[thelist] Website ROI

[Diane Soini]

How would you measure the ROI of a web site? How could you be certain a 
sale wasn't affected by a web presence? I have gone to stores to see a 
product, then purchased it online. I've also checked something out 
online, then bought it from a store. Not always from the same company 
in either case, however. So I would think it is hard to measure.

At the company I work for, we thought we could just offer the product 
online and people would buy it. We were wrong. Turns out our customers 
need a sales person involved. But our web site is invaluable to the 
sale in the end because we offer web casts and demos and whitepapers 
and case studies etc, and some of this is used by the sales people.

There are marketing tools out there. Our company uses Aprimo. Aprimo 
helps us manage marketing campaigns. It can help measure the 
effectiveness of the web site, the email marketing and so on, and in 
the process, keeps data that can be used to ensure we're reaching who 
we want to, and not spamming people who don't want it. The web 
presence, therefore, can always be improving its effectiveness. The web 
site not only advertises the product, but gathers names and contacts 
for us so we can target other kinds of marketing, and target the 
marketing based upon what they were looking at on the web site.

I would think that that right there is a huge plus, but maybe not so 
simple to measure.

Diane


On Wednesday, September 3, 2003, at 04:04 AM, 
thelist-request at lists.evolt.org wrote:

> At 23:42 09/02/03, you wrote:
>
>> We have some numbers that suggest that selling $1000 worth of product 
>> per
>> month will allow a new e-commerce site to pay for itself in one year. 
>> So,
>> this would indicate a tipping point: if you/your customer believe 
>> that an
>> e-commerce site will do that much business in a year, it will pay for 
>> itself.
>>
>> Anyone have any good tidbits they'd like to share?
>
> You might also want to look for information on the other side of the
> risk-reward question... what are the risks, today, of not having a 
> site?
> I'm finding it increasingly frustrating when I see a product that looks
> interesting, I go to check out the features... no web site.
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