Dear Mr. Elbaz,
Consider these facts. Women control much of the purchasing power-as much as 80%--when it comes to cars, homes, groceries, health-related products and more. When iWin.com launched a special women's section on its web site, traffic to the site increased 30% in just one month! When Hollywood.com added a Women in Film section, advertisers such as iVillage saw click-through rates grow to 52%!
And here are two more facts to ponder. A third-party survey conducted for FloNetwork found that 91% of the women online like opt-in email newsletters. A similar study recently conducted by Pew discovered that 65% of women like email in general, as opposed to 55% of men.
The point is, especially if you have a retail-oriented site, you can't afford to ignore women as a separate market. According to PC Data Online, women between the ages of 35 and 44 were the dominant online retail demographic, sending online stores with a large female customer base, like JCPenney.com and BestBuy.com, into the top 20 web sites in terms of sales for July 2000. If you want to tap into that kind of purchasing power, here are some tips.
As I said above, women like opt-in email newsletters. If you don't offer one, you should. Make sure the subscription form is easy to fill out and make sure it's accessible from every page on the site. You also need to make sure that the newsletter's tone and content is woman-friendly. Women tend to prefer content written in a friendly, personal voice and they value practical information much more highly than they do information about your company. You also should consider buying ads in other companies email newsletters, perhaps especially those that are text-only. Studies show that people are more likely to read a text ad than a banner ad.
Another important strategy in attracting women to your site and getting them to come back has to do with branding, and it resembles advice I've given in this column before: If you already have an offline brand, make sure your website is as strongly identified with your bricks and mortar presence as possible. Women prefer to buy brands they know.
If you don't have an offline brand and/or your business is new or small enough not to be known by most people, consider a partnership with a more established site. There are two primary forms of partnerships:
· Microsite Media Buy, in which you pay your partner to build a special section of their site of which you are the only sponsor;
· Co-Branding, in which your site appears as part of your partner's site. Depending on the arrangement, your logo may appear on the site or your partner will construct things so it appears that they own the site 100%. In either case, you share the revenue.
There are now more women than men on the net. To ignore that fact and continue to market to both genders as if there were no differences between them is to lose an opportunity to cash in early on what will be one of the driving forces behind the ultimate success of the online retail market. If your business is online, that's a risk you can't afford to take.
David Stein is president of Automatic On-Line System, a full service web design, marketing and maintenance company. He can be reached at (718) 361-3091 or by e-mail at internetdoctor@autoonline.net.