What's New in Marketing - Issue 41, September 2005

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Blending the Right Solution

There is little doubt that e-learning has not achieved the success it promised some 10 years ago, even though the primary benefits in terms of cost and flexibility remains extremely attractive.

However, far from being dead, e-learning has emerged as an important element in the successful blended learning approach to people development. Blended learning incorporates face-to-face delivery with online study; skills workshops; assignments; assessments, and workplace coaching.

Some of the mistakes that have been made with e-learning are:

1. A lack of a holistic approach.
E-learning was viewed as being a replacement for traditional training methods. To be successful, e-learning should adopt an integrated approach to human resource development. This means integrating performance assessment with Training Needs Analysis, with Personal Development Plans, with Continuous Professional Development records, with e-learning blended with other training resources, learning methods, and corporate learning programmes.

2. A failing to understand the e-learning medium.
Much of the reason for no 1 is the problem of thinking about e- learning as a substitute for face-to-face training just delivered cheaper and faster whenever employees want it. While computers bring strengths and opportunities to the learning experience, it must be remembered that they also remove some of the critical components of face-to-face learning, such as audio-visual; peer discussion; and the social environment.

3. A Belief that the audio-visual component can be replaced by e-learning.
Many companies designing e-learning programmes have engaged expensive programmers and invested in heavy duty programmes and equipment in order to enhance the e-learning experience. Students end up being entertained but come away learning little.

4. Blowing the Budget on a Technology Solution
The problem with mistake number 3 is that it is expensive. Spending £1m on an e-learning system is not unusual. Neither is finding out that the initial spend is only part of the expense. There are updates and maintenance to consider. Heavy duty programmes require heavy duty equipment and software to download. As a face-to-face trainers we can alter training notes, handouts and session content very quickly and inexpensively. Try doing that with audio-video content.

5. Failing to link e-learning with business needs.
Traditional training should flow from the organisation's business strategy. E-learning is no exception. Whilst e-learning may be a new delivery method, it does not change the fundamentals of business strategy, manpower and HRD planning, individual performance reviews and training needs analysis; nor learning programme design, progress monitoring, programme evaluation and learning verification. Like other learning methods, an e-learning programme must flow from, and be driven, by the organisation's business development objectives, and therefore e-learning should also be monitored and measured.

6. Unrealistic Expectations.
How many projects have failed for want of a realistic assessment of time, resources and expectations? Many would point to Total Quality Management (TQM) as a pretty good example. When a project involves a new discipline and particularly when that discipline involves new technology it is very common for management to overestimate short-term expectations and underestimate the time and cost needed before benefits can realistically be achieved. If this is doubted, then ask any project manager. As a result, initial enthusiasm is soon replaced by despair. Like TQM or any ‘flavour of the month’, e-learning has many substantial benefits but it is not a magic wand, and it is not a substitute for sound management.

7. A Lack of management involvement
E-learning is no different to any other form of training. It might work in the classroom or on-line but the measure of its transference to the workplace is totally reliant upon the involvement of the line manager. The special problem with e-learning is the number of technophobe managers who can hide behind " I’m not an IT expert" excuse for not getting involved in the learning goals of their staff.

You do not need to spend millions on trying to replace traditional learning methods with an e-learning platform. Treat e-learning as just an addition delivery channel, which gives you more flexibility. Research shows that students can only absorb 15/20 minutes of e-learning at a time anyway which is why a well-designed `blended learning programme` will usually deliver study tasks in small bites. It provides the option to more effectively use the training budget whilst keeping a tight control on who is studying what; when; to what level; whether the manager is involved or not; and ultimately how the learning is being applied.

The 21st century is about all types of learning and therefore we must look at a `blend  of learning` that suits the requirements of the individual.

About the author

Colin Thompson, a former successful Managing Director of Print Manufacturing Plants, Print Management/Workflow Solutions companies, Group Chairman of the Academy for Chief Executives  and a Non-Executive Director helping companies raise their `bottom-line` and `increasing cash flow`. Telephone Direct Business line: + 44 (0) 121 244 0306 Mobile: 07831 588310
Email: colin@cavendish-mr.org Website: www.cavendish-mr.org

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Improving retention online

All marketers know how vital customer retention is to profitability, but it seems that with online marketing, many businesses are grappling with other thorny issues like attracting visitors to their site and then converting them to the outcomes they need. Little resource then remains for improving customer retention. But some companies do give this aspect of online marketing the attention it deserves and in this article we will review the key success factors to improve retention of online customers. The examples I will use are mostly from e-retail, but the principles apply equally to other sectors.

Building long-term relationships with customers is essential for any sustainable business, and this applies equally to online elements of a business. Failure to build long-term relationships largely caused the failures of many dot-coms following huge expenditure on customer acquisition. Research summarised by Reichheld and Schefter (2000) showed that acquiring online customers is so expensive (20–30% higher than for traditional businesses) that start-up companies may remain unprofitable for at least 2 to 3 years. The research also showed that by retaining just 5% more customers, online companies can boost their profits by 25% to 95%.

Success factors for retention

A useful approach to review how to improve all aspects of digital marketing, or indeed any marketing activity, is success factor mapping. You may know this as ‘cause and effect analysis’ or ‘fishboning’. With this approach, the ultimate objective is placed at the right of the diagram and the success factors or performance drivers that will help achieve this outcome are placed on the left of the diagram. Figure 1 shows my success factor map for online retention marketing.

Figure 1. Success factor mapping for online retention

In the case of online retention marketing, our ultimate goal on the right of the diagram is customer loyalty. The factors on the left help to deliver two facets of loyalty. First, emotional loyalty where loyalty to a brand is demonstrated by favourable perceptions, opinions and

recommendations. The success factors at the top of the diagram which are all related to the customer experience of using an online service tend to influence emotional loyalty the most and these are important in determining customer satisfaction. Of course, a favourable customer experience is, very important to achieving repeat purchases – how many online sites have you continued to use after a poor level of service was delivered? The second type of loyalty is behavioural loyalty where loyalty translates to repeat sales and response to marketing campaigns. To achieve these repeat sales, companies work hard to deliver relevant marketing communications either through e-mail or web-based personalisation or through direct mail.

So, you can see that the success factors are grouped in terms of customer experience and relevance, but I have stressed the importance that, although we are referring to online retention, these are delivered across different channels – hence the main performance drivers are delivering a satisfactory multi-channel customer experience and delivering relevance in marketing communications across channels.

