I'm going to recap the basics because marketing and selling are so intertwined that it's easy to get confused as to what is what. The line can be quite blur sometimes but put simply:
- Marketing is all about bringing in the leads; and
- Selling is all about closing the deal.
You could think of it as a continuum - it's commonly referred to as a sales pipeline and usually depicted with a funnel at one end. The analogy being you market to get prospects into the funnel (not all of them will buy), then qualify them into cold and warm leads (so you can prioritise your efforts). There'll be fewer hot leads (customers ready to buy) and lots of cold ones, hence the narrowing of the pipeline. The point here is with a fixed amount of resource, you'll want to apply it so that the flow through the pipeline is smooth and predictable. There's no point overfilling the top of the funnel (over-marketing) and leaving a bottleneck at the closing-the-sale end. Likewise, if you are closing all your hot leads faster than you can replenish this supply, you're not maximising your flow rate.
Seen another way, marketing is actually a range of business activities aimed at bringing together buyers and sellers. This is not to be further confused with advertising. Advertising is a subset of marketing activities, sitting alongside market research, media planning, public relations, product pricing, sales strategy, customer support, etc. Traditional advertising is essentially a paid-for, non-personal announcement of a persuasive message by a company to its existing and potential customers. Marketers are constantly looking at new ways to connect with customers (read
Loyalty through the brand), who are either jaded or savvy to the tricks of the trade. These cynical customers look beyond the superficialities of the product to the values associated to the brand when making their purchasing decisions.
In online retail, marketing gets customers to your store and sets brand expectations. Once there, 7 out of 10 visitors intend to purchase, so we need to close the sale. Paul Dawson blogged about the failure of retail websites to convert these potential customers (see
"Point of sale" online?). The biggest problem in the virtual sales process is the lack of human interaction. The successful sales guy/gal is an empathic, people-person. They establish rapport and trust; they respond and guide. As much as 90% of this is communicated non-verbally! So, you begin to see what's missing in stores online. We're struggling to advance customers along the sales journey by not providing guided selling, not addressing micro-barriers (those little customer worries that stop them committing), and focussing too much on product features and not solutions to the customer's problem.
Retailers need to change the online store experience or rather translate the elements that work from the brick-and-mortar world into the virtual world. We need to move from:
- 'non-personal advertising' to 'personalisation and targeted messaging'
- 'talking about features' to 'selling solutions'
- 'informing' to 'persuading'
- 'engaging rationally' to 'engaging emotionally'
- 'monologue' to 'dialogue'
- 'listening about the brand from a distance' to 'experiencing the brand at close quarters'
- 'us and them' to 'just us'
Of course, I'm going to hold up user-centred design (UCD) as an approach to achieve this new paradigm - it's my job. However, it is worth noting that UCD also got us to the old one. UCD in itself won't give you the big idea. You still need the clever clogs to give you the big idea. UCD is used as an approach in all sorts of industries and it works because it is generic in so far as it considers users within a system.
Bryan Eisenberg gives us another flavour that focuses on retail information architecture -
persuasion architecture. Arguably, it's UCD again but with a twist, a retail focus. He talks about meeting the user psychological needs and so on but the bit I really liked was the simple analogy of brick-and-mortar store layouts and how it's done to persuade customers to navigate the store the way retailers want them to. Clients are always telling me about the different types of users and the myriads of user goals/needs and asking how we can satisfy them all. The answer is always: develop a number of key personas that will handle the majority of users (remember doing some things well is more often than not better than doing all things badly) optimally and try to sweep up the rest gracefully.
We first have to acknowledge that if we mapped real customer paths through our website, it is guaranteed not to be a clean arrow from the homepage to the checkout. What we hope though is that the path isn't random. It should still broadly resemble the path as the retailer intended. We call the ideal path the customer journey - lots of research goes into defining this and it's a result of examining the user and the business needs (and often the technical constraints). I like to think of the customer journey at the highest level as 'stepping stones', like the ones leading a user through a garden. IKEA has taken this literally into their physical stores. Customers can still short circuit the paths but because the waypoints are clearly marked and the shopping process made explicit, customers easily orientate themselves and rejoin the journey. So, the customer journey is optimised in terms of merchandising, guided selling and user satisfaction. The customer journey tolerates divergence from the intended routing but if designed carefully customers will inevitably return as it
is ultimately taking them to where they want to go.
The mechanics of selling should be very similar online or offline. After all we are dealing with the same entities - products/services and customers. There are, of course, implementation differences and constraints of the platform but if customers see online as merely as another means of communication, then to them the messaging and the processes don't fundamentally change because they are now in front of a computer. By breaking down the buying and selling processes into little steps, retailers should be able to re-create a meaningful customer journey in the online world.