10 lessons of Online : Marketing in India

Which is why marketers worldwide have been trying to locate the keys to successful marketing on the Web. Being a new medium, many of the initial moves were based on the trial-and-error method and this has been true for most things that we have attempted at Fabmart as well, especially in our online retailing effort. I am highlighting a few points, which I believe will help marketers interested in this medium.

Lesson One:

Watch the mail

Since customers have many doubts about Internet transactions, the first crucial issue to be tackled is trust. What can websites do to build and retain the trust of faceless customers and make them come back again and again? This is not easy to achieve and requires consistency and fairness in all dealings with customers.

Most importantly, websites need to build a strong customer response mechanism, where every incoming email (the primary method of communication over the Internet) is responded to quickly. This is also the biggest failure of most websites. Survey after survey has shown that not just small start-ups, but even large corporates with focused Internet teams are guilty of not being able to set up flawless email response mechanisms.

Lesson Two:

Balance business and creativity

Another big myth is the website itself. Websites need to have commercial reasons to exist and this must be based on strong business logic. While designing a site, always, always keep the business objective in mind and make sure that this is being delivered at all times.

Web designers are likely to get carried away by their creative instincts and make a site which is very attractive to see. But if this takes ages to load (ages on the web is around 30 seconds!) and sacrifices functionality at the altar of bells-and-whistles, I can assure you that the website is not going anywhere.

On the other hand, a drab and dull website that's full of text is unlikely to draw repeat visitors. It is, therefore, essential to strike a fine balance between drab text, attractive images, technical design and site performance. If you visit www.fabmart.com, you will notice that all the content put up is only to help a customer buy better, which is in line with our fundamental business of shopping. Content for the sake of content is out! Over time, we have also learnt a fair bit of the kind of images that we need to carry and yet maintain a tight balance between attractive content and site performance.

Lesson Three:

Stay fresh!

While on content, the importance of freshness cannot be overemphasised. When a website builds up a steady community of regular visitors, it is important to make them feel that there is something new for them to check out every time. Websites that don't get updated regularly send out a clear message to customers that nothing much is happening here. Regular updates do not simply mean showing the current date, a process that is easily automated. Visitors do not need to know today's date as evidence of updation. The proof is always in the pudding and that means content all over.

Lesson Four:

Don't frighten your customer

The web is actually a marketer's dream come true. I read an article some time back that Amazon can do a lot more with its 30 million customers than Wal-Mart can with its 300 million because Amazon knows them well. Unfortunately, marketers get so carried away by all the data warehousing and mining that is possible that they go overboard.

Many websites insist on cumbersome registration before allowing visitors to browse. The registration forms ask for so much data to be filled in that eight out of 10 visitors probably go away. At Fabmart, we took a call right on day one that customers can do almost anything at Fabmart (except ordering) without registering.

Further, registration at Fabmart merely consists of seeking the name, address, phone number and email id - data that we require to execute the orders. In other words, we do not know our customer profiles. Our approach has been a little different - once a customer has transacted several times with us and is comfortable, we can ask him or her for more personal data, which in turn will help us to improve their shopping efficiency through tailor-made content. This is after the customers get comfortable with the medium and also start trusting us as a reliable shopping mart.

Lesson Five:

Stay clear of spamming

Email marketing is a fast-growing phenomenon simply because it is the cheapest way (yet!) to reach out to large audiences. Ads have very low costs (no printing, no postage, no envelope and no stationery). There are huge databases of email ids, which can be procured at very low costs.

However, beware of sending out emails to third-party bases. People on the Net get irritated very quickly and if their first experience of your online brand is through an unsolicited email (called "spamming"), it is likely that they will immediately form a negative opinion of your product, brand or service. Always send out emails to customers who have agreed to receive your communications and even then, every email must offer them the option to unsubscribe from future emails.

Many websites send out emails offering unsubscribe links, but the links just don't work! The continuous irritation of receiving unsolicited emails from a service that you wish to unsubscribe from will cause permanent damage to the brand.

Writing and creating powerful email newsletters to increase responses is an art in itself, but is unfortunately out of the scope of this piece.

Lesson Six:

Word-of-mouth works best

A very powerful tool to popularise your website (and I am saying this from our personal experience at Fabmart) is word-of-mouth. On the Internet, the experience is the brand and customers visiting and transacting with your site create an image based on their first experience. If this is positive, these people will tell their friends and relatives about it, who are far more likely to trust the words of known people than an unknown website.

On the other hand, there is something about the privacy that the Internet offers, which sometimes tends to bring out the worst in unhappy customers. They can just shoot off emails to their entire address books narrating their bad experience and bad-mouthing websites. In that sense, word-of-mouth is a double-edged sword. It cuts hard, both ways!

Lesson Seven:

Don't forget offline promotions

It has now been proved quite conclusively that promoting an online brand only online will severely restrict the audience you can reach out to. After all, there are lot more people offline than online and a website also needs to build awareness with them. Hence, there is no choice but to also use offline media like print, TV, outdoor, mailers, etc. to promote an online brand. There is, however, a catch here. Mass media is very expensive and even today over 90 per cent of the audience reached out to by such media are not connected. In other words, at least 90 per cent of the ad spend can get wasted. This is almost like a Catch-22 situation.

At Fabmart, we did use mass media but in a restricted manner and very quickly realised that for a pure e-commerce site like ours, awareness is of no real value. We need to get customers actually transacting with us. Hence, we shifted our ad focus from awareness building to inducing trials.

In other words, we moved from ads talking about Fabmart and online shopping to offer-led communications. For example: "Buy this and get this free", "Try this and you will get something extra". This change has worked wonders for us, and our mass media spends have become a lot more effective in terms of responses. Incidentally, the Web is perfect to track ad responses almost instantaneously.

Lesson Eight:

Banner ads can work, but...

Another hyped area has been banner advertising. My views on this are quite clear. While banner advertising as such is increasing and there is potential, one reason why this has not worked well enough is because agencies and brand managers creating online ads are just not comfortable enough with this medium.

The medium is still at its infancy in India, somewhat akin to where TV advertising was in the mid-seventies. You may recall that in those days, TV ads were largely static posters with the voice-over being the same as in the radio jingle. Existing radio jingles were adapted to TV, but today TV advertising has its own approach.

Similarly, it is important for agencies and brand managers to not only allocate separate online budgets but also develop independent creatives, which is aimed towards utilising the interactive potential of this medium. Till this happens, we will continue to see banner advertising just not working well enough for advertisers. This is simply because existing messages and creatives already developed for print or TV are getting adapted as banners for the web.

Lesson Nine:

Loyalty can be built on the Net

A lot has been written about how your competition is just a click away on the Internet. Hence building customer loyalty is impossible. I don't agree with this. Amazon is a clear example of how over time customers continue to shop with Amazon even if the same product may be listed at a lower price at other websites. As long as a website provides genuine value, it is certainly possible to build loyalty on the Internet as well.

Lesson 10:

Constantly check

what works!

Finally, the big debate. Is marketing on the web the same as marketing in the offline world? The answer, as always, in such issues is the same - Yes and No. A lot of things are similar and what works in the offline world can work in the online world as well. On the other hand, a lot of marketing theories get completely turned on their heads on the Internet. The best way out is to approach the Internet and online marketing from zero base.

Based on the assumption that this is an entirely new medium, keep trying different things regularly and keep measuring them very closely. If something works, continue; if it does not, just forget it and move to the next idea. This really has been our biggest learning from the time we set up our own shop on the Net. l

(The author is vice-president - marketing, Fabmart Pvt Ltd, and online retailing website)

(This article was first published in the April 2002 issur of Indian Management magazine.)