Canadian Apparel
January - February 2005
By Emir Tahirovic - The BrainStorm Group
The dilemma: Return on investment (ROI) is critical in determining
the performance of your resources and a website is an easy and
effective way to develop your brand. But how do you know if it
your website is a productive component of your complete marketing
toolkit?
If you look at your website as you would an employee, a store,
or a division, what are the means available to measure ROI? If
you are considering a website for the first time, how can you evaluate
its worth?
A good website plays an integral part in your business strategy
but there are parameters for setting it up and making it pay its
way:
Establishing goals for the website will allow you to effectively
select measurements that make sense for your needs. Prior to launching
a site, go through the exercise of setting objectives. Then you
can find out if you’ve achieved your original purpose or
how far along you are to reaching your targets.
If you didn’t have goals for your site, now is a good time
to figure them out. Align them with your offline business objectives,
and look for the opportunities to synergize your online communications
with your other marketing efforts.
The most basic of website objectives is to uphold your brand online.
The more your target audience is aware of your brand, the more
likely it is to listen to your messaging, and the higher their
propensity is to buy your products.
Communicating your brand is more than just adding a logo to your
site. Your brand is reflected in every image you choose, in the
colours you use, the language you present, and in how easy it is
for users to get the information they are looking for. If a user
has a good online experience, they will feel better about dealing
with you in person too.
Using awareness surveys, measure the opinions of your employees
and your customers to determine if the site has contributed to
increased public awareness of your brand. A simple lift in this
measurement over time may be all the justification you need to
increase your online budget.
What is a hit and what is a click? One of the greatest advantages
of a website is that you actually have hard data – real evidence
of the number of people that have visited your website.
Hits (defined as a user with a unique IP address – IP addresses
are assigned to individual computers when a use is online – landing
on a specific URL – URL is a web address like www.brainstormgroup.com)
give you an idea of how many individuals have visited your website
or come to your website repeatedly. Hits can tell you how deep
people delve into your site and what they’ve looked through;
even how long they were there. Good tracking reports, often provided
by your ISP (Internet Service Provider), will give you these details.
Clicks are typically associated with ad banners, but are basically
measured when a user clicks on an actionable item in your website.
A click can be measured as a hit in most websites but the reason
it’s important to know about clicks is because many websites
have only one URL (common with Flash only sites), so measuring
hits becomes difficult. Clicks let you know if someone has moved
around inside your site – measuring interaction. As with
hits, a good reporting tool will tell you what kind of interaction
your users have had with your site, and what pages they’ve
visited.
Success here is determined by a constant increase in visits. A
lift from one report to the next indicates that you have been successful
in providing an engaging experience and you are increasing the
likelihood that your site is contributing to your marketing efforts.
Another thing to measure is retention. Repeat visits from your
users is a terrific indication that you are providing them with
a resource they need, or updating your site with relevant information
that continues to pique their interest.
Capturing the attention of your audience isn’t the only
way to measure success. You will also garner real sales opportunities
from people who visit your website. Not only should your sales
team feel comfortable referring customers to your website, but
potential customers who are qualifying your organization should
be interested in contacting you once they’ve seen your site.
It also allows you to better qualify your sales leads. The easier
you make it for these prospects to contact you, the more qualified
leads you will have.
How you collect and track this might vary. If you provide a phone
number, or a range of numbers for different representatives, you
will need to ask the callers how they heard about you. You and
your reps will need to record the number of referrals you get from
the site. If you post an e-mail address, count the number of e-mails
you receive. Or, if you post a form to collect information, tally
the number of completed forms you receive.
If your site isn’t doing what your audience expects it to
do, you might get a lot of hits on your home page but not a lot
of secondary pages – and your users won’t stay very
long. Make sure that no matter how you measure it, your site is
always working for you.
If generating leads was one of your goals, then you should expect
to see consistent numbers in this category attributed to your website.
Measure increases and decreases in your leads each month and watch
for correlations between your offline marketing, sales initiatives
and the number of leads your site generates. Don’t be afraid
to give credit to your site when it is due.
With your reports in place, you can now identify which areas of
your site are generating the most interest. These are the pages
on which you should focus to maximize the time you have with your
audience. For example, if people are spending the bulk of their
time on two of your pages, you can decide if those pages are providing
the ideal information you want to share. This type of optimization
could improve the quality of your site and the likelihood that
your site will move you closer to accomplishing your online objectives.
Online promotions are a hidden gem. You can reward loyal customers,
build your prospect database, provide a coupon to drive in-store
traffic, clear merchandise, extend special offers to regular clients,
or create an exciting incentive for potential clients that will
actually increase sales.
Most exciting is that you can easily measure the increase in traffic
the promotion generates on your website. By the volume of registrants,
number of clicks, and number of entries, you will be able to gauge
if promotions are a useful tool for your organization. A carefully
structured promotion can generate qualified, quality sales leads
that you can directly attribute to your website. Success in this
category could very quickly give you reason to increase your online
efforts.
Converting a sales lead into a sale is a way to measure how your
revenue is impacted by your website. If you are selling online,
then you want to measure your conversion rate against your overall
site traffic to find out how many of your regular visitors are
becoming shoppers. If you are trying to clear merchandise or
extend special offers to regular users, measure how many of your
targets
actually become purchasers. Either way, you gain the advantage
of knowing your site is contributing to your sales process, and
can provide a quantifiable number to attribute to your website.
And you might be surprised at how well your website can sell.
Many visitors are willing to provide you with their e-mail address
to receive a regular newsletter or updates on your organization
or your products. Register for your favourite retailers’ newsletters
to see how they respond to you. The basics might include: sending
a thank you message to new registrants to set their expectations,
followed by monthly newsletters or updates.
The number of registered users in your database provides a useful
indicator of your website’s role in your marketing mix, and
could hold the key to better understanding the demographics of
your customers. Tracking clicks from the newsletter’s directing
readers to the website will help keep your site traffic high and
provide you with a measurable result come budget review season.
Innovative and engaging marketing is contagious and can spread
fast. Everyone with an e-mail address has received some joke of
the day, funny video, or outlandish picture with its 15 minutes
of fame by now. Providing users with a unique online interaction – a
game, video, picture, something that captures the attention of
your audience, gives you the opportunity to propel awareness of
your website and your brand. Be careful to make sure the added
feature is in line with your brand strategy or the idea could backfire.
Measuring this type of response is not a qualified science either.
You will need to keep an eye on unexpected PR and sudden spikes
in traffic on your site. If you are lucky enough to have an idea
like this resonate with your audience, don’t hesitate to
capitalize on your “15 minutes”.
Armed with one of more of the above, you can evaluate the performance
of your website and make it work to accomplish your objectives.
It is important to keep measuring the same factors and watch for
changes. When your objectives shift, don’t forget to change
how you measure your success.
When reviewing your numbers, don’t forget to consider the
variables that affect how people perceive your brand (design, tone,
positioning, seasonality, etc.) in relation to your website. If
your site isn’t doing what your audience expects it to do,
you might get a lot of hits on your home page but not a lot of
secondary pages – and your users won’t stay very long.
Success will come in many shapes when you review your website.
How much work you choose to make your website do will translate
into the return on your investment.
Make sure that, no matter how you measure it, your site is always
working for you.
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