Online Revealed

Building strong online brand identity begins by incorporating a positive corporate or product image within the culture of an organization. Then you need to enlist support from every member of your organization to fulfill the brand promise and make it a reality.

Although many online campanies are adept at creating a positive internal culture, the important connection between online customer experience and the brand promise has often been overlooked. Most of us are probably experts at reading our marketing metrics that capture data about quantitative elements such as unique visitors and pageviews etc., but how many metrics exist that help us understand qualitative information like customer usability, and satisfaction with their experience using the site?

Jens Thraenhart is the Executive Director of Marketing Strategy & CRM for the Canadian Tourism Commission. He was also one of last year’s co-chairs for Online Revealed. Jens maintains an excellent blog where covers topics in the travel internet marketing arena.

Today I read an interesting post in Jens’ blog entitled “Marketers need to understand the Website Experience“. In the article, Jens quotes what he agrees are four critical elements that any online brand must get right in order to strengthen their customer relationships. Each of these items relate directly back to the need for marketers to ensure that they offering outstanding customer experiences on brand websites.

• Brand - The value of brand cannot be underestimated. A site with a lot of ongoing problems will lose its reputation quickly, resulting in fewer sales.

• Increasing conversion - If users can’t complete a transaction, or are frustrated with navigating through a site because they have come to a page with an error on it they aren’t likely to become a buyer.

• Customer retention - If an established customer is having consistent problems with the site then there is a good chance of losing that customer.

• Decreasing cost - Finding problems with a site can take a long time, especially if someone cannot reproduce the sequence of events that led up to the problem. Between calls to customer support, and work done by engineering and QA, this can be a costly proposition

No doubt there are many resources available that can help mitigate these important elements, but the most important action item you must implement to get into the heads of your consumers is to use your own website! If you are troubled with any area of your own site in terms of “ease of use”, then be sure your customers are feeling it 10 times worse.

While you are building your online brand, start using your own website - you might be surprised with what you find! Both you and your customers will be better off.