Assessing customer satisfaction and loyalty

Figure 1 suggests the need for metrics to assess the quality of customer experience, communications relevance, satisfaction and loyalty. Although the terms satisfaction and loyalty are sometimes used interchangeably, they are clearly distinct. Customer satisfaction refers to the extent a customer is happy about the quality of products and services. As a customer’s satisfaction with products and or services increases, so should their behavioural and emotional loyalty. Satisfaction is classically measured as a gap between service expectations and experience, so Figure 1 refers to a ‘satisfaction gap’.

Benchmarking of satisfaction with online services is most advanced in the US, with services such as Foresee (http://www.foreseeresults.com/,) based on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI, http://www.theacsi.org/) methodology. Satisfaction ratings are derived through surveys for top e-retailers, online banks, portals and e-government services, and it is useful to consider their view of performance drivers. For example, in the online banking report, performance drivers include general website features and functions such as navigation, tasks/transactions and content, as well as banking-specific satisfaction drivers such as bill payment and bill payee set-up:

• Bill Payee Set- Up

• Bill Payment

• Content

• Functionality

• Look and Feel

• Navigation

• Privacy

• Retail Satisfaction

• Site Performance

• Tasks & Transactions

Of course, there may be customers with a high degree of satisfaction who don’t exhibit behavioural loyalty and conversely, customers who are behaviourally loyal may be at risk of defection since they are not satisfied. The implications are that it is important not only to measure satisfaction with online services, but loyalty also. This way we may be able to identify customers at risk of defection who are likely to choose an alternative and those in the zone of indifference. These are an important category of customers who although they may have a high degree of satisfaction, are not necessarily loyal. We also need to factor in variations customer value when considering satisfaction with service delivery – companies such as Screenselect (http://www.screenselect.co.uk/) profile customers by profitability and deliver higher levels of inbound call and e-mail service to their most valuable customers.

The type of approach to identify loyalty drivers was highlighted by Reicheld and Schefter (2000). They reported that Dell Computer has created a customer experience council that has researched key loyalty drivers across different channels, identified measures to track these and put in place an action plan to improve loyalty. Loyalty drivers and KPIs are:

1. Order fulfilment. Ship to target. % that ship on time exactly as the customer specified.

2. Product performance. Initial field incident rate – the frequency of problems experienced by customers.

3. Post sale service and support. On-time, first-time fix – the percentage of problems fixed on the first visit by a service rep who arrives at the time promised.

You can see that similar loyalty drivers can be identified for an e-retailer, i.e. Deliver on target, time to resolve different queries and returns.

Although companies can access benchmarking services, companies that are passionate about improving the online or multi-channel customer experience are evident from the efforts they put into surveying customers using – not simply ad-hoc surveys, but rolling surveys and in-depth feedback using systems such as Opinion Lab (http://www.opinionlab.com/).

Delivering the online customer experience

In their book excellent book ‘Managing the Customer Experience’, Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler suggest that companies should ask afresh for online channels ‘what experience must we provide to meet the needs and expectations of customers’. They note that some companies use online channels to replicate existing services, whereas others have extended the experience online. The concept of online brand promise is closely related to that of delivering online customer experience. Leslie de Chernatony’s team at the University of Birmingham has researched has researched this area (see http://www.davechaffey.com/Internet-Marketing/C5-Marketing-Mix/ for a reference to selection of papers from this team). de Chernatony (2001) suggested that delivering the online experience promised by a brand requires delivering rational values, emotional values and promised experience (based on rational and emotional values). The different factors that contribute to influencing the online customer experience are summarised in Figure 2.

Figure 2 The online customer experience pyramid – success factors (adapted from de Chernatony, 2001)

Figure 2 shows the challenge of developing a great online customer experience. An indication of the effort required to produce a customer-centric online presence is given by Alison Lancaster, head of marketing and catalogues at John Lewis Direct, who told Revolution recently:

‘A good site should always begin with the user. " Understand who the customer is, how they use the channel to shop, and understand how the marketplace works in that category. This includes understanding who your competitors are and how they operate online. You need continuous research, feedback and usability testing to continue to monitor and evolve the customer experience online. Customers want convenience and ease of ordering. They want a site that is quick to download, well-structured and easy to navigate.’

We will now briefly review in more detail the different factors which contribute towards a successful multi-channel customer experience

Rational evaluation

On the all important first site visit, site visitors will make a rational, although albeit often subconscious evaluation of a site. The key areas are ease of use which is determined by the disciplines of usability, accessibility; relevant content (content is still king) and Performance. Research by the Hewson Group (2003) showed that usability interventions had a potential to uplift revenue by at least 22% in addition to the increases in conversion rate with which they are usually associated. It might be expected that in the age of broadband, performance isn’t important, but performance benchmarks (See http://www.siteconfidence.co.uk/company/benchmarks/top100.php for example) from the likes of Site Confidence (http://www.siteconfidence.co.uk/) show that there is a massive difference between page weight and download speed between the top sites and the bottom ones. I know from personal experience that those sites towards the bottom of the list are frustrating even over a broadband connection and more than a third of online users are still on dial-up. Failed transactions at different points in the purchase process are sometimes under-represented by simple measures of availability. A study by SciVisum (http://www.scivisum.co.uk/press-releases/200508CampaignStudy.htm) found that three quarters of Internet marketing campaigns are impacted by website failures, with 14 per cent of failures so severe that they prevented the campaign meeting its objectives. More than a third of failures were rated as serious to severe, with many customers complaining or unable to complete web transactions

Emotional connection

Approaches such as usability and accessibility tend to lead to a rational design, but there is a risk that with this approach the emotional connection may be lost. So, for most sectors, website design needs to be a balance between the rational and the visual. An emotional connection can be achieved through visual design, established branding and it is also necessary to shows empathy with customers through reassuring them about their fears such as security and privacy.

The tone and style of copy are important too. A great example of a rich media campaign which makes the emotional connection is The Tourism Ireland Taxi Challenge (http://www.tourismirelandtaxichallenge.com/). This shows how an online campaign can involve people over a period of a few weeks, to get people revisiting a site and interacting with a brand. It includes integration of a video microsite combined with a forum. But I would like to see e-mail reminders pushed to people also to get them to revisit and offer other promotions

It may even be that there are too many males designing sites to achieve the emotional connection. An E-consultancy (2005) interview with Gloria Moss, Senior Research Fellow in the Business School at Glamorgan University suggests that although over three quarters of web designers are male, females prefer web designs produced by women designers.

