Sometimes when we look at all of the talk about online marketing, we hear about the need to get the visitor now, to get them to take the action that you desire at the moment they are visiting.
This way of thinking is coming to an end, at least with the big companies that sell items online. There has been a mention across the industry that a lot of the metrics used today are those used by the old direct mail and catalog standard. Now these big companies are saying that those things don't really apply to their online efforts.
This is one concern I have among those that are promoting the measuring and tracking of everything school. What do you do with someone that is looking for something that they want to purchase three months down the road, but are searching for ideas now? Do you measure that as failure? Do you put that into the database and your percentages go down as you hang your head?
The big online etailers are starting to see that many of their customers are doing that very thing. Many of them are abandoning the visitor-to-buyer conversion metrics in favor of other strategies and measurements. They found out that they simply do not measure things accurately at all.
So what is the marketing secret I'm talking about? In spite of the fact that we always hear about people making split decisions when they come to your site on whether to stay or leave immediately, there is much more to the reality than that.
I know that if you're a Wal-Mart(WMT), Sears(SHLD) or Target(TGT), that it's easy to see why they don't have as much concern about these things. And yet when I have searched online in the past, I have come back to many sites that I put in my favorites for visiting at another time when it would be more relevant to what it was I found there.
The point is that it is presumptive to think that because a visitor doesn't convert into a buyer, that they never will. Think through the implications to this, it can make you do a lot of things differently than you currently are.
Have you found this to be true with your experience? Let us know what you did.
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