Ciceron Blog Archives

Are Your Lights On?

At 1:41 AM it dawned on me (pardon the pun) that others were probably awake too, and some were probably visiting my and all of my clients' web sites. Then it dawned on me, "who's minding the store? Are the lights even on?"

That's the difference between traditional marketing and Internet marketing: the Internet's always "on". On the Internet, your marketing "campaigns" are always happening, even when you're sleeping, like a Target store that stays open 24-7, 365 days a year. (A retail concept that I find amazing when you really think about it. It-never-closes.) On the other hand, traditional marketing campaigns are scheduled, controlled, and linear.

Look at your statistics someday and think about what's going on while you're sleeping. I checked. In Ciceron's case, I had more visits from people between 12-1 AM than 5-6 PM. Overall I had many more people visiting my site on off-work hours than on-work hours.

What's up with you people! Are you all insomniacs? Do you only think about Internet marketing at night? Or maybe my site is more appealing to coffee-infused Europeans than sleeping Americans.

The real point of my observation here today is that you don't control the time when your web site is getting used, by whom, or their intentions. They may be there to learn, to buy, to spy, to download, or just happen to visit by mistake. So, have you made their visit worthwhile? Has their visit been worthwhile for you?

Digging a little deeper into my site metrics I might learn that people research products and services during the day (I'd know this by looking at my site usage statistics to figure out what time of day product pages are accessed or PDF files are downloaded) but go home at night to buy or contact me (by looking at my shopping cart timestamps or time of incoming form submissions). Better yet, I'd look at even more sophisticated tools that tie all of that together. (More on that next month.)

What about international B2B scenarios? Say I'm a buyer in Hong Kong visiting your site and request customer support through the web. Do I have to wait until "American" time to expect a response? Whereas, if I were a similar customer in New York, might I get a more immediate response?

I'm not suggesting that someone needs to be on-call at all hours of the day and night, but I am suggesting that if you learn that your customers are either international buyers or American nightowls, you need to accommodate the time difference through the following:

Best Case - You have someone available overseas to respond to customer inquiries.
Next Best Case - You have automated customer response emails that have some intelligence built into them, helping customers navigate to areas where they can help themselves until you have a person available to assist.
Marginally Acceptable Case - An automated response to online inquiries indicating your hours of operation, and when they can expect a response.
Totally Unacceptable Response - No immediate response with no clear expectation of when or if a visitor will hear back from you.
The fact is until you know your customer behaviors, you are most likely responding as though your site is only open on your time. For some people, this may be acceptable. For others, it may not. Either way you need to know and respond accordingly.

I know. It's become my mantra: know your customers' behaviors. Don't treat them like second-class citizens. They're world-class citizens -- literally. Research is telling us consistently over and over again that the Internet is influencing buying decision more and more each day, each month...each and every hour of the day and night.

Back to bed...