Learning from the ShopIrish.com Webstore
Web Marketing Today, Issue 9, April 15, 1997
Creative Irish Gifts is a unique specialty item catalog with a non-profit focus that began on our family's dining room table ten years ago. Being homegrown, we've always operated under the principles of simplicity (doing a lot with a little) and innovation. We realized the potential of a website, but didn't have much money with which to play. So I built one myself.
The Creative Irish Gifts website, SHOPIRISH.com (http://www.shopirish.com/), went live in October of 1997. Since then we've received more than $60,000 in sales directly over the Web. Web sales have grown steadily from 1% of our total business in the beginning, to 5% more recently. For Creative Irish Gifts, 5% annualized is a $200,000 chunk of business. Our out-of-pocket cost? About $8,000 in both site development and marketing.
Building, maintaining and marketing the site ourselves has been a rich learning experience. We've learned from both our successes and our mistakes. First, our successes:
Learning from Successes
1. Have a passion for Web marketing. This is the most important element. I love everything about what I'm doing -- from design, to programming, to interacting with customers. If I had anything less than passion, the site would not be a success.
2. Constantly acquire both technical skills and Web marketing expertise. It's a beautiful thing to dream up a Web marketing strategy and know how to execute it technically. I couldn't sit down and write any "fresh" JavaScript or Perl, but I know enough about coding to "re-heat" most any freely-available script on the Web and make it work for us. Cross-functionality of discipline is the way of the future for the cyber-savvy marketer.
3. Maintain site structure and aesthetic integrity. I'm not a designer by nature, but I do understand that people won't hang around (much less buy from) a site that looks shoddy and disorganized. SHOPIRISH.com is not cutting edge, avant-garde design; but it's got a "classy" image, sensitivity to download times and intuitive navigation. Customers tell us so.
4. Target your advertising. We bought banner space for several Irish-related keywords on Yahoo, as well as on the Boston Globe's website. Both turned out to be well worth the investment.
5. Study logfile statistics. I know exactly where people are coming from and what they are doing on the site. The information is readily available for me to make fact-based (vs. "shot-in-the-dark") marketing decisions. That is, I know what customers are interested in and can make sound judgements based on that knowledge.
6. Offer value and incentives. The Web is not so different from any other marketing medium. Offer good enough value and customers will buy. Offer incentives on top of good value and customers will buy more. Our sales peak when we announce special offers such as free shipping or web-only sales. We save on overhead when customers use the Web, so we use the cost savings to incentivize the purchase.
7. Communicate with your customers. The web marketer’s Field of Dreams is, "Communicate, and they will come (in droves)." We offer visitors the option to be included on our e-mailing list to be updated on sales, special offers and other new developments at SHOPIRISH.com. We communicate regularly … and those little reminders go a long way. It is a no-fail way to drive sales over the site.
8. Offer feature-based content. I have the unique advantage of being a photographer and have stockpiled a good number of Irish scenes of my own. So another "hook" for us is our "Irish Photo Gallery" and a "Send an Irish Postcard" system at the site. The latter in particular has turned out to be an enormous success. Site visitors actually drive more site visitors by simply drawing their friends to the site to pick up postcards. On top of good value, we give visitors more reasons to come to our site again and again.
9. Include a "request for catalog" option on the site. Hard reality: shopping from a Web catalog is still not as rich an experience as shopping from a print catalog. But one thing the Web does offer is incredible reach. By allowing new customers the choice of shopping from the Web or requesting a free print catalog from the site, the potential for customer base expansion is infinite. Getting a nice print piece in the mail also validates the legitimacy of a website.
10. Offer alternative payment options. Even though we offer SSL, some people still don't want to give credit information over the Web. Our "Call me for credit info" option allows customers to place a web order minus credit information, which we call them for the next business day. It isn't ideal for us, but once we have customers’ information they can use the "Repeat customer -- card info on file" payment option. While we don't have the top-of-the-line software that "remembers" visitors information, repeat customers appreciate not having to input card info with every order. Obviously there is potential for problems, but we've had very few. It's another way to build attachment.
11. Commit to timely, quality customer service. We respond to customer e-mail inquiries with quality information within 24 hours. We value the voice of our customer and give visitors feedback opportunities all over the site. I need to hear how the site is functioning, if there are any bugs, etc. So listening to what our customers say is critical to the site's success. Also, the positive feedback and encouragement keeps me going.
Learning from Mistakes
But it's not all gravy. Here are a few valuable learnings I realized the old fashioned way -- by making mistakes.
1. Don't use frames. Frames seemed like a good idea at the time I built the site, but they've caused much heartache. To my surprise, not all of our visitors have frames-enabled browsers. I tried to have some NOFRAMES tags for these people, but it just isn't adequate. Even worse, search engines are not indexing the sub-pages of our site because of the frames. By using frames we've lost much potential in terms of exposure. Don't do it.
2. Advertise your site to existing customers. If we could do it all over again, we wouldn’t just list the site URL in our catalog, we’d advertise it. When we started out we were tentative about the Web as a viable medium for shopping, so we put the URL in our catalog in with our contact information (just more small type). Our catalogs have been our primary form of communications with our customers and print only once a year, so there was no going back once we realized the site was proliferating. On our printed materials next year we’ll be urging customers to SHOPIRISH on-line. Why? St. Patrick would.
3. Cutting corners in the interest of time. I still have to go back and edit weak HTML I hastily coded in the early days. I always thought I could get to it when I had "more time." "More time" never came and before long I was looking at hundreds of HTML pages that needed editing. There are solutions, but it’s always easier to spend the extra time up front getting it right.
4. Not getting digital product images from the source. We made the mistake of assuming we could get the images from our print catalog designer in a digital format. Wrong. They wanted $50 per image to exhume the images from digital tape and put them on a Zip disk. Being a small operation we simply couldn't handle that cost for 300-400 images. I had to scan images from the catalog, resulting in marginal image quality.
5. Using a shopping cart that can't handle sizes. The products database is four times bigger than it needs to be and is a nightmare to maintain simply because I need a separate SKU for every size in the catalog.
Creative Irish Gifts (http://www.shopirish.com) is proof positive that you don't need millions of dollars to launch an effective Web marketing campaign. In fact, you don't even have to quit your day job -- I’m a "moonlight marketer." What does help is to have an already-existing direct marketing business in place, a good understanding of both marketing and technology, and most importantly, passion.
Rory O'Conner is the webmaster at Creative Irish Gifts at http://www.shopirish.com/. Copyright © 1998, Rory O'Conner, all rights reserved. Used by permission.