Promised experience

The promised experience is the totality of what would be expected from a brand. It is based on the rational and emotional values and also the core features of the value proposition such as product range and pricing. This also relates back to the delivering a satisfactory customer service experience in terms of product fulfilment and support which typically top most surveys of reasons why online customers won’t buy from a supplier again – they have had a problem with product delivery or in answering a query.

Multi-channel customer relevance

The performance drivers shown at the base of Figure 1 refer to delivering relevance in customer communications whether they are delivered via personalised e-mail, web or direct mail. Delivering a great experience is not enough – customers need to be reminded about online services through relevant communications. This is based on Seth Godin’s permission marketing mantra of delivering relevant, anticipate, [timely] and personal communications (http://www.permission.com/).

Figure 1 shows that the key performance drivers are quality of knowledge about online customers, segmentation and targeting strategies and touch strategy. Let’s look at these in turn.

Customer knowledge – List quality

While it isn’t the most interesting topic, achieving relevance in communications starts with how well we know our previous purchasers. To deliver relevance we need to capture the full range of data from 1. Demographic (characteristics of an individual customer such as age and sex); 2. Transactional (customer interactions including purchase history and contacts via phone or e-mail); 3. Behavioural (this is the response history showing how customers interact with a site and respond to e-mail campaigns); 4. Relationships (between family or decision unit members) and 5. Derived data such as customer profitability or lifetime value, customer growth potential and propensity to purchase

But the online marketers capability to deliver relevance may be limited if there is insufficient focus on customer knowledge within an organisation and the following problems can arise:

•           Limited capacity to target leading to lower response and higher cost for direct marketing campaigns

•           No clear responsibilities for managing data quality

•           No targets for data quality, strategies to achieve them or measures for data quality

•           No coordination of improving customer knowledge quality at different touchpoints and for capturing e-mail details.

•           Data stored in separate databases with duplication and lack of integrated information accessed from a single source

The last problem is often the most difficult one to resolve if an organisation has legacy systems. Investments in integrated systems which enable customers to ‘sense and respond’ customer interactions across different channels. CRM systems vary in their capacity to do this – some such as E.piphany,Blue Martini/Ecometry and Siebel have the capability to sense and respond with ‘Next Best Product’ offerings across different communications channels. These tend to be enterprise solutions requiring a large investment. Sometimes standalone systems such as Touch Clarity (http://www.touchclarity.com/) which can integrate with existing customer data sources can be used. Touch Clarity is used by HSBC and First Direct to deliver personalised messages to first time and repeat visitors.

Targeting approaches

The segmentation and targeting approach used by E-retailers to deliver relevance is based on up to five main elements which in effect are layered on top of each other. These are:

1. Identify customer lifecycle groups. As visitors use online services they can potentially pass through seven or more stages as shown in Figure 3 as their relationship with a company evolves.

Figure 3. Typical lifecycle segmentation for an e-retailer customer

Once companies have defined these groups and setup the customer relationship management infrastructure to categorise customers in this way, they can then deliver targeted messages, either by personalized on-site messaging or through E-mails that are triggered automatically due to different rules. First time visitors can be identified by whether they have a cookie placed on their PC and their computer setup or user agent settings. Once visitors and then registered, they can be tracked through the remaining stages. Two particularly important groups are customers who have purchased one or more times. For many e-retailers, encouraging customers to move from the first purchase to the second purchase and then onto the third purchase is a key challenge. Specific promotions can be used to encourage further purchases. Similarly, once customers become inactive, i.e. they have not purchased for a defined period such as 3 months, they become inactive and further follow-ups are required.

An example of the lifecycle segmentation approach is indicated by Humby (2003), who describes how e-retailer Tesco.com use what he describes as a ‘commitment-based segmentation’ or ‘loyalty ladder’ which is based on recency of purchase, frequency of purchase and value which is used to identify 6 lifecycle categories which are then further divided to target communications:

•           “Logged-on”

•           “Cautionary”

•           “Developing”

•           “Established”

•           “Dedicated”

•           “Logged-off” (the aim here is to winback)

Tesco then use automated event-triggered messaging can be created to encourage continued purchase. For example, Tesco.com have a touch strategy which includes a sequence of follow-up communications triggered after different events in the customer lifecycle. In the example given below, communications after event 1 are intended to achieve the objective of converting a website visitor to action; communications after event 2 are intended to move the customer from a first time purchaser to a regular purchaser and for event 3 to reactivate lapsed purchasers.

2. Identify customer profile characteristics. This is a traditional segmentation based on the type of customer. For B2C e-retailers this will include age, sex and geography. For B2B companies, this will include size of company and the industry sector or application they operate in.

3. Identify behaviour in response and purchase. As customers progress through the lifecycle shown in Figure 3, by analysis of their database, they will be able to build up a detailed response and purchase history which considers the details of recency, frequency, monetary value and category of products purchased (RFM analysis).

4. Identify multi-channel behaviour (channel preference). Regardless of the enthusiasm of the company for online channels, some customers will prefer using online channels and others will prefer traditional channels. This will, to an extent be indicated by RFM and response analysis since customers with a preference for online channels will be more responsive and will make more purchases online. Customers can also be asked direct through surveys. It is useful to have a flag within the database which indicates the customers channel preference and by implications, the best channel to target them by. Customers that prefer online channels can be targeted mainly by online communications such as e-mail, while customers who prefer traditional channels can be targeted by traditional communications such as direct mail or phone.

5. Tone and style preference. In a similar manner to channel preference, customers will respond differently to different types of message. Some may like a more rational appeal in which case a detailed e-mail explaining the benefits of the offer may work best. Others will prefer an emotional appeal based on images and with warmer, less formal copy. Sophisticated companies will test for this in customers or infer it using profile characteristics and response behaviour and then develop different creative treatments accordingly. Companies that use polls can potentially use this to infer style preferences.

