Maximize Your Web Tools
Good news for American multichannel marketers: The growth rate of the Internet continues to make China’s economic expansion seem paltry. After all, China is only growing at a measly 11 percent!
But there’s bad news, too: 10 years of uninterrupted, 20-plus percent growth has encouraged software companies to produce a seemingly never-ending flood, or plague, of new site features.
Who has the time, energy, money or development staff to try all these new site features? So how do you know which one(s) to work on? And how do you make sure you get the most out of the ones you do invest in?
Here’s a quick primer on how several catalogers are using six new Web features to make the upcoming holiday season a happy one.
1. Customer rate and review feature increases product page conversion 42 percent.
Much has been written about the benefits of allowing for customer product reviews and comments. But a few savvy marketers are beginning to take advantage of how these customer ratings affect conversion rates on the product page.
Kitchen Krafts, a multichannel marketer of baking goods that installed a customer rate and review feature this past March, reveals data that’s consistent with what several other Web sites have experienced.
What’s more, visitors to product pages that don’t have a rating at all are about 7 percent less likely to purchase the product compared to the overall site average. Therefore, consumers appear to trust products with good ratings much more than products with no ratings at all.
Smart marketers drive traffic to the highly rated products by executing the following:
* Featuring them in e-mails;
* Placing them on the home-page and highly trafficked category pages; and
* Using them as landing pages for paid search.
These marketers also are going all out to get more products rated.
