Читать книгу Low-Budget Online Marketing - Holly Berkley - Страница 9

After the customer service commitment, the most important factor to consider before starting an online marketing campaign is whether or not there exists a reasonable need for your product or service to be available online. Customers must find genuine value in buying something through your website, rather than dropping by the local mall or convenience store.

Genuine value really boils down to two key motivating factors:

• Convenience

• Cost

Before you try to sell your product online, ask yourself if your customers need to buy it online.

Is your product rare or hard to find in your area? Is it easier for customers to buy your product online than to drive to a local store? Is it cheaper to sell the product over the Internet than in a storefront?

A perfect example of e-tailers cashing in on a consumer need based on convenience and cost occurred when the new tobacco tax was enacted in New York in autumn 2002. The tobacco tax sent the cost of cigarettes skyrocketing to more than $7.50 a pack, making New York the most expensive place in the United States to buy a pack of cigarettes.

So what were smokers in New York to do? They certainly wouldn’t all quit smoking. They would just have to buy cigarettes outside New York. Since more than 78 percent of New Yorkers don’t own cars, the Internet became the perfect medium to distribute cheaper cigarettes, and 15 million packs sold online in the first month after the tax was enacted. According to Rebecca Lieb in an August 2002 article for ClickzZ, “In only four weeks, over $100 million was redirected from the cash registers of delis and newsstands to Indian reservations and other out-of-state vendors.”

E-tailers saw a need and acted. And the cigarette industry is not the only industry booming online. Overall online consumer sales jumped 26 percent from July 2001 to July 2002, by which time they were averaging $6 billion usd per month.

“This is one of the only us economic sectors experiencing double-digit growth this year,” wrote Lieb. “It’s because buying online increasingly fits consumer needs . . . Look at what’s growing: travel, computer hardware, and, most of all, financial services and information. All offer solid incentives to buy online.”