Web strategy: Attracting and retaining visitors

1
Web strategy Attracting and retaining visitors

• Patrick McKeown
• MIS Dept., University of Georgia
• Pmckeown_at_terry.uga.edu

2
Doing Business Differently

• Leveling the Playing Field
• Reversing the Flow of Communications
• Customer Convergence
• Mass Customization
• Changing Role of Intermediaries
• Intermediaries
• Disintermediation
• Reintermediation

3
Doing Business Differently
Communication Flip-Flop
4
Electronic Commerce Strategies

• Broad Customization
• Specialized Customization
• Adaptable Sites
• Cookies
• Mass customization

5
Web communication

• Multimedia
• Interactive
• Richer
• Major communication companies are undergoing a
  strategic realignment

6
The Web is flat

• All participants have an equal voice
• Low barriers to entry
• Rapid imitation
• How do you build a mountain in a flat world?
• How do you standout from the crowd?
• All stores are at the end of a dead end road with
  no other stores on the road

7
Marketing goals

• Traditional
• Effective customer communication
• Positioning and differentiating a product and
  brand
• Web
• Creating an attractor Web site
• Getting stakeholders to select your message

8
Attractor

• A Web site with the potential to attract and
  interact with a relatively large number of
  visitors in a target stakeholder group
• Good sites offer interaction
• Not an electronic dumping ground for the
  corporate brochure

9
Types of attractors

• Entertainment park
• Archive
• Sponsorship
• Town Hall
• The club
• Gifts
• Freeway intersection (portal)
• Customer service center

10
Entertainment park

• Yuckiest Site on the Internet at
  yucky.kids.discovery.com
• GumbyWorld.com
• MSN Zone.com (3 Hole Challenge)
• Lycos Gamesville.com (with Anna Kournikova
  licensed games!)
• Snapple Beverage site

11
Archive

• Many newspapers (e.g., the Sunday/Business Times
  back to 1996)
• Daimler-Chrysler (e.g., muscle car years at
  Chrysler)
• De Beers (including history of diamonds before
  discovery in South Africa)
• Hewlett-Packard (beginning with HPs first product
  in 1938)

12
Sponsorship

• DuPont and Nascar (Jeff Gordon)
• Texaco and the Metropolitan Opera
• Coca-Cola and 2002 FIFA World Cup
• Reebok and Venus Williams
• Ameritech and Van Gogh-Gauguin exhibition at the
  Art Institute of Chicago

13
Town hall

• ESPN.com Chat rooms to talk with athletes and
  coaches.
• Apple Computer to hear and see live comments on
  quarterly results.
• Tech Forum on Sunday Times Web site
• Any number of chat groups.

14
The club

• Cnn.com
• Amazon.com
• Kodak.commembers upload and save pictures online
• Any number of My. Web pages like
  MyNetscape.com

15
Gifts

• Free.com
• many links to free items
• Kodak
• Send digital images to yourself or friends
• Ragu Foods
• Recipes
• Delta Airlines (SAA partner)
• Download flight schedule to Palm PDA

16
Freeway intersection (portal)

• Yahoo!
• ISWorld
• AOL
• MyNetScape

17
Customer service center

• FedEx
• UPS
• Sprint
• Fuji Film

18
Service process matrix
H
igh
Service
Professional
shop
service
Interaction and
customization
Service
Mass
factory
service
Low
Low
High
Labor intensity
19
Attractors grid
H
igh
Service
The club
center
Customization
Utility
Mass
entertainment
Low
Low
High
Interaction
20
Discontinuity

• The trend has been to reduce labor intensity and
  interaction
• The move down the diagonal
• Attractors mean a reverse
• A push to customization
• A push to interaction and entertainment
• The structure of some industries will change

21
Sustainable attractiveness

22
Potential attractors

• Prior back-end IT investments that take time to
  duplicate
• Special relations
• sponsorship
• Special information resources
• an archive
• Established brand or image
• part of the enterprises history
• Proprietary intellectual/artistic capital
• a Monet painting

23
Strategies for attractors

• Concentrate on attracting the most influential
  stakeholders
• Identify the stakeholders
• Decide on the degree of customization

24
Types of attractors

• Broad
• Specialized
• Personalized
• Adaptable user actively adapts Web site
• Adaptive Web site adapts itself to users
  buying/searching habits

25
Electronic Commerce Strategies

• Attractor
• Interactivity

Two-Stage Attractiveness Model
26
Cookie

• Remembers details of a single visit or stores
  facts between visits--necessary for adaptive Web
  sites
• Cookies are small text files on users hard disk
  that can contain user information such as
  passwords as well as prior buying habits
• Cookies can be used for
• Visit tracking--Site improvement
• Storing information--Subscription services
• Customization--New services
• Marketing--Banner ads

27
Customization vs Privacy

• To customize a site to a customers needs, Web
  site must have information about customer from
  cookies
• This requires a loss of privacy on part of
  customer
• User can stop saving of cookies
• Big issue for E-commerce

28
Conclusion

• The corporate Web site will define the
  organization
• This definition cannot be left to chance
• An attractor must be created where possible