Marrying Traditional Advertising to Online Sales (Part 2)
Web Marketing Today, Issue 53, February 1, 1999
This is part 2 in a 2-part series. You will also want to read "Using Print Display Ads to Point to Your Online Brochure"
While combining traditional print ads with an online brochure can be extremely effective, it's even better when they can not only read the brochure, but place their order online. Businesses with products that lend themselves to this kind of direct sales really stand to profit on the Web.
Level Playing Field
Large companies are moving to online sales. By Christmas of 1999, nearly every savvy retail chain in the U.S. will be on the Web if it can. Is there room for the small businesses? Is the age of the level playing field over?
Certainly the playing field has changed, and companies with money to invest stand to gain. But smaller companies can certainly capture many of the specialty niches if they do so quickly.
The Web is far too glutted with sites to rely on search engines alone to bring customers. And banner advertising bought at CPM (cost per thousand views) prices is too expensive for most products. One much underutilized method is to use ads in specialized print media to bring people to the online store, and once in the door, sell them the product.
Blind Eyes
As I was researching this article, I got the feeling that most companies using small display ads don't really understand how to use the power of the Web as an order-taking tool. Some of these owners are blind, and blind in both eyes.
The first blind eye seems intent on getting a print catalog in the customer's hands. After all, a print catalog is the way the founder built the business. I'm not suggesting that they scrap their successful catalog. But most catalog sales owners don't appreciate the face that they can have an online, up-to-date, order-taking color catalog on the Web for a fraction of the printing, updating, and distribution costs of a print catalog. And customers with fewer catalog requests means money in the owner's pocket.
The second blind eye relies on an 800 number to take the order. Agreed, there are many advantages to having a person at the end of the phone line taking your order and assuring you that all is well, and yes, your order is in stock and will be shipped promptly. However, the cost of this approach is several times that of taking the order directly on the Web. Companies that set up an effective order-taking system will be able to compete better because they can lower their costs. Yes, keep a phone ordering system for those that prefer it, but by all means develop an online order-taking capability.
But just because you have an online store doesn't mean you shouldn't be checking your vision, too. Many online shopowners are lost in space themselves. How can I get noticed? How can I get people to my site? Learn from the successful phone and mail order companies that presently inhabit the niches and use traditional print advertising. You may live exclusively on the Web, but the rest of the world purchases and reads periodicals in their areas of interest. That's where the eyes are. Capture them.
Right now there is an excellent opportunity for fast-on-their feet entrepreneurs to move into some of these niches and blind-side the old guard who don't understand how to use the Web. With 40% of American homes on the Net, and many with a recent experience of online ordering, many are ready to use the Web now.
Electronics
In case you haven't noticed, sales of online electronics on the Web is hot and price competition is keen. So how do you bypass the price competition engendered by similar sites lined up on Yahoo? Bring them in another door, print ads, where your prospect types in your URL, and yours only. Crutchfield ("The complete car stereo and home audio/video catalog," http://www.crutchfield.com) took out a 3-color 1/12 page ad in Home Magazine which cost them several thousand dollars per month. In this periodical they are targeting upscale women readers who are remodeling and want a new audio system. Of course, Crutchfield offers a print catalog -- they've been doing that for years -- but they also invite you to their website. Wow! Here is a complete catalog with the ability to order online. It's pretty obvious by looking at their site that Crutchfield spent some serious money developing this capability. You can see they are planning to carve out that market: they tout themselves as "the Internet's Leading Electronics Store."
Most small businesses don't have the capital to try to capture a market as large as consumer electronics. But many have the wherewithal to capture a smaller niche, and should follow Crutchfield's example of using modest-size traditional media advertising targeted to specific audiences. You can find out a great deal about setting up an online store in our E-Commerce Research Room (http://www.wilsonweb.com/research/), including links to scores reviews covering the better known shopping cart programs (http://www.wilsonweb.com/research/store-software-reviews.htm)
Single product sales
Many times I'll get a call like this.
"I have product I'd like to sell on the Internet."
"A single product?"
"Yes, that's all I have to sell right now, but I hope to add more products later."
I tell them that single products sites are difficult to make a success of, since (1) they're hard to find on the search engines unless the shopper is searching very specifically, and (2) you aren't likely to get repeat business. You just can't get people to find you -- unless, that is, you couple your site with some traditional advertising in niche publications with small display ads or classifieds.
Browsing through my wife's Home magazine I find a display ad for Pot-O-Matic, "Day to day use or when you go on vacation ... the best and least expensive system for watering house plants." Only $9.95 for two. The price is attractive, though a bit low for a direct market single-product item. They give an toll free number and a URL. It leads to a simple two-page site with a secure online ordering system. This is the classic what-is-it? how-does-it-work, order-now site. While the system has some flaws, they got the essential idea correct: use small print ads for single products that trigger hits to your website. Then provide the essential information your customer needs to make a decision, and offer an opportunity to purchase online immediately. If you can set up this kind of system, choose the right product, and select a periodical targeted to your potential buyers, you can have a winner. And if you desire to sell several single products, you can set up a site for each while saving money using a single secure ordering system.
If I were setting up a single-product site, I'd look at two low-cost e-commerce software solutions:
- IBM Home Page Creator (http://mypage-products.ihost.com). US $24.95 per month allows you up to 12 products, including hosting on a secure server. Available in 26 countries (prices vary). Packages to host a larger number of products are also available.
- OpenMarket ShopSite Lite (http://www.shopsite.com). The software is free and good for up to 12 products. The only cost is for secure hosting by one of ShopSite's hosting partners, at $40 to $50 per month. One option it allows is to paste HTML code and ordering buttons into existing web pages on a completely different site, and use ShopSite Lite as your secure ordering system. There is a clear upgrade path to ShopSite Manager which can handle hundreds of products, and to ShopSite Pro for thousands of products.
Using print ads in targeted publications which point to your online store allows you to bypass some of the difficult of bringing traffic to your store. Sure, there is a continual advertising expense. But when you compare it to the cost of banner ads on targeted websites (if they're available at all for your niche) you may find display ads cost effective.
Read additional articles from Web Marketing Today, Issue 53, February 1, 1999
