Marketing Profs

Despite what marketers may want to believe, most who visit their Web sites are destined to have only a brief stay there.

The typical surfer drops into a brand marketing Web site for one reason or another, and then just as quickly goes on his or her way. The marketer is often left longing to start a more in-depth online relationship—which will probably never materialize.

Marketers can lament this hard fact of the online world, or they can seek gains from it. Just because a surfer's visit is short and fleeting doesn't mean that the relationship is without significant value. With a proper messaging approach, a marketer can shape even the briefest of site visits into a gainful interaction.

One such proper approach is to be continually agile with our messaging to short-term visitors through an iterative process of learning what works best at any given moment to create gains with these users, and applying these insights to future rounds of messaging.

The idea is to keep refining a site's messaging in a rigorous direct marketing fashion to squeeze the most gain possible out of even the shortest of contacts with a consumer on a site.

It is a simple idea. This trouble is that most brand Web sites are just not well designed to do this type of gain prospecting.

Brand sites tend to serve best the needs of more involved users while neglecting the needs of transient ones. Marketers are all too frequently just preaching to their choir through their Web sites rather than also seeking ways to influence the behaviors of shorter-term visitors who often are in critical states of consideration or early awareness about a brand.

Additionally, most of these sites lack an adequate technical infrastructure to carry out truly gainful messaging optimization.

Information architecture has done a good job of cleaning up site designs to better serve the navigational and experiential needs of short-term visitors, but this is only a start. Information architecture can improve the visitors' experience of a site, but it does not necessarily provide marketing gains in the process. It also assumes that these visitors' intent is correctly understood a priori and that this intent is unchanging over time.

The success of most Web site marketing messages is left up to the instincts of their creators, which in my experience can be a hit-or-miss proposition. In the same way, the fate of the short-term visitor gains is left to the vagaries of the creative process and the risks embodied in it when there is no significant performance feedback to direct its course.