Crossing The Internet Chasm > ReachCustomersOnline.com

Crossing The Internet Chasm

Posted by TimSlavin at June 1, 2003

Today, on my wife's birthday, I took our daughter to shop for a gift. We wound up at Cannondale Crossing, a local shopping area of sleepy Civil War era buildings. As we drove out of Cannondale Crossing, I noticed a cute shop buried in leafy vegetation, Annabel Green Flowers & Finery. Besides flowers, they sell silk flower arrangements and jewelry my wife would love. We bought her a nice silver bracelet.

When I got home, I tried the website address for Annabel Green (http://www.annabelgreen.com) only to be confronted with a pop up asking for me to login. I clicked the cancel button on the pop up and got an error message page instead of a website. I looked again at the business card that I picked up from their store but did not find an email address. I happen to know how to use a whois query to find their email address. Most customers do not know this trick, however.

In 1993, Geoffrey Moore, a technology marketing expert in Silicon Valley, wrote an insightful book called Crossing The Chasm. Moore describes how technology companies must cross a chasm between a few customers inclined to try new products and the majority of customers who demand references before they buy. Many technology companies fail to grasp this challenge, never cross the chasm, and their companies fail despite great products.

My experience is that there is an internet chasm between customers who are online and businesses who do not have the time, money, or knowledge required to reach their customers online. This column, to be published on the first and fifteenth of each month, will provide practical how-to knowledge that will help businesses cross this chasm.

Annabel Green's situation is common. The internet can be costly, tough to learn, and needed know how hard to find. At the same time, research shows that millions of people are online, they have the money and the desire to shop online, and they like to get email from merchants they know.

Contrary to popular belief, there are no cost and low cost tools and services that can be used with a minimal learning curve required. This column will show you how to send email newsletters to customers and prospects who volunteer their email addresses to your business. You will learn how to write copy for your email newsletters and your websites. I'll also show you how to do online and email surveys and how to set up newsgroups to support your customers.

For example, consider any company like Annabel Green. Rather than immediately incur the expense of selling online, they could start with a one page website and devote their main energies to an email newsletter to drive store traffic with email coupons and product news. This approach would reduce technical complexity (one web page to design and maintain) and costs (low cost webhosting, a full featured and easy to use web page editor, no/low cost email newsletter delivery). Money could be spent instead on a designer for an html email newsletter design and a single website page design.

This approach does not work for every business, of course. It works best for companies that want to work with a small but avid group of customers, for example, local bookstores, florists, toy stores, hardware stores, and dry cleaners. Most importantly, a one page site and an active email marketing effort is a viable and less costly alternative to spending high hundreds and low thousands of dollars for a website.

This column will address the internet needs of companies like Annabel Green, small store based businesses with little or no marketing and technology support. It also will address the needs of companies like Advantage Homes, a large prefab home business that has marketing and technology support but could use direction to extend their offline marketing success to the online world in cost-effective and measurable ways.

Besides showing you how to set up a basic website and how to pick publishing tools that are low cost and easy to use, this column will show how to make your website highly usable and your content easy to find. I'll also write about how to find and choose a graphic designer or programmer to help with your internet projects. I'll also provide plenty of links in this column, and on my website, to help you do your own research.

I also plan to write about trends and research about how businesses use the internet. You will find case studies that show how others have thrived on the internet. And I plan to respond to questions you might have about the internet. (Send your questions to byline@reachcustomersonline.com.) Finally, creating an email newsletter or website is not enough. So I plan to write about how to handle sales leads generated from a website or email newsletter, for example, and other hidden topics. You will also learn how to plan, manage, and measure your internet projects.

My goal is to help you make the internet work for your business, to help you find and support your customers online. The main constraint that prevents most businesses from connecting with their customers online is a lack of internet knowledge and fear of technical complexity, not just limited funds. I aim to help you cross that chasm.

Resources Mentioned In This Column

Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

If you want to learn best practices for online marketing with email newsletters and websites, be sure to visit:

ClickZ
MarketingProfs
MarketingSherpa

[NOTE: I do not make money recommending any vendor or book mentioned in this column.]

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.reachcustomersonline.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1444

ReachCustomersOnline.com