Eddie the Erroneous E-Marketer
by Jason OConnor
Poor Eddie the e-marketer has been plagued by errors in judgment all his life. From
always picking the longest line at the toll booth to buying lots of dot com stocks
right before the bubble burst, he constantly struggles with making the right choices.
From disagreeing that a car really needs oil changes every three thousand miles to
insisting that the eight-track is going to make a comeback, Eddie bumbles through
life perplexed. One area that particularly suffers is his e-marketing efforts.
You see, Eddie recently got himself a new website for his business. Unfortunately,
he's been trying in vain to turn it into a vehicle for getting leads and
making sales. He's confused. He's dazed. He thrashes about lost in a
maze. Although he at least understands the importance of e-marketing for driving
traffic to his site, he's like a hamster running on a wheel, wasting energy
and getting nowhere. Let's take a look at a few of the more typical
e-marketing errors Eddie regularly makes.
Treat the Web as a different medium
The other day his business partner, Betty, showed Eddie a recent half-page ad they
ran in one of their industry's magazines. Eddie, excited at how pretty the
pictures were, wanted it up on their website pronto. Did he alter it in any way
before they posted it to the site? Did he add a specific call to action hyperlink in
it? Did he optimize the large print graphics so they would download fast in
people's browsers? Nope. He just took the ad, as is, and posted it. Eddie has
never been able to grasp the idea that traditional marketing and e-marketing, while
related, are not the same thing. What works in print doesn't always work
online. Why? Different mediums require different approaches. Look for Eddie's
static magazine ad in his first TV commercial, just the motionless ad on the screen
for thirty seconds. Riveting.
The Web is interactive. Site visitors can click buttons, fill out forms, or post
immediate comments in forums or blogs. When Eddie was having his site built, he
really just wanted to have a way to talk about his business. He wanted to tell the
world how great his company was and the exciting history of its formation. This is
called brochure-ware. It's just taking a company brochure, posting it online
and adding a few links. To say that Eddie is underutilizing the Web is like saying
the ocean is mildly wet. The Web is extremely powerful and businesses have a choice
of taking advantage of its power, or just scratching the surface with simple
brochure-ware. It's similar to buying a tank, climbing in and lifting the
hatch only to shoot spit balls at the enemy. If you have that kind of power, use it.
Ask your customers what they want Since Eddie doesn't really grasp the
interactive nature of the Web he guesses what his potential customers want and need.
One day in a meeting Eddie was scratching his head, staring up at the ceiling and
saying, 'Gee, if there was only a way to figure out what our customers want, a
way we could get in their heads, and a way to reach enough of them to get a really
clear picture, hmm . . . ?' Thankfully, a timid but sharp junior associate
raised her hand and suggested that they just ask their customers their opinions and
needs directly, and do it online where they could ask a whole bunch of them.
Eddie jumped at the idea. Finally he was going make the right choice, albeit aided by
a junior associate, but the right e-marketing choice nonetheless. They created an
html form with forty of the most important questions he could think of and posted a
link on their homepage called 'Customer Survey'.
Offer incentives Only three people ever filled the survey out, and that was it. Eddie
was dumfounded. What went wrong? He was hoping for hundreds. The problem was that Web
users are not patient and generally don't like to fill out forms, especially
long ones. Even more importantly, they don't like to do something for nothing.
If you were jostling your way through a crowded store in a big rush and a bored
teenage clerk asked you to fill out a survey of forty questions but wasn't
offering anything in return, how likely would it be that you'd do it? A more
effective approach for Eddie would have been to narrow down his list of questions to
four instead of forty, and offer a coupon for 10% off any online purchase in return
for filling it out. If you want to create leads using your website, offer something
for free and require your visitors to give you a bit of information first.
They'll be much more likely to respond if they get something they perceive as
valuable in return. Give the people what they want, an incentive.
Regularly study your website statistics Another area that Eddie seems to miss the
e-marketing boat is in analysis. He doesn't have time for looking at all those
pesky Web statistics. He can't be bothered with analyzing the number of
visitors who come to his site, or how they got there, or where they go once
they're there. He's rendered blind to his e-marketing campaigns'
successes and failures. It's like always ignoring your checking account
balance and then despairingly wondering where all your money went each week.
What's worse, because he ignores the numbers, he has no useful information to
help plan his next campaign. Numbers help in life.
A jumbo jet is off course 90% of time. It reaches its destination successfully by
constantly checking the data on its exact position and continuously making the
appropriate adjustments until it lands on target.
Likewise, an e-marketing objective can be best reached by analyzing the data and
making the necessary modifications. For example, if your target is a thousand
visitors a week, then look at your website statistics and learn where the majority of
your visitors are coming from. Discover what type of site, link or search engine is
doing a lot of the referring. Then adjust your time and budget accordingly.
It's been rumored around the office that Eddie sometimes locks himself in his
office and counts his new website's hit counter, prancing around in jubilation
each time the counter goes up by one. Yet he hates to hunker down and look at all the
numbers, all the visitors, all the referrals, and then conduct a meaningful analysis
to help understand the past and better plan for the future.
Since Eddie hates looking at his site statistics, he has no idea how well his last
email marketing campaign went. He sent out five thousand emails to a rented list and
then asked his sales people if they got any more phone calls that day. It'd be
like a television network executive asking his employees if they happened to see
their neighbors' TV sets on the night before to determine if the new show did
well. Hey Eddie, I have an idea, check your Web stats for page views and
you'll know exactly how successful your email was!
Poor Eddie the erroneous e-marketer, is he condemned to sub-par performances in life
and business? If he tries to learn from his mistakes, if he starts to treat the Web
differently than print or any other medium, he'll start to see results. If he
uses more of the Web's power and potential, tapping into its interactivity and
offering easy ways for his site visitors to communicate with him, and if he offers
incentives to motivate his visitors to take action, then maybe, just maybe, he may
not be doomed after all.
Unfortunately, after choosing the longest line at the toll booth again, his
car's engine seized from idling and poor oil maintenance. So to pass the time
waiting for the tow truck, he popped in an eight-track cassette, flipped open his
cell phone and purchased some more Enron stocks.
Jason OConnor
Copyright 2004
Tags: web-design, boston, e-marketing, websites, marketing, email, bad-web-design, web-development,
See Other Web Design Articles...
|
|