To summarise the approaches described, the example of Euroffice is informative. Euroffice (http://www.euroffice.co.uk/) is a large online office supplies company which targets small and mid-sized companies. This description is adapted from the company website press releases and Revolution (2005). According to George Karibian, Euroffice CEO, ‘getting the message across effectively required segmentation’ to engage different people in different ways. The office sector is fiercely competitive, with relatively little loyalty since company purchasers will often simply buy on price. However, targeted incentives can be used to reward or encourage buyers’ loyalty. Rather than manually developing campaigns for each segment which is time consuming, Euroffice mainly use an automated event-based targeting approach based on the system identifying the stage at which a consumer is in the lifecycle, i.e. how many products they have purchased and the types of product within their purchase history. Karibian calls this a ‘touch marketing funnel approach’ approach, i.e. the touch strategy is determined by customer segmentation and response. Three main groups of customers are identified in the lifecycle and these are broken down further according to purchase category. Also layered on this segmentation is breakdown into buyer type – are they a small home-user, an operations manager at a mid-size company or a purchasing manager at a larger company? Each will respond to different promotions.

The first group, at the top of the funnel and the largest are ‘Group 1. Trial customers’ who have made one or two purchases. For the first group, Euroffice believe that creating impulse-buying through price-promotions is most important. These will be based on categories purchased in the past. The second group, ‘Group 2. The nursery’ have made three to eight purchases. A particular issue, as with many e-retailers is encouraging customers from the third to forth purchase, there is a more significant drop-out at this point which the company uses marketing to control. Karibian says: ‘When they get to group two, it’s about creating frequency of purchase to ensure they don’t forget you’. Euroffice sends a printed catalogue to Group 2 separately from their merchandise as a reminder about the company.

The final group, ‘Group 3. Key accounts or ‘Crown Jewels’ have made nine or more orders. They also tend to have a higher basket value. ‘These people are the Crown Jewels’ and will spend an average of £135 per order compared to an average of £55 for trial customers’. They have a 90% probability of re-ordering within a six-month period. For this group, tools have been developed on the site to make it easier for them to shop. The intention is that these customers find these tools helps them in making their orders and they become reliant on, so achieving ‘soft lock-in’.

Touch strategy

To deliver relevance also requires a plan specifying the number, frequency and type of online and offline communications and offers. This is a contact or touch strategy. A good starting point is to ask ‘what will annoy’ the customer. Clearly if e-mail communications are too frequent, then the customer is less likely to have the time or inclination to open an e-mail. So one approach is to monitor the response for e-mail communications. But higher frequencies will likely lead to higher response. This helps explain the high volume of e-mails sent by Tesco.com to its consumers, which averages between 1 and 2 per week for me. But Tesco.com have recently been exposed by the BBC as ‘bombarding UK consumers with a massive e-mail marketing campaign’ (BBC, 2005). Based on the E-mail tracking service E-mail Monitor (http://www.emailmonitor.co.uk/) from Interactive Prospect Targeting Services, the BBC says that, Tesco is blitzing the nation with 16-20 million e-mails per month. It reports that in September it issued 44 separate e-mail campaigns last month which was more than Sainsbury, Asda, Waitrose and Somerfield put together. Part of this activity can be explained by Tesco’s market share. A Tesco spokesman was reported as saying ‘More people shop with us online than with anyone else and we do communicate with a lot of them by email. We know that customers hate junk mail so we try to target them as much as possible and make it easy for them to stop receiving emails if they don't want them." In 2005 Tesco was dealing with about 170,000 orders per week, compared with its nearest rival, Sainsburys.co.uk, which gets about 38,000

The alternative to a high touch frequency, particularly for non-retail brands, is to research customer preferences, or to offer a choice of frequencies at the point of initial opt-in. This may well suit the customer better although it will probably lead to reduced sales compared to the company having the choice of frequency.

A contact strategy should indicate:

1. Frequency. This defines the minimum frequency (e.g. once per quarter) and maximum frequency (e.g. once per month). Remember that we will often e-mail too infrequently Similarly, it may also be useful to set communications targets such as ‘at least four e-mails per year’

2. Interval. Some companies may seek to set limits on interval, e.g. there must be a gap of at least one week or one month between communications. This may be overtly restrictive and brings us to the next point…

3. Flexibility. It is impossible to create rules to cater for all occasions and some companies have limited opportunities by creating such rules. For example, a rule to limit intervals to greater than one week or month would restrict multi-message campaigns where there a reminder is sent out to boost response.

4.  Content and offers. We may want to limit or achieve a certain number of prize draws or information-led offers.

5. Links between e-newsletters and campaign e-mails. Often the link between e-mails and campaign e-mails is missed in communications planning. This can lead to missed opportunities where the e-newsletter could be used to reinforce messages in campaigns. Or sometimes the e-newsletter may be the main vehicle for explaining an offer, but it may get diluted amongst the other items.

6. Links between online communications and offline communications. Again, synergies between online and offline communications may be missed or there may be mixed messages.

7. A control strategy. A mechanism to make sure these guidelines are adhered to is essential. One method is to use a ‘focal point’, or single person who checks all communications for one group of customers before creation or dispatch.

Making it balance

That just about completes our review of approaches to delivering satisfaction and relevance online. But we haven’t mentioned the balance on the bottom right hand side of Figure 1. This suggests the biggest challenge – there are many advanced approaches and technology that can be deployed, but putting in place the right processes, technology and people is far from straightforward. The biggest challenge of all is selecting and implementing the best approaches to deliver a return on the technology investment.

Next months article

Next month we return to looking at the forgotten digital media when I will look at the increasing popularity of interactive digital TV campaigns.

References and Further reading

BBC (2005) Tesco in e-mail marketing assault. Online article. Friday, 11 November 2005,

de Chernatony, L. (2001) Succeeding with brands on the Internet, Journal of Brand Management, 8(3), 186–95.

Hewson Group (2003) Profit or Pain From Your User Experience. Research report. Hewson Consulting Group.

E-consultancy (2005) E-business Briefing: September 2005. http://www.e-consultancy.com/newsfeatures/newsletter/2244/gender-and-user-experience-interview-with-gloria-moss.html

Reichheld, F. and Schefter, P. (2000) E-loyalty, your secret weapon, Harvard Business Review, July–August, 105–13.

Revolution (2005) E-mail Marketing Report by Justin Pugsley, p58 to 60. Revolution. September, 2005. http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/.

Smith, S. and Wheeler, K. (2002) Managing the Customer Experience. FT-Prentice Hall, London, UK.

Trocchia, P. and Janda, S. (2003) How do consumers evaluate Internet retail service quality? Journal of Services Marketing, Volume 17, Number 3 (June 04, 2003)

About the author

Dr Dave Chaffey is workshop leader for a range of one-day e-marketing training workshops from the CIM:

• E-mail Marketing (www.cim.co.uk/0766)
• Running Effective E-marketing Campaigns (www.cim.co.uk/0767)
• Improving Your Results from Digital Marketing (www.cim.co.uk/1138)
• Marketing Research Using the Internet (www.cim.co.uk/1135)

Go to http://www.cimtraining.com/ for course details and online booking.

