The average Website is uninterested, nonreactive and incredibly forgetful. You’d almost say they are arrogant. Websites don’t care about the weather. But they should. And I don’t mean they should care about the weather surrounding their own digital world of server rooms and rack space. They should care about the weather around you, the visitor.
Lets imagine you’re in the business of selling heaters and electric fans to customers from all over the world. Its a fair bet that customers coming from countries that are in the thick of winter are more likely to be looking for a heater then a fan. Conversely, it’s also fair bet that customers coming from countries currently enjoying summer are going to be looking for a new electric fan to beat the heat.
But your website doesn’t care to ask if its visitors are visiting from a country in winter regions or summer. So you run a promotion for fans and heaters on the home page. Now you want to add an entire range of summer and winter clothing but you currently don’t any women’s winter clothing in stock. So you create a rotating carousel on the home page and in addition to the heaters and fans you add a summer mens promotion, a summer womens promotion and mens winter promotion and hope that users look at the carousel long enough until a relevant item appears.
Business is going well and you start to sell you can now offer free shipping to most countries. You also offer a newsletter for new customers. You also realise most people that buy summer sports equipment buy matching sports clothing. And you want to run a 10% off promotion, but only weekends.
But just like the weather, your website doesn’t know which countries to offer the free shipping. And it doesn’t know if your users are a new visitor or someone who is already subscribed to your newsletter. It certainly doesn’t know what day of the week it is, in the timezone that your visitors are currently in. It certainly doesn’t understand that people who buy one type of product, are in interested in similar and related products. That sort of information does not computer to your average website.
By now you are trying to cater for users based on geography seasonality, gender and age, specific times and days of the week, new vs existing customers and related products. Your home page already looks like a patch work quilt on steroids. The home page carousel rotates so fast that it features an epilepsy warning. Sales should be skyrocketing but it all seems a bit lack luster.
How do we make the web site care about the weather? How do we make this dumb machine respond to a customers world, their behavior, teach it to tell the time, make it learn to relate similar products. An effective Optimisation program is the answer. An effective optimisation program, aided by a robust and powerful optimisation tool can do transform a static, arrogant website into a living, breathing, dyanmic environment that responds in real-time to each visitor. It treats it’s users as individuals.
Subscribe now to find out how to launch and sustain effective optimisation programs and transform your web site into a intelligent, marketing genius.
