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In
my view…fundamental
to the success of both customer loyalty programs and personalized shopping systems is the
need to put your customer first, to focus program planning and
implementation on what best serves your customers. As we recognized
in Part 1 of Selling Smarter, these opportunities will only serve your
business if and when your customers recognize and respond to the service
values being offered.
In Part 2
of the VIEWPOINT
Selling Smarter series, we will
discuss the importance of making the best possible use of the prime
"real estate" in your webstore - making a great first impression
on first-time, infrequent, and regular visitors and maximizing sales and
gross profits from prime webspace. And as with every smarter-selling
opportunity, making the best possible use of your webstore's prime real
estate will only benefit your business if and when your customers
recognize and respond to your team's smart merchandising of this high
impact webspace.
Getting
online "window shoppers" into your webstore: Today's ever
more experienced online shopper has developed online shopping habits that
are increasingly reminiscent of the well-established shopping habits that
guide her real-world shopping activities. Time spent shopping in a mall or
on a busy downtown retail street is a combination of quick in-and-out
peeks at most stores that she encounters interspersed with lengthy
explorations of the product offerings and promotional activities of a
favored few retailers. This pattern is the logical and not-surprising
combination of getting an overview of what's new in fashion,
entertainment, cuisine, recreation, and other lifestyle trends, while
spending quality time with merchants that our experienced and busy shopper
has come to know and to trust.
Online
shopping today encourages and supports exactly the same pattern,
particularly when our shopper is using a search engine to guide her
shopping activity. The majority of retail websites visited will only get a
cursory glance unless something catches our shopper's eye. And she will
spend the majority of her time perusing one, two, or at most a small
number of familiar online stores. This shopping behaviour is playing out
tens of millions of times every day across North America and around the
world. This emphatically underscores how critical it is to the success of
your online store to make a compelling presentation in the webstore's
first page or two of the products and services your store has to
offer.
Sound
familiar? The tactics used for making a great first impression online are
the same ones you use when building storefront and show window displays in
your real-world store. Presentations of just-arrived products, best
selling items, thematic presentations, and seasonal favorites in seasonal
displays work as well online as they have for many, many years offline.
Make it easy for your customer to impulse buy items from your webstore's
high-traffic landing page merchandise displays. It is not clever and, in
fact, it is terrible customer service to make your customer navigate deep
into the webstore to add an impulse purchase to a shopping cart. Never
allow your transaction processing systems to defeat your customer's desire
to be in and out of your webstore with purchase completed in just a few
clicks of her mouse.
High
impact equals high performance: As the tactics for effective webstore
merchandising mature, it is becoming increasingly important to understand
the gross profit potential and to measure the gross profit contribution of
each major piece of your webstore's "real estate" - your retail
webspace - as you already measure gross profit performance for each
section and each product facing in your real-world store. The fact that
there is only a nominal hard-dollar cost for installing an additional
webpage within an established webstore has encouraged too many online
retailers to add pages without sufficient consideration of the gross
profit potential and the actual gross profit production of each piece of
online retail webspace.
The
need to understand and measure turnover and profit productivity is
particularly true for the "above-the-fold" portions of the first few
webpages that a customer visits when she clicks through to your webstore -
whether from a search engine, from an outside website link, from a
bookmark, or from directly entering your webstore address into her
browser.
If
the purpose of your webstore is to contribute to the overall bricks 'n'
clicks profits of your multi-channel retail business, then you must have
product turnover and gross profit performance objectives in place for your
webstore's landing pages, and you must have a plan in place for achieving
these objectives. Every real-world retail store - from car dealer to
clothier to convenience store - has merchandise available for sale as you
enter the store. Don't let the ease of creating webspace lull you into
thinking that sales and profits per square foot - or per square inch - are
not equally important for your webstore's high-impact webspace.
Lastly,
if your webstore landing pages are not intended to make product
presentations that begin your persuasive selling process, then it is
imperative that you establish click-through objectives for your webstore's
landing pages. This gives you the opportunity to measure the success of
your webstore merchandising and navigation at pulling traffic through your
webstore and directing this traffic to the merchandising pages that you
have created with the purpose of achieving the sales and profits budgeted
for the webstore.
In
next edition of VIEWPOINT, we will look at smart online merchandising
techniques for presenting and selling one-of-a-kind items, out-of-season
items, hard-to-stock items, and clearance items from your webstore. These
product categories can cause merchandising challenges but they also can
create pleasantly surprising incremental sales and profits for your
Internet integrated retail organization. As always, be sure to regularly
visit www.bricksNclicksPROFITS.com
to get the latest comments and advice from
many of the foremost online retailing experts.
Happy
retailing,
Peter
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contact Peter, click here
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