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e-HELP
How Sticky is your site
By Sanjiv
Rana
If your answer includes these 4 words-with hits, page-views, eyeballs, and even portals-it's time to refresh your thinking. Glib appellation it may be, but stickiness-keeping customers in the slippery world of the Net-is the name of the game. A sticky site lets the visitor bounce around for long periods of time. The idea of course is to retain users and drive them further into the site-until they're yours.
The peg is customisation, or personalisation. One that leads to the Holy Grail of the Web: valuable personal, family, and financial information entered by customers. Driven by delight, inertia, or just comfort levels, these customers keep coming back for more. They will come back to use your services, get advice, buy goods, and, yes, see more advertisements. The last one's important, because it is expensive to get new visitors through advertising. It's far more cost-effective to retain a higher percentage of those visitors as customers, and prior customers as repeat customers.
If that seems like par for the course, it isn't. While stickiness is definitely a barrier to competition, it can't be taken for granted. In the physical world, inertia could lead to stickiness. On the Net, the customer has the option of going to a competitive URL at the click of a mouse. The solution is to be constantly on one's toes, keep on adding innovations-and creating hurdles that translate into switching costs for customers. Bundling a host of services and offerings has led to surfers increasing the average time spent in Yahoo.com-the world's stickiest site, according to Media Metrix-from a few minutes in the first 2 of years of its existence to more than an hour currently.
Indian Websites have a long way to go before they can boast of such loyalty. According to a survey by IDC on the Indian Netizen (Your E-customer At Home, btdot.com, February 22, 2000) the highest proportion of surfers (30 per cent) spend an average of 10-15 minutes on a Website, before moving on. Only 5 per cent stay longer. Limited bandwidth in the country also translates into slow downloads. While that problem will be rectified over time, sites will still have work at building stickiness. Here are the Cs of stickiness:
CONTENT: It's at the top of the sticky list. A report by Forrester Research indicates that content drives 75 per cent of customers back to a site. Content should have relevance, there should be lots of it, and it should be constantly updated. Advises Amit Gundh, 24, Corporate Relations Manager, Indiamart: "Keep the site alive. And keep updating it, depending on the target eyeballs.''
Of course, it should be relevant and in the proper perspective. There is a lot of raw information available on the Web. What differentiates one site from another is structured availability. Elaborates Sanjeev Bikchandani, 34, CEO, Naukri.com: ''We focused on providing a lot of depth to our content so that it is not possible for a visitor to access all the data in one go and he has to come back. We also keep on updating the site regularly, so that there is something new for the viewer.''
A prime example of a stickiness tool is provided by Indiainfoline.com, which has packaged 1 million CDs free of cost to people registered on the site. Not only has this given the company access to a valuable database of customer information, surfers using the CDs have to constantly upgrading from the site. Sites that allow users to earn points and redeem them for gifts also find repeat usage going up. In fact, sites like Alladvantage.com, Elabh.com, and Pacfusion.com pay users to surf. Pacfusion, for instance, pays users to surf the site, in terms of discounts on e-Commerce transactions.
Or take games. Says Pankaj Rooprai, Director, Greymatter: ''When visitors play games with other visitors, they tend to stay the entire length of the game-a very sticky application indeed. Also, gaming forms an integral element of community as well.'' There's even search engines, the beginning point on the Web. While most sites, big and small, have one, the effectiveness of the search is a major sticky factor. Look at the recent success of Google, which has weaned away surfers used to Yahoo, Alta Vista, and the like.
CUSTOMISATION: The most powerful tool to keep consumers on your site. Quite simply, once surfers spend time personalising services at a particular site, they are less likely to switch to a competitor. Allowing surfers customise the look and experience on a Website is the way forward. Financial information is always a starting point. Take sites like Dhan.com and Satyam Online's Walletwatch-which provide surfers with a personal portfolio trackers. Then there's Indiaworld's Samachar.com, which lets users customise the look and content of their newspaper on the site. Says Prabhat Mohanty, 40, CEO, Digital Craft: ''Customisation puts the surfer in the driver's seat. And he sticks on for a long time just tuning the customisation.''
COMMUNITY: It's another sure-fire sticky application. When a site attracts a large enough audience of people having similar interests, they keep on coming back for more. Vortals have an advantage here, as visitors coming to their site have a common interest-the building block of on-line community. So, sites targeted at students, women, fashion buffs, or lawyers, have a simpler job of creating a community. On the other hand, general portals have to make an effort by segmenting visitors into groups to form communities. Adds Manosh Markos, 33, Head, TBWA Anthem Interactive: ''The chat room on Indiatimes.com is more sticky than the one on Rediff.com because it is buttressed by the offline coverage a chat or a poll get in TOI.''
CARE: Apart from building community, where users interact with each other, a site must build an ongoing interaction with the visitor. Continuous relationship marketing can improve stickiness by allowing marketers to build a relationship with customers over a long period of time. This means getting feedback and suggestions from the visitors on a constant basis, both online and offline and also sending reminders as pleasant surprises or utilities in the form of newsletters, e-mails, or even attractive offers that pull visitors to the site. Says Amit Gundh: ''It is crucial to make your visitors feel important. Opinion polls was one such way of doing this, which now, however, is becoming cliched.'' And finally, always, always respond promptly to the consumer. But don't overdo it.
COMMUNICATION: The most effective retention programs cater to a user's communication needs, like the free e-mail and messenger programs. E-mail is the single largest resource being used on the Net and is fast becoming a standard feature for almost every site (be it a portal or a vortal). While chat rooms are sticky-as has been proved by most of the big Indian portals-surfers have been known to move from one chat site to the other. Messenger systems on the other hand-like Marabilis' ICQ and MSN's Instant Messenger-are the ultimate tools in stickiness, and this could be the way forward for big-ticket Indian sites.
CONCLUSION: As we're running out of space, this is a C we just had to add. Always, always remember that trying to provide all services within the same site might in fact lead to a compromise on quality. For instance, many portals treat the visitor to a limited variety of news, as they do not provide links to news from other sources. Others, like Snap and MSN, go against this trend and feature links from all across the Web and thus, serve a superior news experience. Mastering the give-and-take required to make a service relevant, and easy to use, is the challenge facing the sticky brigade. |
