Using Community as Retention


Everyone has an opinion, and most people want to know that their opinions are taken seriously. Some enjoy helping other people; others want to learn more about a subject, issue, or product. These desires cause people to gravitate to online communities. As word gets out that serious discussions are going on at your Web store, and if you can promote those discussions on your site, shoppers will come back on a regular basis to see what's discussed next. This is using community as a retention strategy.

In addition, adding community elements can be a key driver for users when making a purchasing decision. Word-of-mouthhearing from other users, not from your organizationis the best reason for a new user to buy from you. Keep in mind that a community works best when there's something to talk about. Establish a content area on your site about your product or service. Expanding your site in this way accomplishes two objectives:

  • It provides grist for the conversational mill.

  • It increases your search-engine ranking by generating additional content for searches matched with your keywords. This content should include archived issues of your email newsletter. Search engines looking for keywords even read PDFs.

Tip: A Bonus to Community Interaction

Sometimes, there's a bonus attached to this interaction with your site visitors: Some customers might actually end up taking over some of your product support role by helping other customers. Such interactions should be monitored, of course, and sometimes you have to mitigate wrong answers, but existing customers who use the product constantly sometimes come up with better solutions (and faster) than you might.


Discussion Boards

One use of community elements on your storefront is the discussion board. Discussion boards and forums (or message boards, as they are sometimes called) provide a bulletin board of threaded discussions. They start with a series of subjects or questions that readers can post their comments or answers to. Later, readers read the posts and add their two cents to the thread of postings, either to the original subject or in response to a reader's posting.

Visitors to your site are allowed to read all posts. But if they want to participate in the discussion, they usually need to register and get a username and password. When they register, you can collect some demographic and interest information for marketing uses.

Chat Rooms

Live chat rooms are another type of community element. This is the stickiest interactive community tool of all. Having a live chat room on your website can keep visitors on your site for hours at a time. That's a lot of face time for one Web page. During this time, you might place offers on the chat discussion page pitching your products or service. You might even join in the chat about your product or product category, identifying yourself as the merchant and offering to answer any questions about your company and its products.

Warning: Chat Room Downside

Chat rooms have a downside: Unlike discussion boards, where you can read all the messages posted there and remove any that are deemed unfit for your board, chat rooms are open free-for-alls. To supervise them would take a staff of people monitoring them 24 hours a day. To solve this problem, you can open the chat room at certain times of the day when monitoring is available.


warning: Hello? Is Anybody There?

Nothing kills a chat-room tool like people dropping by and asking, "Is anybody there?" and getting no response. That is why a chat moderator should always be present when your chat room is open.


As with discussion boards, you don't need to set up a resource-demanding chat room on your server or your hosting company's server. You can use one of many free chat services on the Net by providing a link from your site to the chat services server. As mentioned before, one such service is Delphi (www.delphi.com). Another is FreeChat (www.sonic.net/~nbs/unix/www/freechat/). You can download the free chat software from these sites and install it on your server. Users of your chat room do not need to download any software; they can use the chat room through their Web browser.

Discussion Lists

Although discussion boards and chat rooms require shoppers to visit your site, there are other ways to build a community with shoppers that do not require a site visit but that build loyalty and keep your Web store in their mind. One of the best and least expensive ways to build community is to use of an email discussion list.

A discussion list is a discussion board via email. Subscribers to your discussion list regularly receive emails containing comments that are "echoed" to every other subscriber on the list. Every subscriber on the list receives every post to the list. All posts to the list are done via an email message sent to the list. In a typical discussion list, the listserver software enables a member to send a message to the list address and then broadcasts or echoes that message to all the list members, all within a few minutes.

A well-executed discussion list can gain wide visibility and a very good reputation for your business and for the products or services you sell. Members of a popular discussion list could number in the thousands and offer a great opportunity to sell your product or service.

You don't need to place a program on your site; you can use one of several free services on the Net. One is Yahoo! Groups (www.groups.yahoo.com), which enables you to set up your own private discussion list for your shoppers. Consumers can send and receive emails, schedule meetings, share files and photos, or have private group chats.

Tip: Drop Your Programmer Install Programs Yourself

A multitude of free CGI scripts is readily available on the Web. One such site is Matt's Script archive. He has guest books, counters, discussion boards, and forumseven search engines for your site. Check them out at www.worldwidemart.com/scripts.


Three types of discussion lists exist:

  • Unmoderated discussion lists

  • Discussion list digests

  • Moderated discussion lists

An unmoderated discussion list sends all messages received to all members of the list. If the number of members on the list is small and the members are not very active, this is not a problem. But if it's a large list with active members, it could generate hundreds of messages a day and swamp the users of the list.

One solution is to create a list digest. The digest collects all the messages sent to the list, bundles them, and emails them in one email to the list members. The digest can be either daily or weekly.

Another way to cut down on the number of emails to the list is to have a moderated discussion list. The free listserver services provide what's called unmoderated discussion lists. That means that all posts that are sent to the list appear without any review. If you want to control what is said on the list or the number of posts sent to the list, you must bring the listserver software in-house.

Web Marketing Today (www.wilsonweb.com/reviews/free-lists.htm) has a good review of free mailing list programs. It explains the main features, pointing out differences and advantages of each listserver.

The next chapter discusses some ways to earn money from the shoppers on your site and how server logs can be used to increase the effectiveness of your marketing program.




Succeeding At Your Yahoo! Business
Succeeding At Your Yahoo! Business
ISBN: 0789735342
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 208

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