3 Reasons Marketers Should Continue to Allow Guests on Their Sites

August 5, 2009 By Heather Fletcher, Senior Editor, Target Marketing

multipage

People also are accustomed to being anonymous on the Internet, says Neal Creighton, RatePoint's CEO and co-founder. If new visitors think they can find goods and services of equal quality elsewhere while maintaining their privacy, they're probably going to leave a site that won't let them be anonymous until they trust the brand, says Erick Mott, communications director for Emeryville, Calif.-based e-mail and Web marketing software company Lyris.

One way to know how much revenue a site is losing by not allowing guests, Ezrin says, is to look at how many people abandon the site when asked for personal information and then calculate that figure against the average order value.

2. Marketers often can capture enough data about guests to personalize their Web experiences. Cookies aid in this pursuit, Ezrin says. "They don't gather personal information; they use their own identifiers for returning and new users. But they can also generate the personalized product recommendations to a returning visitor."

Analytics also seem to aid the cause. E-commerce software company ATG, with North American headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., elaborates that marketers can personalize homepages for guests by "leveraging customer history, the referring Web site, adwords used, Google search term[s] used or banner ad[s] clicked. Dynamic homepages can be served up with content most likely to interest and engage a given customer." Personalized product recommendations at checkout can enlarge orders, too, says ATG.

3. Getting user-generated content from guests also can help a marketer improve products and services. "I don't think anonymity is the answer," says RatePoint's Creighton. "But I do think there's a place in between, where consumers will come in and they will give you some great information that you would completely miss if you tried to register them and then ask for that information, because a lot of them would drop out [before providing it]."

For instance, according to Nationwide Candy's Hanson, not only are the reviews helping provide him with high search engine rankings, they helped him realize that once, he had the wrong product picture matched to a completely different type of snack. "That costs us sales," he says. "I know, because a lot of customers shop based strictly on what they see."

Marketers also can ask guests, through nontransactional surveys, what they'd like to learn more about in order to meet customer needs, Mott says.

• MORE ON
• DATABASE & CRM
• ONLINE MARKETING