Dave Chaffey is trainer and consultant for Marketing Insights Limited (http://www.marketing-insights.co.uk/) and E-marketing Director at Ripe (http://www.ripe.co.uk/). He is a prolific e-business author whose books include ‘Total E-mail Marketing’, ‘Internet marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice’ and E-business and E-commerce Management.

Read Dave Chaffey’s blog (http://www.davechaffey.com/) for E-marketing Essentials – the 5 “must-read” articles about online marketing from the hundreds Dave reads each month.

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Reinventing the wheel – there’s every point!

Forget Harry Potter for a moment – one of the biggest publishing successes at the moment is a book chronicling the life and times of a ‘lady of the night’.

The book features the website diary of a mystery woman which attracted massive hits before catching the eye of a publishing house.

This website is proof of how private individuals rather than companies are breaking new ground on the web.  Some of today’s really exciting sites are in fact web logs -  or blogs to use the vernacular – used by egocentric individuals to record their daily experiences.

Contrast what is happening here with a typical corporate website. If you remain awake long enough you will notice the standard menu bar on top of the screen providing options giving a potted history of the company, its trading record, international network, and some information on the directors.

If it is a public company there will be information geared for investors such as stock exchange releases, a share price graph and links to its financial advisors.

Companies need to show a lot more imagination in designing their websites which are, after all, a shop window for the business.  Would you expect to find autumn fashions on display in the spring? Of course not.

When pitching for new business most firms point out how they differ from their rivals. Yet check out the website and it is probably a mirror image of its closest competitor. The language will be stilted – corporate speak in other words – with illustrations showing dreary ranks of suited executives.

Partly the fault lies with the company but lazy website designers are also to blame for rolling out the same standardised product. 

You would not expect to buy a newspaper containing old news. Yet companies are frequently guilty of failing to update their websites. Anecdotal evidence suggests over 80% of sites contain old and inaccurate information. This is not good enough. Now that updating sites is simpler and no longer solely the province of the webmaster, organisations should be able to keep on top of the problem.

The web is a wonderful selling tool for firms but many pay lip service to the medium. For some companies the web can work against their best interests. A poorly designed site reflects badly on the business and can turn potential customers away.

With oil prices marching towards $70 a barrel the cost of moving goods and people is going to become more expensive. So the potential for cost savings by doing more business online is growing.

Action should therefore be taken now to tackle the problem. If there are insufficient resources within the business then it is relatively inexpensive to hire outside expertise to update a website and ensure it provides accurate, easy to understand information about the company and its services.

About the author

Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, Chief Executive of Knowledge Technology Solutions PLC

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Website Goals from Top to Bottom

Measuring the success of anything is impossible without a clear goal. Simple. Measuring the success of a website, and using a web analytics system to do it, is impossible without a rather well considered series of goals. Not quite so simple.

Identifying the “Big Goal” is the easy part. The Big Goal is based on the area of the website under consideration at the moment. The portion of our website that sells low cost items and takes credit cards measures its success in income. The area on the site dedicated to considered purchases measures qualified sales leads. The customer service area is after cost avoidance and increased customer satisfaction. The human resources bit hopes to attract more experienced potential employees. These are fairly straightforward objectives to quantify. Optimizing these site areas requires a little digging.

A web analytics tool becomes much more effective when each Big Goal is parsed into its various components. Given the goal of bringing in more and better sales leads, we slice the process into discrete milestones:

            Attract Attention

            Build Desire

            Engender Contact

            Evaluate Quality

A web analytics tool can help determine which method of getting the word out is bringing in the most potential customers. But merely investing more in the technique that generates the most traffic will be harmful to the bottom line unless that traffic is properly evaluated.

The end goal is qualified sales leads. Offering a chance to win a Jaguar XJ will certainly bring more traffic to our website. But we must be sure that somebody who desires a " truly sensuous driving experience" is also a likely buyer of what we have on offer. Our first milestone must be matched with the last to determine the value of the first.

A web analytics system will help identify which promotions bring in which prospects. Once the sales team identifies the best prospects, it's time for the web analytics tool to do the work it does best: the bits in between. Having identified which campaign brought in the most qualified prospects - the ones we want our sales people to spend the most time with - the ones who are most likely to buy - the focus can shift to the persuasion process.

From a given banner ad or link, how well are we moving prospects from click to consideration? How well do we move them from curious to interested to desirous? A web analytics system can monitor a series of tests to optimize the words, the layout, the calls to action, etc., which lead the best qualified to our sales representatives' desks.

One test-landing page might focus on the low cost of our offerings, another on the high quality, while a third one describes the successes other customers have enjoyed. Which of these encourages the best-qualified visitor to click deeper, learn more and, eventually, fill out the form asking to speak to a representative?

Is it better to publish a large number of benefits and let the prospect ask the sales team for clarification? Or is it better to publish detailed information online and answer those questions in advance of the call? Which produces the most sales calls with the most qualified prospects?

Web analytics shines a light on the sales cycle and allows us to quantify the steps. The ability to run multiple, continuous, side-by-side tests gives us the chance to try a multitude of messages highlighting different features and benefits, different offers, and different interest generating approaches. Imagine the time and cost of doing that across multiple trade shows or magazine advertisements.

And yes, there are technologies that can automate the whole procedure. Firms such as Touch Clarity take it a step further, matching offers to website behaviour. Rather than simply measuring which landing page layouts and features encourage the most qualified prospects to contact the sales team, this system builds a profile of each visitor in real-time and learns which offer will spark the greatest interest from that visitor.

The World Wide Web is starting to get more interesting.

About the author

Jim Sterne will be hosting the first round table on web analytics for the Knexus community, Europe's leading corporate business club and network. http://www.knexusgroup.com/. London 16 November 2005.

Jim Sterne is an internationally known speaker on electronic marketing and customer interaction. A strategy consultant to multinational companies and online companies, Sterne focuses his twenty years in sales and marketing on measuring the value of a website as a medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships. Jim is the Founder and Director of Target Marketing http://www.targeting.com/

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I’m Dreaming of a Maujaq Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Happy Chanukah!

Belated happy Diwali!

