Talking pages

The mystique that the Internet holds for many marketers is difficult to define. Some are lured by a quantitative appeal: information technology can measure individually each of its 26 million users. Others are seduced by its chaos: the marketing rule book has been flung out of the window.

But both schools realise that relationships are a defining quality of the Internet. In France their impact is recognised by a new synonym for information technology – relationship technology.

So how are marketers making use of the Internet to build relationships within their markets?

There is more to it than just wiring up a World Wide Web site to a customer database. A marketer should be making use of a variety of new media to gather data about a market, to pose questions, to listen and to respond – the important elements of building any relationship.

Underlying any use of relationship marketing should be a proper understanding of the new media used.

“The Internet is seen as being most effective when it combines thinking from all marketing approaches,” says Ajaz Ahmed, director of AKQA, a London-based agency that develops sites for the BMW, Virgin Radio and Durex brands. “Just taking a ‘broadcast approach’ or a ‘direct response approach’ or a ‘publishing approach’ wouldn’t work in isolation.”

“The Web is relationship marketing,” agrees James Thompson of Clear Cut, an Edinburgh-based agency that develops new media strategies in the drinks industry. Thompson believes many marketers fail to understand the Web environment: “The whole thing is a dialogue. The Web is not the same as publishing. We don’t publish our comments to each other, we converse.”

Dialogue becomes possible where the two parties share a common ground, interest or subject. Therefore it is vital to understand the users of new media. Thompson and his colleagues at Clear Cut have spent time “lurking”, and have monitored Web sites and forums that cover subjects and values similar to those associated with a brand.

Some brands, such as Elida Gibb’s Vaseline, have sites closely identified with particular communities. The brand is sponsoring university sports, so its site contains the week’s rugby, football and hockey scores. Stream, the agency that produced and maintains the Vaseline site, takes match reports and results from students and incorporates them in to the site.

An alternative approach is to out-source the content maintenance to one of the nascent “content houses”. These are companies, often offspring of Web developers, that produce editorial-style comment and features focusing on a particular market or demographic.

A clearly focused new media presence is a good start, but how is the dialogue initiated and maintained?

It is best to avoid some of the interactive excesses that are possible. A puzzle or animation, developed using the latest technology, may impress the programmer’s peers but it will do little to contribute data or to build the dialogue.

But a Web site can incorporate a number of elements, covert and overt, which help develop the relationship and inform the dialogue.

Web site visitors can be tracked and traced without intruding into the enjoyment of their visit.

Software such as I/Pro’s I/countapplication, used to audit sites, automatically give each visitor an identification tag when they visit a site. Users behaviour, such as which content was viewed and for how long, can then be recorded for analysis.

Technologies such as Netscape’s Cookies give each user of the company’s browser a tag which it shows to a site when visiting it. So a site can be aware of who the visitor is and how they behaved last time.

While such applications are useful for measuring the performance of a site, it is more helpful to be open with the visitor when attempting to get his or her measure. The most popular overt way is a registration form that must be completed before access to the site is allowed. But while this may seem a heaven-sent opportunity for marketers to interrogate the users, it can also be a deterrent.

One UK controlled-circulation magazine – specialising in communication – presented would-be visitors to its site with 17 questions on a form. But users’ online time is valuable, and they will avoid what they consider such a blatant waste of their time.

A user-friendly registration form can garner demographic data, but it should also promise the visitor access to further useful information. Ideally, it should have no more than five questions and should find out the e-mail address.

Simple design touches can make form filling easy. Instead of asking users to type in all details, pop-up menus (like those found on Windows-style applications) can list possible answers and require only a double-click to select.

Firefly is a Web site that has data-gathering and relationship-building at its core (http://www.ffly.com). It is based around an intelligent agent that assesses a user’s musical and movie tastes. The site puts visitors with the same interests in touch with each other, suggests bands and movies they might enjoy, and also puts advertisers in touch with the groups. Advertising banners for Guinness, Duracell and 13 other brands are tailored to appear alongside specific content. E-mail dialogue is encouraged by requests to submit personal reviews.

The reason capturing an e-mail address is so important is that e-mail is the most effective way of starting a dialogue. It is the “killer app” of new media. It is popular – 80 per cent of people connected to the Internet use it – and it is cheap. UUNET/Pipex, the Internet service provider, says that sending a ten-page document from Cambridge to London using e-mail is 23p cheaper than the post.

For marketers, e-mail is direct and personal. “When it comes to e-mail versus the Web, especially for delivering news, the difference is as great as receiving the newspaper directly on your doorstep versus having to run down to the corner to pick up a copy,” says Robert Seidman, a US new media commentator.

Marketers can use e-mail in two ways beneficial to building the dialogue of relationship marketing. The first is to use it to deliver a targeted message to a focused group of consumers within a particular market. The second, and more ambit- ious use, is to develop the fabled one-to-one relationship by maintaining a regular dialogue.

Despite its ubiquity within new media, it is only within the past six months that marketers have begun to wake up to the potential of e-mail for delivering marketing messages.

In the US, a number of companies are exploiting e-mail’s potential. Juno offers Internet users free e-mail software that also delivers an advertising banner. Click on the banner and users are linked to the advertiser standalone site (http://www. Juno.com).

However, Mercury Mail offers the most to companies wanting to build relationships. Its technology allows “multimedia e-mail” which hold both a message and an active link to a Web site. An invitation to return to a brand’s newly updated site can be acted upon immediately, with no need to fire up new applications (http://www.merc.com).

So making the dialogue as easy as possible is clearly a high priority. Thompson believes relationships can be fostered by judicious use of both e-mail and the Web.

“They should be used simultaneously,” says Thompson, but he is wary of many of the latest technologies, such as Java and Shockwave, which are used to enhance Web sites. “Agencies are selling on technology, bolting on so many whistles and bells that the message is not heard. It’s like a direct marketing company saying it could send a car through the post,” says Thompson.

The second benefit of e-mail is that it allows a one-to-one dialogue. Technology publishers such as Ziff Davis and CMP were quick to exploit e-mail. Visitors to their respective Web sites are not only encouraged to customise the content on the site, but to sign up for a weekly e-mail newsletter from the sites’ editors. These newsletters contain a guide to what’s new on the site, draw attention to topical features, and prompt use of long shelf-life features such as archives and market reports.

To encourage a consumer to return to a site, it must be worthwhile for them and content must be fresh and interesting.

However, in the future, a return visit may not be in person. Users may send intelligent agents to strip from Web sites the relevant content. Carefully fashioned branding will have been wasted, and only a personal relationship will overcome the challenge agents create.