E-commerce: Roll Out the Red Carpet

Opening your site to customer involvement

June 2007 By Molly Joss

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The idea that word of mouth helps sell products and services isn’t new. Asking a neighbor, friend or colleague how they like their new car or new wireless service provider is standard party or office cooler conversation. But as the online environment enters a new phase of maturity in the consumer’s life (some call it Web 2.0 or even 3.0), marketers have learned that they can leverage this social connectivity to enhance their audience’s experience, glean consumer feedback and even boost sales.

Although customer reviews and comments have been appearing on some Web sites for as long as eight years, consumer-generated content still is not something every online merchant has incorporated into its Web strategy, says Ken Burke, CEO of MarketLive, an e-commerce software and consulting firm in Petaluma, Calif. One of the biggest reasons why merchants haven’t opened their sites to customer involvement is uncertainty about how to manage the flow of comments. James Belcher, senior analyst at eMarketer, a New York City market research and trend analysis firm that covers online marketing and e-commerce, characterizes this unease as wariness toward ceding control—or at least concern regarding how customer involvement might affect carefully honed marketing messages. Corporate apprehension may not be entirely misplaced, Belcher states, and he cautions merchants to “think it through before they throw the doors wide open.” The best results come from making customer interaction part of an overall marketing strategy. “Decide what you want to accomplish and what is possible and then start off on a test basis,” Belcher says.

Reviews and comments are the most common forms of customer involvement, but the gamut of methods includes polls, contests that invite participation, blogs, and even pictures and video. Garrick Schmitt, vice president of user experience at Seattle-based interactive marketing agency Avenue A|Razorfish, says the overall goal is to increase customer engagement and to foster a community that is passionate about your product or company. Methods that facilitate communication between companies and customers work better than one-way communication, he adds. One example of two-way communication is a company blog in which writers responds to reader comments.



Interaction Benefits

According to eMarketer research from late 2006, adult Internet users rank sites with customer-generated advertising as more customer-friendly, creative and innovative than sites that feature only professional advertising and corporate-driven messaging.

That’s great for traffic-building goals, but what about sales? If you want to give online shoppers more reasons to buy from your site, then customer-generated reviews and comments can help facilitate the process. A Janaury 2007 Forrester Research study titled “How Damaging Are Negative Customer Reviews?” indicates that 76 percent of shoppers use online reviews to guide purchasing decisions. Since shoppers pay attention to online reviews and comments, it makes sense for companies to allow interaction on their sites and to use reviews and comments in their marketing, explains Brett Hurt, CEO of Bazaarvoice, a company that hosts user-generated content. He reports that Burpee Seeds, a Bazaarvoice customer, saw clickthroughs rise 43 percent when it put customer-generated product reviews in its RSS feed. What’s more, keeping customers on your site as much as possible during their shopping process makes good business sense, he counsels. “Don’t ask them to go elsewhere” for product comparison information, he explains, since they might not make their way back to your site when following through with their purchase.

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