Radiance Blog

 

Last Spring the Denver Business Journal ran an interesting article about how Colorado has one of the highest rates of browsing to e-commerce sites.

The research, produced by Hitwise (a company that uses Internet Service Provider data to track which websites people visit), found that Coloradoans are 16 percent more likely to visit retail websites than the average citizen in all other states. Colorado had the fourth highest e-commerce browsing rate in the country.

In a tough economy, many businesses are looking to leverage their internet presence to make all this internet browsing benefit them.

Whether your organization is for-profit or non-profit, what does this mean for you?  How can you survive online?  These questions should be considered in any strategic planning process you engage in over the next several years.  Although every case is unique, the following points will be helpful for you to consider:

• Have a well thought out internet strategy. The flashiest website won’t matter unless you have a clear, well thought out reason for its existence and a person or team in charge of regularly updating your content.
• Make it easy to find and buy you. If people are going to buy your products or donate to your cause online, you have to make it easy for them to do so.  If a potential customer, volunteer, or donor searches for your product or service online, can they find you?  As a quick and dirty test, take some terms that are relevant to your business or non-profit and see how high you show up in the google results.  Once people find your site, is it easy for them to navigate around?  Usability testing and web analytics can help tune your website to perfection.  In usability testing, we examine the behavior of individuals as they navigate your website to see what they find clear or confusing.  Web analytics (using google’s software or the myriad of other existing solutions) examine the behavior of actual visitors to your site.  How do users get to your site (and what other sites or google searches are doing the referring), where do they go on your site, how long do they stay on each page, and which pages cause them to leave your site.
• Make it easy to find information about your products. Just because Coloradoans are likely to go to websites doesn’t mean they are necessarily buying more from websites! Hitwise only tracks where people go — it doesn’t say anything about what they actually do. And as it turns out, the vast majority of individuals who visit e-commerce sites probably do not buy anything. Less than a quarter of those who visited music and cell phone e-commerce sites before buying those products actually made their purchases online. However, that does not mean that a good website is a waste! According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, many internet users use information they find online before making a purchase at a brick and mortar store. And a Yahoo study agrees with this, showing a noticeable increase in purchases from physical locations after people researched products online. Yahoo calls this the ROBO effect–Research Online, Buy Offline.
• Keep everything current. This is obviously important because having the most up-to-date information will provide the most useful experience for your users and will enhance your credible reputation.  If the last thing on the “news” section of your website is an event from last October, you send the message that you either do not do enough or do not care enough to let people know.  If you don’t update your website, there’s no reason for people to come back again.
• Know who is (and is not) using your website. We mentioned web analytics above, but this topic is important enough to warrant a bullet of its own.  Do some research with your customer base (or donor base) to determine their level of awareness and use of your website.  If the people who already know you do not use your website, find out why.  Are there certain demographic groups that will not use your web store or web donations?  Consider focus groups or interviews to find out why.  Try discount codes, donation matching, or other incentives to encourage use of your website (and measure how well your different initiatives work so you know what to keep doing!).
• Stay informed. The web is exciting and scary precisely because it changes so quickly.  The amount of brainpower that is used to create new services and new paradigms online is staggering.  The hot things recently have been social networking and microblogging (i.e., twitter or plurk), but who knows what’s next.  Not every hot new web gizmo needs to be adopted by your organization, but by keeping current you can ensure that you will not miss the developments that are essential for you.

If your organization has a web strategy, what has been your biggest challenge and your biggest opportunity?