December is strange.  The first few weeks are hectic.  Daily the media counts down to 25th.  At work everyone tells you how little time is left.  At home you fret over whether or not the needles on the tree will survive the central heating.  At work you find yourself running around trying to get as much done before January.  The remainder of the month offers a last minute chance to email Xmas greetings to those who didn’t quite make the official card list.

Then comes the break itself. Days to spend endless moments with people who you would rather not spend a second with, let alone share a turkey. 

But, like the Queen’s speech, soon it’s all over and you can look forward with relish to joining the queues at the New Year Sales.  It is now that the patience gained from having to endure another repeat of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ as well as the additional energy stored up from those slices of turkey and bites of mince pies, start to work for you.  You are ready to plunge headfirst into the beating heart of rabid crowds outside John Lewis all craving a pair of knickers or a silk tie reduced in price by a staggering  £1.

Yet, despite the ups and downs, overall the season is a time for reflection and renewal.  One minute to midnight on 31st December you wonder what was achieved during 2005.  One minute past midnight brings home the stark reality that you are over halfway through the mid-way point of the millennium’s first decade. (Remember when you were at the end of the 20th century?)

For me, each passing year marks a passage of increasingly hectic days wondering how to squeeze 27 hours into 24, delivering events for clients, writing up reports, sending invoices, spending time with the family, finally get my car MOT’d, plan the future… Maybe it’s a sign of the times.  One thing that is for certain; this season I am looking forward to at least one silent night at home to ponder some of life’s little niggling questions beyond the likes of:  What is happening on the streets of Paris?  Which conservative leading is the more boring?  Is it true that after his final term in office, Bush is hoping to go to Hollywood to play the part of the scarecrow in the remake of ‘The Wizard of Oz’? What message is Saddam Hussein trying to give to the West when wearing a blue tie in court?  What does AIDA stands for, or in which Boston-box should I stick my proverbial SWOT?

Here are some answers to a few of the more endearing and unusual questions posed on the ‘Ask Gabay’ section of my website throughout 2005.  I trust they give you and your loved ones something intriguing to ‘chew over’ whilst munching those scrumptious mince pies or spinning driedels.

Q. Was Humpty Dumpty really an egg?

A.  Probably. However some say the original Humpty Dumpty was the name given to a 1640s royal cannon, which fell from a church wall during a siege.

Q.  Can chewing an HB pencil during a boring sales meeting cause lead poisoning?

A.  No.  The pencil contains graphite, not lead.  (On the other hand, the ambience during the meeting may still be fatal).

Q.  Can working at a PC all day really damage my eyesight?

A.  According to opticians, staring a PC all day may cause additional strain. However just as you cannot over-use your ears, you cannot over-use your eyes.  Equally, subjecting such organs to extreme abuse such as placing your head on a 3,000 watt speaker at full blast, or staring at a football stadium floodlight from 2 metres away would cause some damage. 

Under normal circumstance, if working at a PC really wore out the eyes, in addition to Luncheon Vouchers most corporations would provide staff with ‘white sticks’.

Q. Last Christmas I was in the ‘Ladies’ touching up my make-up before making a ‘big entrance’ at the office party.  I plucked my eyebrows, which made me sneeze.  This has happened at unexpected occasions before. Why?

A. Eyebrow plucking excites a branch of the nerve supplying your nasal passages. Some doctors speculate that even though the impulses aren't coming from the nose, the stimulation generated by eyebrow plucking causes the entire nerve to be more sensitive.  This makes it very easy for impulses to generate a sneeze. Similarly bright light, odours, eating too much, cooling certain parts of the skin, sexual excitement, hair pulling, shivering and sensations from your stomach could excite a set of neurons located in the brainstem which collectively are known as the ‘sneezing centre’.

Q.  Recently whilst attending a particularly tedious conference I was listening to our CEO drone on about how employees should be considered as ‘one team with one aim’.  On hearing this, my mind pondered over the question as to if there really is an Aryan race and if so are they ‘blue –eyed, fair skinned and blond haired?

A.  Strictly speaking, Aryans don’t fit such a fixed description as espoused by Her Hitler. The dictator based his miss-guided thinking on a German philologist named L. Greiger.  The philologist was proven wrong.   During the second millennium BCE, Aryans (who spoke an Indo-European language) settled in Iran and northern India.  So in fact rather than blue-eyed and pale skin, Hitler actually blabbed on about a perfect race of the very same people he set out to annihilate!

Q.  Re: that advert for Ready Break or hot porridge, featuring a kid with a halo of warmth surrounding him: Does hot food really help fight off the winter elements?

A. According the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Foods, such foods only provide a perception of extra protection.  The Manual of Nutrition (1985) states:  “The heat of hot food is trifling compared with the energy provided by metabolism of its constituents within the body.”

Q. Is ‘re’ an abbreviation for ‘referring to’ or ‘with regard to’?

A.  Both my book, ‘Gabay’s Copywriter’s Compendium’,  (see www.gabaywords.com) as well as Fowler’s Modern English Usage, state that ‘re’ comes from the Latin  ‘res’ meaning ‘thing’.  The word is short for ‘in re’ which derives from ‘in the matter of’.  Today it means ‘in the legal case of’ or ‘with regard to.’

Q. Do the people who ask those ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ on websites and leaflets really exist?

A.  In two decades of copywriting on behalf of external clients I have never actually come across an FAQ from an actual person.  Most of the time I have had to make up the FAQs as if speaking to myself.  But thank you anyway for the question.

Q.  If I get plastered at the company Christmas party, will a strong cup of coffee revive me?

A. According to the Surrey Alcohol and Drug Advisory Service, “Coffee will only wake you up, leaving a wide-awake drunk instead of a sleepy drunk.”

Q.  Some mornings I am so tired from a marketing presentation the night before that I fall asleep on the train.  Often I wake up coughing and spluttering.   Do you think I may have occasionally swallowed a spider or two whilst asleep?

A. No.  According to leading Arachnids expert, Rod Crawford from Seattle, USA, ‘For a sleeping person to swallow even one live spider would involve so many highly unlikely circumstances that for practical purposes we can rule out the possibility.”

Q. As a brand specialist I attend focus groups where people are asked to provide names for new products.  Is it true that Eskimos dreamt up 400 words to describe snow?

A. This myth can be traced to the 1940s. Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf started it.  He quoted an anthropologist called, Franz Boas, who never actually said it in the first place! 

