Available Marketing - the second 'A'
| 19 May 2009
| Following on from ensuring your marketing messages are Accessible where people are looking, as addressed in the previous accessible marketing article; these messages must also be Available at the time people are looking.
In the traditional offline retail store, people are looking during your opening hours and therefore you are “available”. However online researchers and shoppers do not restrict their research behaviour to store hours, instead they are looking 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So, unless your marketing messages are accessible at a product level (remembering that this is predominantly how people research) and can be discovered every minute of every day, you are missing out on prospective customers.
With traditional stores, there was no availability conundrum. Stores were 100% available (open) during the time people would look in the store (shopping hours). However, it is impossible to get the same 100% availability through traditional media; due to logistics, cost and the nature of offline media.
So the paradigm of ‘Availability’ under traditional media and with traditional channels, was based around two key instruments
- opening hours; and
- promotional campaigns.
Opening Hours – online must be always open: The online behaviour of prospective customers changes this paradigm. Opening hours for a retailer online (whether a customer is buying or just researching) should be 24/7. This 100% availability is a significant change from the 33% availability (9-5, 7 days a week) current stores have. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to achieve online.
Promotional campaigns – re-think your marketing messages for online: The difficult thing for retailers to achieve is producing the information the consumer is seeking in order to make a decision and making it available 24/7. This is where the traditional marketing behaviour of promotional campaigns, with defined start and stop dates, must be modified or supplemented to be successful online.
What happens to the millions of searches that occur when you don’t have a catalogue campaign or a sale event on? Are you closed? Do you not sell products during these “down” times? Of course the answer is you do sell and you do want people to find you. So you must have content, applicable to helping people decide to buy from you, available at all times. In sales times and in non-sales times, every day of the year.
This content doesn’t have to be discount- or event-driven. It could be your key inventory lines with images and product information and your every day pricing. But it must all be easily accessible on your site and through other channels and be available whenever and wherever somebody chooses to look for it.
Filling the gaps between marketing campaign pushes with consistent information to cater for the person seeking for “thongs” in June and “woolly jumpers” in December is crucial to optimising the online experience. There might not be many of these searchers, but they exist in numbers greater than you expect; so you might as well be prepared for that opportunity.
The beauty of the online channel is that for the first time you can reach all the people searching for the products you sell at the time they are searching, something no other media can do. This could be late at night, or at work during the lunch hour, or in the car via the mobile phone. If you have nothing available for people to find you are putting up a “closed” sign – when in reality, for most products retailers are open for business.
Having covered marketing that must be accessible and available; next week we shall look at the final “A” – Applicable marketing. Until then, happy selling.
This article appeared in Inside Retailing Online
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