Can heaven be that distant? A huge potential market in about 200 countries. Relatively little cost to reach them on a per-1,000-name basis. Instant communication with clients and prospects. And lest we forget, great graphics!
On the other hand, this market, though it’s expanding, is still largely vertical. It consists of millions of insomniacs, age 20-39, who comb the Web for information and some interesting chats, businessmen who see the Web as a huge appointment calendar, and opportunity seekers who want to know if they can get a good deal on a Compaq laptop for an opening $1 bid. Not to mention a group of affluent hackers who aren’t really sending you viruses to steal your money – they want to destroy most of North America simply because it’ll make a great term paper.
Well, as in most things, we’re caught between the best and worst scenarios when it comes to the Web.
The process of Web response – the initial response, the user’s click to the advertising link – most closely resembles elements central to package inserts.
The key driver of the user’s click is impulse. Just as package insert respondents are diverted from examining the merchandise delivered to them by the headline of a package insert that catches their eye, Web users are diverted by a Web ad from exploring the Web site to which they have originally clicked.
The lesson to a Web marketer, therefore, is that the banner headline from which users click and the message on the screen to which they click must be very powerful to create the impulse, and to interest users in the product.
But the click to the advertiser’s Web site is more powerful than the perusal of an insert: Users are aware that they have committed an act, as they’re not when their attention is taken by an insert.
It is at this point that the impulse factor largely ends. And, as never in the package insert process, the Web user is brought into another world – the advertiser’s. That creates a certain amount of tension for the user for three reasons.
First, the deeper prospects move into the advertiser’s Web world, the more distance they feel from what their immediate goal has been – the reason for accessing the Web site from which they’ve clicked. That distance is an important factor Web marketers must face, for they must overcome the prospects’ feelings of latent anxiety – which come from abandoning the ship and swimming in strange and unanticipated waters.
Second, users have some compulsion to return to their original goal because – it was their original goal! No sense of closure exists so far as that goal is concerned.
Third, users may very well distrust the computer’s ability to return them to the Web site from which they’ve clicked. How many times have we all found our “Back” button grayed out?
As with solo mail, the only way to deal with that is by presenting, in the advertiser’s introductory screen, the most powerful message to sell that one can muster, and deepening users’ involvement on a screen-by-screen basis.
But beware: The catch often is that it’s visual phenomena that engages prospects. Marketers themselves are often captured by the promise of the new medium – their ability to create graphics that arrest, change shape and color, utilize the new technology in a new way – and lose sight of the importance of the merchandise sell.
It is the merchandiser’s ability to ignore these temptations, to increasingly enhance prospects’ interest in a product, that lies at the heart of Web marketing. As with any impulse buy, prospects’ attention must not only be engaged from click to click, from screen to screen – it is desirable that it be increased. For any involvement needs fuel – added benefits, bonuses to buy and the like. It is essential, as with solo mail, to quickly make users forget about nice pictures. If they’ve not been drawn by the product by the second wave of screens, they won’t buy. If all you’ve got to offer is one screen, the product had better be incredibly utilitarian (the nearest pizza shop is just around the corner, for example), or, if it’s not, first prize in a $10 million sweepstakes.
The need for greater engagement by the buyer is underscored by what must be considered the closest thing to water torture ever concocted. The urge to click onto the Web site is an impulse. But the steps leading up to the actual buy are so convoluted that they make consumers wonder why they’re on the Web in the first place. All these steps involve the purchase form.
Some particulars:
– The “secure order” option. This is designed to reassure prospective buyers that hardened criminals aren’t lurking in the wings, waiting to pounce on their credit card numbers and use them to make endless purchases.
And while it probably does reassure us, the meta-message in the process is that ordering on the Net is indeed dangerous!
– The order form itself. The net effect of giving your name, address and credit card number is absolutely forbidding to those people who are exposed to the latest news story about scamming on the Web – and who receive dozens of e-mail ads each day dealing with taking Viagra to traveling to Niagara.
Finally, there’s the absolute nightmare: The buyer clicks through to confirm purchase data, and a message shows up: “Your order could not go through because you didn’t fill out all the essential fields.”
Now we start to backtrack, looking for the essential field. Sometimes we find it, sometimes we don’t.
And sometimes we give up.
Impulse is at one end of the click spectrum and everything from there on should act to inhibit the impulse and turn it into certainty, to strengthen users’ resolve, to make them not only feel secure in buying the product but overcome their hesitancy at the merchandising process inwhich they’re making their decision. That’s not a bad trick – something like taking off your handcuffs under 17 feet of water.
All of these Web challengers, in somewhat different form, exist in the direct mail sell. And they are solvable – as open to solution as any marketing problems faced by the advertiser in space, or time, or direct mail.
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