Every website has two objectives: generating targeted traffic, and making sure the visitor is “hooked” upon arrival at the site.  E-commerce sites have a third objective: getting the order.  Clearly, the more visitors are “hooked” and the more orders are placed, the better the ROI on the website investment.  What’s the “Hook” to generate incremental sales or engagement?  Relevance.  

Let’s look at a familiar example.  My pet peeve is online travel offers.  I see a banner ad which advertises a $520 round-trip airfare to Paris.  My Visitor Expectation is, “what you see is what you get”.  That is, I’m promised round-trip travel to Paris for $520, and the expected outcome is that I will actually be able to book a trip to Paris for $520 round-trip.

Instead, what usually happens?  The site visitor clicks through and gets something else.  Usually, the link leads to the home page of a travel site where the visitor has to enter all the information in a blank form: departure city, arrival city, number of travelers, date of departure.  This is completely different from the expectation that was established.  The visitor is frustrated and leaves.  Your effort and investment are fruitless.  So a lack of relevance equals disappointment which generates lost sales with wasted effort and money.

What should happen?  The site visitor clicks through and gets a page that says “$520 round-trip airfare to Paris is available on the following dates”, with a list of dates which the site visitor can select along with number of passengers, etc.  No mystery and no surprises, and content which is highly relevant to the promise offered.

It’s pretty clear: high relevance = more sales.

On the web, the delay between the promise and the delivery is only one click away.  You cannot afford to be “somewhat relevant”.  If you fail to deliver what you promise, your visitors leave.

Delivery means:

-Meeting expectations on content

-Meeting expectations on presentation

-Providing an online experience that is relevant.

What is it worth?  Let’s look at an example: an e-commerce site that gets 1,000 orders per day with an average order value of $50.00.

In one year, the site generates:

1,000 orders/day x $50.00/order x 365 days = $18,250,000

The annual value of each incremental 1% of business is $182,500.  The obvious conclusion is that better online merchandising equals big dividends.  If you can get 2%, 3% or even 5% more due to increased relevance, the benefit can be significant.

Making information relevant and easy to find takes discipline and hard work.  What you see on the web is 10% of the work, the result of 90% hard work— the planning and strategy that go into it.  It’s hard work but worthwhile, and the ROI potential is huge.

Interested in finding out more? Send me an email or give us a call.