1. As we emphasize for all visual communication, the most important parts of your message are the headline (like e-mail), illustration(s), offer, and price. Your Web site is the perfect medium for testing all four!

2. Your home page illustration must reinforce your main benefit message. If not, find one that does and test it against any other. Sometimes you do better without a picture. Test!

3. Is your type too small (a frequent mistake), or perhaps too large? Try to use nothing smaller than what your computer calls 12-point size. The size you are looking at now is 11. Very large type for things other than headlines and subheads can be harder to read and may hurt response. Test!

4. Does serif type, such as you are reading here, bring better response than sans serif? Practically every newspaper, magazine, and article uses such serif faces, yet many designer prefer sans serif for its artistic quality. Don’t let them! Your site’s job is to communicate, not to make reading a challenge.

5. Long lines of reading matter are uncomfortable for reading. Shorter is better. When in doubt, test!

6. Experiment until you have the right “click here” labeling for your audience. Is “Q&A” better than “FAQ” (frequently asked questions)? Does it help to spell them out rather than use initials? How will you know, if you don’t test?

No Design Committee, Please! A Web site designed by committee may not be a Mars probe, but for all the difficulty in getting it approved and launched, it might as well be. After final agreement on what to send out into the Internet, the committee pulls the big red switch, sees it appear on their screen, and applauds the wonder they have wrought. All too often, there it remains, untested, because any change requires the same committee’s approval, and no one wants to go through all that again. That is no way to design your site and certainly no way to keep it effective

Assigning Responsibility to Get Results Producing an effective Web site, like putting together a successful catalog, is very hard. Things constantly change in the customers’ world and yours. It is unlikely you will get everything right the 2nd or even 22nd time. Continual testing and instant application of the test results is vital to sales success, something almost impossible within the standard corporate structure and committee supervision. Every member has to prove his or her expertise by offering mutually contradictory instructions—all of which must be carried out, then anointed by management so that they can’t be changed without again going through the same procedure. Rather than that, let a top marketer make the decisions. Perhaps pay him or her by results, such as the number of site visits, the number of contact requests, or the number of sales. But begin with reasonably modest goals. We are all still in the learning stage and do not know what to expect. In any case, give your marketer a big raise after a year or find someone else.

Why Testing the Message Is Not Enough The study that showed a 28 percent failure of Web shopping attempts—customers actually trying to make a purchase—also showed that they were thwarted by something on the Web site. Here are three steps you can take to avoid that fiasco:

1. Have your Web site designers use the site to learn its efficiency and suggest improvements. Daily use is best; weekly is the minimum. Get weekly or monthly reports. Of course you will have to pay for them, but if that’s not worth it, you have picked the wrong design group.

2. Use the site yourself. Have staff do it also. Get immediate reports of any problem.

3. Do not accept “hardware” as an excuse for systems failure. Although that can be the case, especially when a site becomes overwhelmed with visitors, it is unlikely to happen to a smaller business. Almost invariably, it’s the design. So be a do-it-yourself design checker. “Doing business” on your Web site is no different from doing business in any other way. You won’t know the problems with systems and personnel unless you use the product or service. We promise you’ll be surprised, sometimes happily.

What a Good Site Is All About In many ways, a good Web site is like the old time neighborhood butcher: He recognized you by name, knew what you liked, made sensible suggestions about what to buy, and kept you coming back as a satisfied customer. As far as your budget permits, have your Web site do the same. No matter how you feel about Ama zon.com, you will be wise to order from their site at least occasionally to see all the things they do right.

• The site makes personal recommendations.

• It recognizes customers when they come back.

• Customer service is consistently top-notch. For instance, when a customer orders more than a single copy of an item, Amazon’s program asks if one is a gift. Then, if you want it shipped by them, you enter the address right there and add the message for a gift card without going back to the beginning. All the things direct marketers learned before the Internet was developed apply even more so on the Web. If your site does not make it easy, fast, and simple, your Web visitors will leave with clicking speed. Just as much as your site needs a designer, you need the Web marketer for success.

How Online Marketing Response Differs from Direct Mail

Although direct mail experience is invaluable in its application to e-commerce, the differences are equally important. In direct mail, the results usually follow a predictable bell curve. Typically, by the fourth day of responses you expect 20 percent of the orders and plan ahead another week for the peak before responses curve down. There is time to stock up for likely winners. On the Internet, a successful promotion brings immediate response. The majority of sales come within a single day. You do not have time for anything except the filling of orders, which must, by law, be done within a very few days. Often the success or failure of your online advertising is apparent within a few hours, something direct marketers love because it gives them an immediate opportunity to fix what isn’t working, then apply what does work to the next thing they do.

The Consumer Is in Control, but So Are You

Always keep in mind that e-commerce puts your consumer totally in control as never before. They can instantly go somewhere else. Though they are unlikely to “shop” through a hundred choices, they are likely to visit a few other sites because they don’t have to walk or drive. The saving factor for the Internet merchant is that practically no one wants to spend hours sitting there, waiting for downloading, new instructions, and gathering merchants’ information. Give them a benefit reason to go to you and stay with you by making it easy to find the products and the service they want. Do that and you are likely to keep them right there, especially for repeat visits.

Requests for More Information

Give your Web visitors a variety of “Send me more information” options. If possible, design your site to give the information online. But no matter how explicit you have made that information, make it easy for someone to ask for more. Probably the information was right there on the site, but lots of people are still more comfortable with something written, rather than on a screen. So if you don’t have more than what is on the site, make a hard copy and fax or mail it with your phone number, in case they still need help.

How to Get Repeat and Add-On Sales

Whatever your business or its size, whether you lease heavy equipment to construction companies, supply popcorn to movie theaters, or are a neighborhood retailer, there are purchasing patterns you know and others only a computer record will reveal to you. Smaller businesses as well as large can have this major advantages of e-commerce—the individual customer’s sales history. It can also let you know immediately who your best customers are. If you wish, it can even be programmed to tell—from your sales patterns—the often surprising things customers and prospects are likely to appreciate knowing about in addition to what they have asked about or bought. When limited to Web site sales, many computer programs can do this automatically. However, integrating e-commerce, telemarketing, mail, personal sales, and customer service into a customer’s record and then applying all that to inventory control requires the much more sophisticated “portal” technology, such as that offered by Aspect Communications (www.aspect.com). Fortunately for smaller businesses, this formerly expensive technology is becoming more accessible and cheaper and should certainly be explored.