There about 30 names in Inuit, Aivilik and Igloolik for snow:

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Marketing the New Zealand Way

In October I had a short working visit to New Zealand – a week of work followed by just over a week with family. I’ve always enjoyed working in smaller economies – there’s a sense of community about business, a sense of making progress together. Of course, there are downsides to this. In New Zealand, the downside relates to weakness in the marketing infrastructure. By infrastructure I mean not only media, telecommunications and postal infrastructure, but also in skills and learning and in the network of suppliers – from agencies to fulfilment houses - needed to ensure quality.

Where it comes to television, there is a small number of local channels, one in Maori. The local channels don’t seem to find much favour with many locals, many of whom prefer to watch Sky TV, New Zealand’s main Pay TV operator. Still, with viewing a (healthy?) three hours a day on average and cinema attendances pretty healthy, it seems that the idea of the outdoor New Zealander who is rarely glued to the screen is a myth.

In telecommunications, The New Zealand market is dominated by just two suppliers, Telecom New Zealand and Vodafone. The telecommunications regulator has been extraordinarily lenient, allowing what is best described as a “two slightly overlapping monopolies” to develop, with bundling of services permitted. They each charge a relatively high price for their services – by international standards. This means that the culture of cheap calling has been slow to develop. The broadband Internet market is developing steadily, though it is constrained by supply capacity. Mobile telephone tariffs tend to constrain users in their use of voice calls, though the global ubiquity of texting is repeated in New Zealand. All this means that just as in the UK and certain other western economies the glorious era of the “contact centre as saviour” is coming to an end, only the most advanced New Zealand companies have started to have doubts about the value of their investment in contact centres. Another consequence of this is that New Zealand Telecom seems to be very strongly focused (not incorrectly) on competition with Vodafone, but is not investing as heavily as it should in market-broadening activities (such as supporting the development of the marketing industry).

On the postal side, New Zealand, like other companies, suffers from lack of aggressive development and support of the marketing industry by the postal service. It’s not that New Zealand Post isn’t trying. It’s rather that it doesn’t seem to have realized the importance of years of investment in developing post coding and associated sorting technologies, and of supporting the development of marketing skills. The result of this is that innovative marketing, led by the New Zealand equivalent of Nectar, Fly Buys, is stifled by the lack of marketing skills and the relative weakness of marketing suppliers.

Some New Zealand colleagues suggested that the nature of the average New Zealand customer has much to do with the slower development of marketing. New Zealand is a successful economy, proudly conscious of its origins in a mixture of enterprising English and canny (and also enterprising) Scots, and latterly a strong leavening of hard-working South Africans, enterprising Asians and of course - from the beginning - its strong Maori and Pacific Islander communities. New Zealanders live well, often devoted to the outdoor life. Cars are cheap, with prices kept down by a high volume of good quality second-hand Japanese imports (remember – Japanese drive on the left too). Transport fuel is relatively (by European standards, at least) lightly taxed, so mobility is high, despite the relative weakness of public transport (not surprising given the dispersion of a population of around 4 million over an area the size of a major European state). In this situation, marketers must do much more to attract the attention of the average New Zealander, who is pretty sceptical of any offer other than that based on value for money.

There’s an added complication. Many New Zealanders move house often – I was told, every three years or so. Even if this is an exaggeration, it’s easy to understand why. Land is plentiful and so cheap by European standards. Construction of single story houses is often mechanised or at least uses cheap, light materials (not a bad idea in a country prone to earthquakes). This means address updating is complicated, especially given the relative absence of data services focused on correcting household details. The silver lining of this cloud is that New Zealanders spend more on improving or furnishing homes – good news for manufacturing industry. Of course, proximity to South East Asia ensures plentiful supplies of cheap electronic products.

As a British marketer, I feel very much at home in New Zealand. High Streets do look a bit like those of small US towns, but the big retailers are every bit as competitive as those in Europe. The involvement of companies from across the Tasman Sea, or “The Ditch” has strengthened marketing, as has the to-ing and fro-ing of the business community between Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand marketers are great travellers, and frequent visitors to peer companies in the US, Europe and other countries where marketing is advanced. So even where marketing is not up to the latest practice, managers are pretty conscious of what best practice is, but are often biding their time until the New Zealand market is ready for it.

About the author

Professor Merlin Stone FCIM FIDM is Business Research Leader at IBM Business Consulting Services, IBM UK Ltd. E-mail: merlin_stone@uk.ibm.com

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Is your Corporate Website driving Customers away?

Does your website underperform? Does it fail to attract new customers … and is it, in truth, really little more than an ‘on-line brochure’?

If your web presence is like most other corporate sites, then the answer is probably ‘yes’.  In fact, sites like these actively drive away many new customers, never to return.

OK, most of these corporate websites to which I refer will save a business money on the print costs of literature.  Fine. But if your site is like so many others, then it is failing to utilise the full power of the internet to enable you to target precisely the customers you want, stimulate their interest, and automatically capture key data on each prospect and their requirements. In other words, to deliver new, semi-qualified sales leads to you.

I said that many corporate websites actually deter new customers.  Why? Because they feature a lot of data of which some 75% is irrelevant to the visitor, certainly at the initial stage of the purchasing process.  Visitors will promptly leave the site if unable to find the information they require, quickly and easily.

What if the site is structured to be entirely relevant to each visitor and they DO have a real interest - but they visit the site and then depart - how do you capture key information on the sales prospect?

You may know that people have visited the site, from the web stats, but who were they? What was their interest?

The key to success in web marketing is firstly to understand exactly how people buy a product or service like yours… the process by which customers gather and prioritise information from the internet and other sources… how they are influenced… their particular requirements for information and for assurance of the value you can deliver… and also for you to understand what determines their ultimate purchasing decision.

Once you have understood how your customers buy, the most important question for you then is this: what do you need to do to make it as easy and compelling as possible for your target audience to buy from you?

The answer is to develop a highly effective sales process – that is, to engineer a set-by-step mechanism for securing high quality leads on the internet in a process that mirrors how customers buy in the real world.  Sales process engineering. Your sales process will deliver the information that the prospect requires in order to purchase from you - and the data that YOU require to progress the sale.  No more, no less.  We all know the sites that do this well: probably the Amazon website is one of the best examples: but similar success can be obtained by much smaller companies albeit it on a smaller scale, operating on a fraction of the budget.

The principles of ‘sales process engineering’ are revolutionising sales and marketing.  For the last 3 years I’ve studied and modelled buyers’ strategies in a range of sectors, to really understand how they make a purchase. With this knowledge, it’s possible to ‘engineer’ a sales process that operates optimally, to maximise the return on investment.

