In studying the elements on a web page that lend to or obstruct conversions, one writer noted the general disconnect between big box retailers design philosophies for their brick and mortar operation in contrast to the shopping experience that they provide their customers online, as if they imagine that their online customer has lower expectations.

Meeting Online Consumer Expectations

Quite the contrary, your online customer comes to your site with high expectations of not only being able to easily find their desired product, they expect enough relevant information to help inform their buying decision. As online merchants become more ‘new media’, savvy they have added podcasts and videos that feed the consumers need to know. Those commerce sites failing to meet those expectations. can lower their own sales expectations.

A recent Yahoo study has shown that customers do their pre-shopping online before they hit the brick and mortars, influenced heavily by online advertising and the search for product information, reviews, and a community of enthusiasts.

“Consumers exposed to online advertising tend to research, or “pre-shop,” online prior to purchase, and this behavior ultimately leads to increased in-store sales, the study found: Pre-shoppers spend an average of 41 percent more in-store compared with consumers not exposed to online advertising.

• Consumers exposed to online advertising are more engaged: Consumers exposed to display and/or search advertising viewed an average of six more pages during the period in which they were researching compared with those not exposed to advertising.
• Almost 90 percent of the incremental sales generated by online advertising take place in-store: Consumers exposed to online advertising spent an incremental six dollars in-store for every one dollar spent online.
• Integrated search and display campaigns have maximum impact: Combined search and display ad campaigns resulted in deeper engagement for consumers exposed to those ads, leading to increased sales.

(Source)

Business Blogging Makes the e-Commerce Difference

This type of information behooves the e-commerce merchant to design a site that not only facilitates shopping ease, but also caters to the customers’ hunger for information.

This is where content and information rich business blogging and blog marketing serves so well the smaller e-commerce merchant who can’t match the big box advertising budget.

The odds are strongly in the favor of today’s customer choosing to buy their sound systems,cameras, jewelry, etc., from the retailer who meets their online information expectations over the indifferent and impersonal big box merchant, even if it costs more.

Tags: Blog Marketing, brick_and_mortar, business-blogging, campaigns, consumer_expectations, conversions, media_savvy, podcasts, search_advertising

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Business Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.