Learn From Those
Who Didn't Buy

By Ken Novak and Avery Cohen,
Metrist Partners

The holiday season may be over, but you've got one last present to unwrap. There's profit hidden in your holiday web log files.

My experience working for a major retail chain in the waning years of the last millennium taught me something worth remembering today: your regular customers aren't like the rest of the world.

Your regulars like you.

Your regulars understand your site's organization, have made it through your registration or checkout process, and have explored your site. They know what makes your company -- your products, services, and web site features -- special. You have met their needs and earned their trust.

Three important characteristics of holiday season visitors are 1) they are motivated to buy, 2) they are in a hurry -- faced with lots of options and limited time, and 3) they aren't only your regular customers.

Your Gift from the World Wide Web

Seasonal spikes in web traffic offer the opportunity to examine the effectiveness of specific elements of the site, such as navigation or search features, informational language, and sign-up or check-out sequences. It is in these details that the more casual customers are deterred or driven off.

That's why the holiday season is so valuable for seeing where your site's customer service elements can be improved. Because there are so many new eyes, there are lots of volunteer "usability testers" helping you.

And all you need do is take the logs, organize them into discrete sessions, and separate the unsuccessful sessions from the successful ones.

Get Specific and Get Results

Then you can see the way different people move through your site. You can measure the effectiveness of your web site features and the persuasiveness of your value propositions -- your ability to distinguish your products and services from the other web sites in your category.

We at Metrist have a proven process for quickly identifying effective features and problem points, and a history of helping our clients fix them.

For example, one of our clients offers a special discount on a (very) big-ticket purchase as their primary value proposition. Visitors who saw pages that explained the value proposition clearly at the top of the screen were significantly more likely to make a purchase than other visitors.

The client made a small change to their site, ensuring that visitors were clearly presented with that value proposition. The result was an immediate 5% increase in sales. And they saved a bundle of money on site redesign.

Another client wanted to offer a discount as part of an e-mail campaign. We ran an A/B test that showed that their response was actually higher in the non-discount version!

It's Not Too Late to Learn

Holiday web logs also give you a vivid picture of the ways visitors "browse" your site before making a purchase. That picture may include referral sources, a count of return visits to the site, and how much of your site a new customer needs to see before they are ready to purchase. This last item can help you learn to make your site more persuasive, earning customer trust more quickly, and leading to an increase in "converting" visitors to customers.

So, don't toss your holiday web logs before learning all you can from them! The people who didn't make a purchase are trying to tell you how to make your web site better. You just have to listen.

Act now...Make a better-selling site before your next peak sales period. Call Metrist Partners at (708) 602-3945 or (847) 414-4314 to speak with Avery or Ken today, or e-mail info@metrist.com!

We can help you
before your next campaign!

Metrist has built reporting systems that give decision-makers business-critical feedback every day.

• It shows the page in the context of sessions and relates it to site success.
• It customizes "Success" definitions for each business's unique needs: sale, registration, targeted activity, etc.
• It simply tells them what they need to know.

Ken Novak is a Principal Consultant at Metrist Partners. His more than twenty years of marketing measurement work have led to bottom-line results in the tens of millions of dollars. Contact him at ken@metrist.com.

Avery Cohen is a Principal Consultant at Metrist Partners. With over twenty years in IT Management and consulting, he has helped companies create value from their customer information by effectively applying business intelligence technologies. Contact him at avery@metrist.com.

Metrist Partners increases marketing effectiveness through custom Internet Analysis and Reporting for clients such as Peapod, iNest, Elsevier Science, and GoToCall.