To understand the principles of sales process and what they mean for YOUR business, consider your answer to this question: at what stage in a customer’s purchasing process does he/she visit YOUR website?

Is this the first contact that a customer usually has with your business - perhaps following an internet search, or maybe in response to your publicity, at Stage 1 in your sales process, as it were?

Is it secondary contact, at Stage 2 let’s say - after they have some knowledge already of what you do - perhaps having met you - to find out further, more detailed information… or actually to buy from you?

Or is it Stage 3: is the web contact mainly part of the on-going relationship with your existing customers, who perhaps visit for information updates or to re-order?

Your answers to these 3 questions are absolutely critical in defining the purpose and function of your website – and are the starting point in formulating a web strategy that will win you a higher volume of new business.

Most corporate websites should, ideally, meet all 3 requirements in full.  Most don’t.  Some are quite good at stage 2 (the ‘on-line brochure’, perhaps with e-commerce facilities, if it is relevant).  Some even at Stage 3 too (as an ‘on-line newsletter’, maybe with e-commerce, again) - but only if the sites are kept up to date and regularly refreshed, it must be said!

But most sites miss out on the tremendous functionality that the internet can offer at all 3 stages.  Specifically: to deliver highly focused information, with maximum convenience, that a selected audience of customers requires in order to buy from you.

This is a fundamental objective in an effective web strategy – the ‘engineering’ of a unified, internet sales process to maximise the generation, progression and ‘close’ of sales leads and repeat orders, cost-effectively and consistently. 

I’d suggest that of the 3 Stages, the key stage - where the benefits of the principles of sales process are most conspicuous and measurable - is at Stage 1: to deliver a volume of new sales leads, from new sources.  This is the prime area of concern of this document.

So here are key recommendations:-

Firstly, sales prospects initially want only helpful, unbiased and relevant information.  Certainly, this is the case if you market a product or service of any complexity which requires some explanation and differentiation of the benefits and features from your competitors’ offerings.

The type of data I’m suggesting you provide at Stage 1 ‘positions’ your business in the mind of the customer as a ‘trusted source’.  You are not seeking to sell, certainly not at this stage… this might follow as the next step - such as via a link to an on-line catalogue – or ‘selling’ might be several steps down the line, such as following a sales meeting, according to the particular sales process for your business,.

Secondly, a dedicated ‘micro-site’ is an ideal vehicle for delivering the information I described above in order to market your products and services.  The site directly and exclusively deals with the core subject of interest – in this case, your interest in an effective web strategy.  There should be no distracting animated graphics or irrelevant buttons or other details on the micro-site.

Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly a place for good design, animations too – such as at http://www.salesgenerator.co.uk/ .  But the micro-site, as the initial point of contact with your business, is not the place for fancy graphics.

You’ll probably require a micro-site, for each individual product or service (or product/ service group) you offer.  It’s worth the investment. 

Research has shown that web visitors trust, and purchase more from a site that is seen to be ‘specialist’, rather than ‘generalist’ – for example, they prefer to book their flight, accommodation, insurance and other holiday services from different web suppliers.  It’s the ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ perception, - and ‘first impressions’ are crucial here.  Once you are trusted, you can then sell other, related products or services.

(Incidentally, if you want to offer e-commerce, the micro-site could be linked to a specialist ‘gateway’ page on your main website, for example, to feature only products/ services that are in the group of interest to the sales prospect - if that’s relevant to your own particular sales process.  Consider too how Amazon enables specialist vendors to partner with it, and to link to relevant books on the Amazon site).

Third, the format and presentation of the page and data it contains should follow certain well-proven principles.  These ensure that the information is communicated to maximum effect. 

A compelling headline is essential on your micro-site, so that visitors want to read further… text should be easy to read, black text on a white background, in a Times New Roman or similar font… the text should be longer rather than shorter – certainly long enough to relate all the information you wish to impart.  The copy should be written in an interesting, conversational style. English as it is spoken.

Fourth, remember that the micro-site is a part of your sales process…  it is one step in the mechanism for developing  a ‘suspect’ – a cold prospect who might never have even heard of your company – into a qualified prospect and then a retained customer. 

To progress a cold prospect through to the stage of reading the information on your micro-site, you’ll need to market the information (though adverts, PR, DM) in advance -  perhaps promoting the content as a ‘Free Report’.

You’ll also need to consider this: what is to be the next stage in your sales process: what do you want your prospect to do once he/she has visited the micro-site and read the information? 

You will need to feature a ‘call to action’ at the end of the text, in other words, to invite your sales prospect to take a further step, to make some kind of commitment.  It might be the case that the sales prospect is ready to click a URL link to a product catalogue and make a purchase (as described above).  But in many instances this will not be the case, and there might be a whole series of stages to go through still - including phone contact and a sales meeting, perhaps – over weeks or months. 

That’s fine… so long as you have a planned sales process which ensures you can manage regular contact and that it includes periodic ‘prompts to purchase’ – by e-mail, phone or other means.  I say this because you - like me - probably receive regular e-newsletters from suppliers, but you never actually get round to making a purchase! A good ‘prompt to purchase’ would be a high-value, low-cost special offer, with a time restriction.

Fifth, automation. The more elements in your sales process that are automated, the more efficient it becomes - this is particularly the case where you engage with a high number of prospective customers .

The process by which visitors access your micro-site can be fully automated with specialist software, with a web form… an ‘acknowledgement’ page… and the ability to respond to completed forms with an e-mail with the URL link to an on-line PDF.

Similar automation technology can be used powerfully to maintain contact with your new and expanding database of sales prospects.  This is important for sales process engineering. It is essential to remain in touch with prospects, with 7 communications a year, the research shows.  Selling is an ‘opportunistic’ business – a sales prospect who is mildly interested today may be a ‘hot prospect’ next month or next year, because of a change in his/ her circumstances.

So, those are my top 5 recommendations, for developing a Stage 1 sales process – to generate new leads through a dedicated micro-site. 

To see an example of an effective micro site on this topic – for layout and presentation, and incorporating the use of automated e-responder - please click http://www.websalesprocess.co.uk/

About the author

Patrick Rea, Chartered Marketer, is a sales and marketing consultant, director of Rea-TMA Marketing, developer of Sales Process Engineering, the methodology to define systematic, transparent and measurable sales processes for integrated sales and marketing strategies.