On Monday we talked about the testing process of marketers. There are a few reasons to test–Marketers test all marketing areas with a standard practice. They reactivate lapsed customers by using strategic customers and they figure out which incentive to use with tactical questions.
To Design a test, marketers need market variables such as different prices, a type of test that they want to explore, and a sample such as a certain demographic or population size.
Then they must establish test metrics by figuring out how significant this test is to what the marketers are trying to sell and setting a cut off date. After this, they must execute the test, moniter the results and then analyze and report test results.
In other news, customers go online and shop online for different reasons, some of which being to find information and to accomplish certain tasks like paying bills or contacting friends and family. Therefore, marketers must segment internet users. Some segments are:
- Rural residents and senior citizens are less likely to be online
- Teenagers are heavy communicators meaning they use sites like MySpace.com, Facebook.com and gaming sites
On Wednesday, we started discussing the 7 C’s Project that is due soon. The 7 C’s are as follows:
- Context – the site’s layout and design
- Content – text, pictures, sound, and video
- Community – the ways sites enable user-to-user communication (reviews, forums, etc.)
- Customization – the ways sites self tailor themselves to different users or how they allow their users to personalize the site
- Communication – site-to-user communication (customer service)
- Connection – how the site links to other sites
- Commerce – the site’s capabilities to enable commercial transactions
We also talked about why people abandon shopping carts when shopping online. Sometimes, people just want the final price and they only way to get the price + shipping and handling and tax is to go through the shopping cart. Once a person finds out the price, they get rid of anything in their shopping cart because they didn’t want to purchase the item, they were just curious.