On-site marketing principles

Along with four main Ps (product, price, place and promotion) influencing traditional marketing activities, there is another one, which plays a special role online: people. People will determine whether it is worth to spend money for a product, and the main objective of a marketer is to make them stop hesitating.

Regardless of whether a company runs an email strategy, affiliate program or develops a web site, there are three simple steps to online marketing that help shape every campaign.

· Attracting: delivering quality traffic, rather than living under the misconception that more is better.

· Engaging: keeping visitors coming back for more purchases.

· Transacting: converting those visitors into customers.

The final goal is to make conversions, in other words, to turn visitors into customers. A professional design can strengthen user trust and improve brand representation—but it should not be at the expense of usability.

Usability can be defined as the ease with which users can complete their chosen tasks on a web site. The problem is that rich media web sites can cause problems with usability. An overloaded web site can hinder visitors, and they can simply quit it. The site should be usable first and foremost, with graphics enhancing visitor’s experience with the site.

The key to finding out if the web site is usable is by conducting usability tests at different stages of web design process. This is what Natalie Downe, a client-side web developer, advices: ‘Have a balance of task-based questions and expectation analysis. This helps maintain consistency across tests. Expectation analysis is more important for testing designs and new applications: ‘Where would you find X?’, ‘What would you expect to happen if you clicked on Y?’. Task-based questions involve providing a task for the user to complete. If you are testing an established system it is a good idea to ask users to bring in tasks that they would normally perform [3].’

Next important concept to consider is accessibility. Asfar asthe Internet eliminates geographical boundaries, social or ethnicdifferences, and even limitations such as cognitive or physiological disabilities, companies have tomake sure that all customers are equally able to perform actions or make purchases on the web site. Web site developers can achieve this equality by checking HTML code for errors, optimizing the font size or simply ensuring the language is clear for visitors with limited English skills.

Once a company uploads a web site to the server, the number of visitors will start to grow. How the web site deals with increased traffic is called scalability. Again, a slow web site will be testing people’s patience, so they will be more likely to click the back button on their browser and go elsewhere to make a purchase.Planning system’s capacity is usually the responsibility of a hosting service or system administrator. Still, it’s important to know the established limits and capacity for growth.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13