Page 185 - Electronic Commerce

Chapter 3

Using these guidelines when you create your site can help make visitors’ Web
experiences more efficient, effective, and memorable. Usability is an important element of
creating an effective Web presence.

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USING T HE W E B T O C ONNECT W ITH
CUSTOMERS
An important element of a corporate Web presence is communicating with site visitors
who are customers or potential customers. In this section, you will learn how Web sites
can help firms identify and reach out to customers.

The Nature of Communication on the Web
Most businesses are familiar with two general ways of identifying and reaching customers:
personal contact and mass media. These two approaches are often called communication
modes because they each involve a characteristic way (or mode) of conveying information
from one person to another (or communicating). In the personal contact model, the firm’s
employees individually search for, qualify, and contact potential customers. This personal
contact approach to identifying and reaching customers is sometimes called prospecting.
In the mass media approach, firms prepare advertising and promotional materials about
the firm and its products or services. They then deliver these messages to potential
customers by broadcasting them on television or radio, printing them in newspapers or
magazines, posting them on highway billboards, or mailing them.
Some experts distinguish between broadcast media and addressable media.
Addressable media are advertising efforts directed to a known addressee and include
direct mail, telephone calls, and e-mail. Since few users of addressable media actually use
address information in their advertising strategies, in this book, we consider addressable
media to be mass media. Many businesses use a combination of mass media and personal
contact to identify and reach customers. For example, Prudential uses mass media to
create and maintain the public’s general awareness of its insurance products and
reputation, whereas its salespeople use prospecting techniques to identify potential
customers. Once an individual becomes a customer, Prudential maintains contact through
a combination of personal contact and mailings.
The Internet is a medium with unique qualities. It occupies a central space in the
continuum of media choices. It is not a mass medium, even though a large number of
people now use it and many companies seem to view their Web sites as billboards or
broadcasts. Nor is the Internet a personal contact tool, although it can provide individuals
the convenience of making personal contacts through e-mail and newsgroups. Jeff Bezos,
founder of Amazon.com, described the Web as the ideal tool for reaching what he calls
“the hard middle”—markets that are too small to justify a mass media campaign, yet too
large to cover using personal contact. Figure 3-9 illustrates the position of the Web as a
customer contact medium, located between the large markets addressed by mass media
and the highly focused markets addressed by personal contact selling and promotion
techniques.

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