I think the value of actually doing exactly what you say you are going to do has been overlooked online. I also think I know why.
When you walk into a high street store you can look through the window, see the kind of people that are entering/leaving the store and see at the very worst a sample of their offering. Online this is not the case. When you consider that the advert/clickthrough is your store window the consumer has no information other than that which you have provided. It would be like plastering the windows with adverts so that you couldn’t see inside…just like Next do at sale time come to think of it….
This made me think that the value of actually doing what you say you will is extremely important. Ok so this might seem obvious but not from mu experience today…..I need some new trainers and I know the kind of thing I want so I did a google search. The top ten sites all claimed (of course) to having the best prices, the most choice and that they were of the style I was searching for. Not one of them was. Not only did this leave me 20 minutes later still without my shoes but also made me feel really disappointed for those sites and their marketing managers. They’re con artists and what is worse is that they are not even that good. The con is too transparent.
With the site I work on if we don’t have the best price – we don’t say that we do. In descriptions I make sure I use terminology that accurately matches the site. Our differentiating factor is normally quality and customer service – so I make sure that at 8.30pm if someone calls, I answer the phone and sound like I want to talk to the person on the other end. I make sure that the site appeals to our target market aesthetically. I’m not on the moral high ground here – I do all these things because I think that they will help turn that click/call into a sale.
Now I know I’m relatively new to all this but shouldn’t this be the base that all sites work from?
Smudgely's Online Marketing Log 