very aware of this. This snippet of their website shows just how enthusiastic they are about helping you buy for your baby:

Now, the girl was definitely already a Target customer but though the aggressive predictive ads, you can bet the young woman became a consumer of maternity and infant goods there too. 

This issue is definitely transferable to the world of online shopping. Cookies remember the kinds of things you shop for and if you have an account on target.com, even better. Companies can track what you’re buying and predict what else you might be interested in. Like the ad sent to the young lady’s house, an email could have just as easily been sent. 

At the time of the controversy (February 2012), here are the results of a mini poll conducted by www.kdnuggets.com:

What do you think? Did Target go too far with their predictive ads? Is it an invasion of privacy?

Leave an answer on the poll and a comment with your thoughts. 

Sources:

1) Roberts, M. L. & Zahay, D. (2013). Internet Marketing: Integrating Online and Offline Strategies. 3rd Ed.  Mason, Ohio:  South-Western, Cengage Learning. 

2) "New Poll: Was Target wrong in using analytics to find pregnant women?" 11-17-13. <http://www.kdnuggets.com/2012/02/new-poll-target-analytics-wrong-to-find-pregnant-women.html>

3)"How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did." 11-17-13. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/>

target.com: The Comeback

As I’m sure many of my female counterparts would agree, it is nearly impossible to leave a physical Target store with only the items you intended to buy. The dazzling displays make it very difficult to stick to your shopping list. An embarrassingly huge fan of Target myself, I wanted to look into the adapted branding of Target.com.  

As an established store, Target has an established brand and this allowed the store to (eventually) have success online. Elements of a strong brand including awareness and recognition, something Target has plenty of. From the logo to the mascot dog, I’d be willing to be there is hardly a person in the USA who wouldn’t associate branded ads with company. Of course, just being aware of the brand is not enough to deem it successful. Customer behavior has be involved with purchases. Whether they are high priced or convenience items, having an associated brand always creates an advantage. 

All these pieces now translate to the online Target store. However, this wasn’t always the case. In the fall of 2011, after ending their relationship with Amazon, Target faced a poorly built website and very frustrated customers. Buyers were faces with broken links and long wait times to checkout. Though the products were the same as in the stores, the website certainly did not supply the best possible customer experience, an important part of brand marketing. 

Two years later, target.com customers are met with a very different website, in that it functions properly. Starting at their homepage, it has bright personality and voice, making a clear message: Get ready for Christmas!

According to eMarketer.com, 47% of US internet users are expected to shop online this holiday season. Target is smart to combine their attention-grabbing brand with targeted holiday marketing, on and offline. These are key elements of strong, successful brands. While Target.com may not be hugely creative in their website, they are keeping up with the latest design trends with the 'flat' layout of the bolded text, as was made popular by the most recent iPhone update. 

The site is fairly standard, no videos, games, or coloring PDFs to print out for a stay-at-home mother's children. While this could be seen as a point of lacking, I hypothesize that it was deliberate. Given the popularity of the Target brand offline, Bullseye the dog doesn't need his own Facebook page like the Travelocity Roaming Gnome has his own homepage. 

In conclusion, it seems that Target executives just wanted the site to work properly, with no added frills. The site is straightforward and perpetuates the popular brand image. 

Sources:

Roberts, M. L., & Zahay, D. (2012). Internet marketing: Integrating online and offline strategies. (3rd ed.). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.

eMarketer. (2013, November 1). Customer Confidence Up, Holiday Shopping On. Retrieved from http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Consumer-Confidence-Up-Holiday-Shopping-On/1010353