Let me explain some fundamental marketing aspects about e-trade:
First of all, you must get the potential clients to visit your site, and that’s a whole science by it self.
Visitors, who reach your site, read a description of your company and your products.
Depending on weather you first of all want to tell about your company and build your image, or if you just want to sell products and services over the “net” your site should be Designed different.
In this article however I assume you are selling something on your site, and then you should create a relation to the visitor
that will lead to some kind of activity from them, either by asking for more info, or a direct purchase.
In marketing this is similar to “Direct Mail” selling. You have persuaded people to visit your site and they read your “letter”.
Is the reader in the wrong “target- group”, not interested enough in your product or if the “letter” is bad written, the reader will very quickly throw it away.
Or as in our case the visitor very quickly “clicks” away from your site and will maybe never return!
The secret is to maintain the visitors interest with the site so he/she will return and keep reading your whole message, and thereby create such positive image of your offer that it leads to some kind of continued contact.
A lot of people are laughing at this art, because we have all been exposed to irritating and bad marketing.
But well written Direct Marketing is a work of art and deserves all our respect.
Beautiful graphic images can make your site beautiful to look at and make your “sales-letter” look more inviting.
If the graphics images are ”big” your pages will be loading very slowly and statistically nobody waits anymore than 20 – 30 seconds for a page to download.
So web-pages with beautiful images and very groovy java-applets could destroy your chances to get contact with potential customers.
And if the graphics looks a little “messy” the visitor get confused with the purpose of your site and misses the point with why you got them to visit you in the first place.
The best solution would be to use a minimum of graphics that makes the page load fast, and if you can make the graphics emphasize the content of a well written, contact creating letter, you have THE sales letter.
To make your visitors interact with your site is another important difference to traditional marketing.
Guest books, e-mails, the order of information-letters, free samples, can be done with the click of a mouse and invites to spontaneous reactions from your visitor.
Compare the enormous progress to marketing that the fax machine gave us.
The speed of communication with clients increased enormously and the whole process of marketing became more efficient at a low cost.
With internet and its possibilities of electronic, almost free transfer of information to anywhere in the world, the “business-world” has taken another step in interactive communication and has given more speed to the sales process
So now we can interact and create a relation to our clients in a very short time, if we do it the right way.
Gunnar Berglund publisher of
The meonit Gazette
http://gazette.meonit.com http://www.meonit.com
