Website Problems Reduce Marketing Effectiveness
Nearly a quarter of all marketing departments have been let down by websites crashing half way through their advertising campaigns, according to new research from technology group CatchFIRE.
The study claims that various technical difficulties with websites often reduce marketing effectiveness and damage corporate reputations. It follows high profile failures such as the launch of the Nectar reward scheme, where the website simply couldn’t cope with the traffic the marketing campaign drove to it.
The research shows that 86% of marketers cannot put a monetary value on losses caused by potential customers leaving web transactions unfinished due to poor site performance. A further 74% of respondents simply didn’t know how many users their web infrastructure could support.
Commenting on the findings, Nigel Thomas, marketing director at CatchFIRE, said: “Online marketing campaigns are now a vital part of the marketing armoury, providing a cost-effective mechanism to attract and retain customers. However, a lack of management of site capacity means that all too many campaigns achieve the opposite, crashing and driving customers away.”
He continued: “Marketers need to sit down and talk to IT departments to ensure websites can intelligently manage the traffic levels that successful campaigns create. Current behaviour is the equivalent of setting up a freephone number and then leaving the phone off the hook.”
The research also revealed that only a quarter of marketers involved the IT department in initial online marketing campaign development.
Recent research from Nielsen//NetRatings has revealed that advertisers are still failing to target older internet users despite the fact that the number of so-called silver surfers has increased by almost 30% since September last year (see Marketers Fail To Target Surge Of Silver Surfers).
CatchFIRE: catchfs.com
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