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.