June 2004

With competitive pressures increasing, the Internet provides a great opportunity to increase store traffic and build strong profits on marginal sales at an extremely low operational cost. It is an inexpensive advertising vehicle that can directly increase store traffic, especially when combined with opt-in Email campaigns. Furthermore, several of our clients are significantly supplementing their sales through direct Ecommerce sales at numbers that could justify opening a new store. Imagine the sales volume of a store without the brick and mortar costs!

But there isn’t a short cut on the road to E-tailing prosperity. It isn’t expensive, but it does take time, patience and a willingness to stay current with a fast changing technology.

Unless you are willing to pay for premium site submission services it takes weeks to even be indexed by your company name and a good six months to start to be ranked by the most widely-used search engines. A good benchmark is the best used search engine: Google. To know if you are indexed, simply use Goggle to search for your Company name and/or web site address. Without an index, customers that know your store won’t be able to find it without knowing your exact domain name.

A good indication of how well your site is recognized by search engines is to determine your page rank. We suggest that you download the Google toolbar. First, it provides for easy access to Google’s premier search engine whenever you open Internet Explorer. It’s worth having it just because it can blocks pop ups, but the real benefit is that it can be used to display their ranking for the importance of each page on your website, and, therefore, how well your site is being represented in searches by prospective customers. This option must be configured, but it is easy: on the Google toolbar, click on the “Options” button and under “Page information” check “Page Rank Display” to show the ranking of each page you display. This is also an important tool for comparing the success of your site to your competitors.

While your web-site can be an important marketing tool for driving store traffic, don’t forget to promote your website in your store and on your marketing material. Many people are now reaching for their mouse instead of for a phone book, and their keyboard instead of their car keys!

You should also maintain a registry on your site as a way for customers to add their name to your e-mail and traditional mailing list. A simple registration form will be effective, but you will be more successful if you provide specific advertisement exclusively through your email campaigns (and that doesn’t mean simply “Sale” notices). Be warned: you must provide an easy method for a customer to remove their name from your mailing list to prevent your Emails from showing up on spam lists. This could have disastrous consequences, such as having all your emails blocked even from customers and vendors who want to hear from you. This is what is referred to as “Opt-in” marketing because it allows your customer to choose to be added - and removed - from your email list.

The rules for being successful in search-engine-ranking changes daily, and in fact Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) is a fine art. While meta tags (Commands in the HTML programming language that instruct the browser or search engines to perform specific tasks, identify keywords, site definitions, page authors, plug-in requirements, etc. that are invisible to the user) and keywords have been important in the past, the current trend is searching the actual content of a page and measuring the recurrence of important words. This is important to consider when publishing merchandise details because pictures and graphical text is not read by search engine spiders (software that “crawls” the Internet and are used to determine what sites appear when one searches for a product or service). We recommend using a lot of text in a web-safe font to help boost your rankings. Furthermore, writing copy for a successful web page is unlike writing copy for other advertising media; you must use key words and descriptions carefully and repetitively (but not too repetitively; you don’t want to bore—or worse, insult— your intended audience).

We are looking at many ways to integrate web sites to the new Merchant Plus software. While Ecommerce is certainly important, we feel it has even greater potential as a targeted direct marketing tool that can be integrated with your back office Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module.

Smyth Retail’s E-tailing division can help you improve the effectiveness of your Internet presence.