Electronic Commerce Avoiding Icky Sticky
It is important to make sure that the e-customer spends as long as possible at your site without him ever deciding that his time has been wasted. This means that the process must be efficient but strewn along its path must be as many distractions as possible.
You should be quite happy if he hangs around to browse and chat. Each second you keep him interested and happy is another second to convince him to buy and to return. Something must grab his attention and encourage him to stay.
The preference is to leave the choice to him to stay or go but make the diversions so attractive (and possibly useful in their own right) that he feels happy with his choice. There are so many ways of catching his eye that you do not even have to overreach the bounds of decency to achieve your goal.
Catching your E-Customer’s Eye
For starters, you have games and puzzles. Some, like the fun ‘ping pong’ arcade, available at the UK bank virtual bank cahoot.com, are playable online or downloadable. Simple, fun and branded they provide a perfect and inexpensive way of holding the e-customer’s attention for long periods. They also link the brand with added value for very little extra investment.
Competitions can be run on their own as a simple ‘register to have a chance of winning’ competition like the BT ‘win a million’ (costing only about 5 cents or 3 pence per e-customer).
They can also run as competitions for winners of quizzes or games. This can be as simple as the ‘best score’ every day, week or month, or as sophisticated as a fantasy league that rewards people whose teams succeed.
Either way such competitions have in common the ability to gather registration details. You can’t win without typing in your contact details. They encourage repeated visits to the site to determine the current position of the competition.
They also open up a simple and acceptable way of starting up an outbound relationship with the e-customer. A registration e-mail is the first to be sent. This reassures the e-customer that the company can deal efficiently with electronic support. There follow e-mails to tell him about the latest highest scores and bit by bit he is fed extra snippets of information to be read while he is in learning mode.
The newsletter can also be offered on its own terms as a desirable source of news. A number of tough choices are involved that are often best determined with experience. How often should it be sent? Who is going to produce it? What should it contain?
There are many schemes out there that can collate e-mail addresses ready for you to use. There are also many software solutions that provide the same facilities in-house. The challenge is in determining the contents and the production responsibilities.
If the stuff you sell is essentially boring then you may want to consider building a newsletter from stories relating to other areas of interest. A general purpose newsletter that can be customized to the e-customer’s views complete with your branding — a pretty useful combination.
Ideal for keeping the e-customer’s mind on your brand is ‘ticker tape’ software. This feeds the e-customer live news in real time just like old- fashioned ticker tapes. Examples of them in the real world include the ticker that comes with aol.com instant messenger or the one that is provided by bbc.co.uk. Both keep the e-customer thinking about the relevant brands. They also link the sophistication and breadth of the world’s news with your products and services.
Demonstrations of selected products allow you to tell the e-customer about the interesting aspects of your product or service. He came to your site or channel deliberately. This means that, in principle, he would like to buy something that he thought you might sell. In this circumstance it seems a pity not to promote the best that the company has to offer.
It’s a great way of weaving multimedia into the sales process. Suddenly it does not seem like an imposition, it is part of the benefit of using the site. For extra spice your demonstration can be 3D or it can involve a personality to do the demonstrating. Once the e-customer has made the decision to watch he will be willing to wait for the download times required for film quality demonstrations. He will do this without complaining and with something akin to baited breath.
Similarly, information about your products or industry can be very interesting to your visiting e-customer. It helps if you lay it out neatly and attractively. Organizing it via nifty headlines that encourage exploration is sensible.
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