Why in the World Should Anyone Come to Your Web Site?

This article contains older information. Go here for newer information on ecommerce and selling online.

You see, a Web site is like a store built on a dead-end street. Nobody comes by accident. Either they deliberately type in your URL (Web address) or more likely they click on a link they find in a Web search engine or elsewhere.

Like any business, so long as you have a good product or service, the more people you can get in the door, the more sales you're likely to close. To get more people in the door you must understand people's four motivations to surf the Net.

1. Information Motivations

Presently, the great bulk of Internet users are looking for information. This takes two forms.

Often people come out of curiosity. They see a banner ad for your Web site on a high traffic site like Yahoo or the Internet Mall, and out of curiosity they'll click the rectangular box and land in your Web site. Perhaps you've come up with an intriguing title or sentence which appears on a Web search engine. They may click on the link just to satisfy the curiosity you've aroused. You might raise curiosity in traditional advertising in a newspaper, magazine, or brochure as you give your Web address. They may come once out of curiosity, but they won't come back unless you offer content they need.

Others come with a deliberate desire to learn. They have found that you offer information about a product, service, or industry. Perhaps you have an archive of articles or past newsletters with valuable content. Perhaps you offer links to information hosted on other people's Web sites (such as our Web Marketing Info Center, http://www.wilsonweb.com/webmarket/).

Freely available information is exploding on the Internet. A year ago you'd be hard-pressed to find up-to-date news outside of commercial on-line services. Today you can find hundreds of newspapers and magazines on the Internet. The Web surfer is the winner, but for us to compete for customers' attention, we may have to give away information we used to sell.

Nevertheless, if you offer a rich source of information, you'll attract a steady flow of customers, and some of them will do business with you. If you think about it, that's the strategy we use at Wilson Internet Services to attract your attention.

2. Entertainment Motivations

A second motivation that drives Internet users is entertainment. This may slop over to information, since for some people learning is entertainment. Web sites which are designed to entertain are rich in graphics. (I suppose that pornography on the Internet is a sort of perverse entertainment.) As people's access to the Internet gets faster than 14.4K -- say an ISDN connection or access through cable TV wiring -- the entertainment use of the Internet will skyrocket. You'll see an explosion of movies, videos, games, etc. But today the entertainment comes in the form of the fun, the bizarre, the unique. Java applets (small animations you can see if you have a Netscape 2.0 Web browser) are designed more to entertain than anything else at this point. But they do entertain, and people will visit your Web site just to see your Java application in early 1996. I doubt that the novelty will last forever.

3. Economic Motivations

Economic motivations are the next category, and I believe will be a growing one. An increasing number of people are doing research on the Internet (information motivation) as well as shopping for specific products. What would motivate a person to purchase something over the Internet? Impulse, convenience, choice and availability, quality, price, security?

• Impulse. They're "just surfing" and see something they like and decide to get it now.

• Convenience. You make it easy to purchase the item. No need to go out in the rain or on icy streets, or wait till morning. Neither do you have to fight the traffic at the mall. This is one of the attractions of catalog sales, and the Internet might be viewed as a huge, but unorganized catalog. If you offer an 800-number or an on- line form you can sell services as well as products conveniently, too.

• Choice and Availability. Mason Shoes of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, has sold shoes by catalog for years, since they carry a wide range of hard-to-find sizes and styles.

• Quality. Do you offer a product or service at a higher quality that your customer can find elsewhere? Perhaps you offer unique features which make yours superior.

• Price. Do you offer a better value? It seems to me that due to the economies and lower overhead of Web pages, in many cases you can afford to offer lower prices than your print media and storefront competitors.

• Security. People like the Internet since they are more physically secure at home than they are on the street. But how secure do you make them feel about their credit information. Do you offer a Netscape Secure Commerce Server or other comparable security? The sense of insecurity may be causing many of your potential customers to hesitate. Offer multiple methods of purchasing: on-line form, fax, phone, mail. Write some reassuring words, such as the truth that there are unsubstantiated accounts of any credit card information being stolen over the Internet. That their credit information is probably safer than when entrusting their card to a waiter or gas station attendant.

Give people a reason to buy from you. If you can't compete on at least some of these points you won't do much business on or off the Internet.

The other side of the economic motivation is people's attraction to free products. A good part of the shareware industry is based on giving away fully or partially functioning products with hopes of enticing the user to register or pay for an upgraded product.

Information is sometimes the hook. PC Magazine's early strategy was to offer an article or two per issue as a way of getting you to come to their Web site, and then show the complete table of contents of the current issue with an opportunity to subscribe to the magazine itself. (Now they offer a large part of the magazine free on their Web site, but sell advertising space.)

Contests are another form of the same motivation, though you still have to advertise the contest heavily to get people to come to your Web site to participate.

The widely-used strategy in a nutshell: offer something for free to get them to come, then offer something for sale.

4. Social Motivations

A fourth motivation that draws people to the Internet is social, human interaction, closely related to the entertainment motivation. Chat rooms, news groups, and mailing lists proliferate on the Internet. The Web form of these is an interactive Web page where one can read others' messages and leave one's own on a number of topics. One of the freeware versions of this type of software is the cgi program HyperNews.

If your Web site is the chat center for your industry or product or service, it will attract people. The downside is that you may find yourself spending time deleting frivolous or derogatory comments that you don't want gracing your pages.

You might consider hosting a mailing list of customers or users. It provides great customer support and sparks repeat sales, though you'll spend some time to keeping the address list clean and moderating the discussion. As an adjunct to a Web site, this can be a powerful tool.

Strategies

Where do you begin? Write down a profile of your best potential customers on the Web. Who are they? What are their demographics? What are their felt needs? Their real needs? Their motivations?

Then design your Web site to appeal to multiple motivations. Just make sure you begin with manageable objectives. You don't want to dream big, and then find that the time to keep the site updated is so huge that you end up with an untended Web site. Consider starting with a single motivation, and then address others once you get the first stage of your Web site marketing strategy under control.

Why in the world should someone come to your Web site? Now you have some idea.