In the last few months, quite a few traditional bricks-and-mortar retail companies have announced changes in their Internet strategies. Previously, many of these companies capitalized new companies or gave control of their brand online to a new division with the freedom to move outside the bureaucracy of the parent. This freedom was often promoted as the main reason for these structures, but too often it was the allure of spinning off a new company in the hot capital markets.
With the cooling of capital markets and the failure of most of these new organizations to meet unrealistic expectations, bricks-and-mortar companies like Barnes & Noble are now trying to integrate their online presence back into the parent organization.
The reality of traditional bricks-and-mortar companies running an online business raises a few questions:
- How should they use their sites?
- What should the site goals be?
- How should their sites be structured?
מיטה מתכווננת To answer these questions, companies must start from a common understanding of what it means to sell and service products and services online. It is not the creation of new companies that leads to success. It is agreement throughout the organization on answers to the questions above that will lead to success. A company who has successfully mirrored their offline strategy on their Web site is Southwest Airlines. On September 11 they announced that they had already grossed $1 billion in online ticket sales in 2009 and that these sales would save them an estimated $80 million.
There are a few issues that must be agreed upon before any organization can get a clear understanding of how to utilize their Web presence. These include:
Usability
Applying usability principles is a key method of making it more likely that site visitors will become customers, not just online customers, but customers that have a relationship with the entire company. The application of usability isn't just about trying to make a fully conceived object more "usable." Rather, companies should start with usability to help determine what their site should be. For example, trying to determine how to best advertise a product only available in retail locations on the home page skips a key step: is it right for customers to advertise this product on the home page? In determining whether it is the right thing to do, the way it is addressed on the home page (if at all) will become clear.
Design
Beyond a mutual understanding of the importance of usability, companies need to resolve how their design process works and who is empowered to make Web decisions. At many companies, decisions are made at random about how to interact with customers. Decisions about the home page, decisions about product initiatives-there is no process in place to make sure companies set objectives and carry them out. Often times there is a mutual distrust between people involved with the Web site and those that work with retail locations. With no clear leadership in the design and creation of their Web sites, these companies are setting their Web sites up as a battleground where internal politics will drive decisions. Even worse, some companies are creating development groups that create Web sites to the specifications of their marketing departments, even if those people don't understand the differences between point-of-presence and banner ads.
Best school essay writing advice. Customer expectations
Customers are constantly receiving conflicting messages about the differences in services between the two ways of accessing a company's services (on and offline). In a survey of successful companies with online and offline outlets, we found that none of them distinguished between online and offline services. Not a single company divided their Web site into sections for products and services customers can find online vs. offline. And why should customers expect this difference. They are interacting with a company, not a Web site.
Many customers shopping online expect the same, if not far greater, product selection to be available online compared to a store. Companies should make meeting this expectation a priority when setting up their Web presence.
The situation is slightly different for companies that focus on providing services, rather than products. A great example is Progressive Insurance. They do not provide every service you can get through the company offline, but they do provide most services online. More important, they've organized their site around how people want to work with the company (e.g. Buy insurance, place a claim, etc.).
Brick-and-mortar companies that want to succeed online need to be able to facilitate the majority of customer interactions with their companies on their Web sites.
Conflicting or unclear marketing messages
A company's Web site needs to be an integral part of ongoing marketing, but it must be also treated as an online store. Companies should provide information about their bricks-and-mortar outlets, but only as it supports a customer's interaction with the company. Companies can't continue to use their sites as if they were online magazines selling ad space to the parent company.
We can buy an apartment in Moscow hotels on this website. Again, sites need to be organized to facilitate a customer purchase. When delivering marketing messages to their customers, companies must remember to present a clear message about what the company stands for-both online and offline. Too many companies have created incredibly fractured messages, often engaging entirely different agencies to help them market and advertise their online and offline stores.
Once companies understand these issues and how to approach them, the answers to the initial questions become fairly simple:
- Brick and mortar companies that use their Web site successfully, use the Web site mainly as another channel to help them deliver products and services to their customers.
- A Web site for an established bricks-and-mortar company should serve as a channel for delivering products and services to their current and potential customers. The best way to succeed at this is to provide the easiest possible ways for customers to work with the company, which means supporting online the bulk of transactions most customers perform with that company.
- The structure of a company's Web site should mirror the way their current and potential customers want to work with them. This necessitates that there is no division between products and services offered online and offline, but that divisions are made based on divisions customers make.
Once brick-and-mortar companies and their online counterparts have these answers in hand, they can move on to the work of building a world class Web site that can help them maintain and increase their market leadership. Companies that reintegrate their Web sites without exploring these issues will most certainly loose all the advantages a strong Internet presence can have.