Management Goals

With few exceptions (Johnson, 2001), it has been others such as information technology (IT) researchers, and not marketers, at the forefront of studying Web site or e-mail design. This is problematic . The marketing function has an external focus and plans online experiences that further company goals. If marketing academics cede the study of consumer-Web site interaction to IT researchers, and if marketing practitioners cede control of companies' Internet marketing to IT professionals, this is a loss for marketing as a discipline and for companies. This loss grows when one considers new electronic marketing forms such as mobile phones and Interactive TV. Inter-disciplinary books such as this help bridge the gap between disciplines.

How does marketing optimize firms' online efforts? Customer acquisition and customer retention serve as two organizing principles. The former involves awareness, such as advertising, public relations, online banners, registering the site with appropriate search engines and an intuitive Web site address (Hanson, 2000; Ilfeld & Winer, 2002; Murphy, Raffa, & Mizerski, 2003). The latter, customer retention, is the heart of the forthcoming section.

Web site goals drive the customer retention strategy, whether to induce visitors to click on particular links or click on many pages. E-mail marketing has similar goals as well as a 'viral' goal whereby users forward clever e- mails that the firm produces (Godin, 2001). Management goals for the site or the e-mail influence the subsequent design of the site, or e-mail communication. A brief summary of Web site and e-mail goals follows .

Realizing Web Site Goals

• Entire Sites. Numerous research issues and practical questions center on the organization of a site (Goldfarb, 2002; Johnson et al., 2003). A Web master has several options for a site's menu structure. The menu could be deep, with many sublevels, or shallow with more breadth on each page. Menus could also be alphabetical, or according to other semantic principles.

The ideal site structure depends on the Web site goal. For example, should a site have a small number of large pages or a large number of smaller modules? The decision in this case hinges on whether management is trying to get visitors to notice particular links and filter visitors towards these key links, or whether management wants to maximize page views.

Although other scientists investigate these issues from cognitive (Pirolli & Card, 1999) or human-computer interaction (Scheffelmaier & Vinsonhaler, 2002, 2003) perspectives, marketers would tend to approach Web site navigation based on the business goals discussed above. If the site sells advertising, the firm can draw upon the Economics of Surfing (Adar & Huberman, 2000) to build a navigational structure that increases page views, and the resulting increased advertising revenue. Yet, if the goal is to funnel visitors to specific pages, other navigational structures might be optimal.

Pirolli and Card (1999) developed a cognitive information model for Web navigation based on the analogy of a foraging animal. For such an animal, the calories spent acquiring food must be less than the calories gained by eating that food. The Web visitor, trying to capture the scent of desired information or entertainment, constantly decides whether to stay on a given site or leave for more fertile searching grounds. A site should provide a scent to the visitor, that is, provide a priori information about pages not yet seen. How firms provide this scent - consistent with the site's marketing goals - is an open , empirical question, answerable using the experimental methods later discussed in the chapter.

• Individual Pages. At the individual page level, management faces numerous decisions. Social pressures and bandwagon effects often drive management decisions to have a Web site, built on fashion and fad rather than addressing management goals (McBride, 1997; Murphy, Olaru, Schegg, & Frey, 2003). Artists or IT professionals may build pages according to creative whim, blindly deciding the number of links on a page, the type and style of links, format for information, positioning on the page of various elements and use of images. The demise of Boo.com, for example, illustrates fashion rather than function driving the design process (Stockport, Kunnath, & Sedick, 2001).

Marketers should conceptualize a Web page not as a fashion statement but as a supermarket of competing and complementary links. Click-through rates represent the market shares of links on the page. Similar to a store manager, the site manager who controls what goes on the page should optimize pages to meet company goals. In addition to optimizing individual or total clicks, another tactic is strengthening relationships by having the visitor bookmark the page (Garofalakis et al., 2002; Murphy & Hofacker, 2003).

• Particular Links . Web log data record clicks to individual links. It is simple to investigate how myriad independent variables pertaining to wording, layout or formatting of specific links or banner ads influence clicks.

• Personalization. A hallmark of the Internet is the potential for personalized interaction (Hanson, 2000; Parasuraman & Zinkhan, 2002). Personalization can increase click-throughs (Ansari & Mela, 2003) as well as build and increase loyalty (Newell, 2000; Reichheld & Shefter, 2000; Romano & Fjermestad, 2002).

Realizing E-Mail Goals

Since e-mail oftentimes resembles a Web page, many of the issues are the same. One can investigate the entire e-mail and measure total clicks from the e-mail, or investigate links in the e-mail and measure clicks on these links. In addition, other criteria of interest include actions taken to unsubscribe, and viral effects whereby recipients forward the e-mail to others.

E-mail also resembles direct mail. Unlike Web pages whereby visitors actively seek a page, e-mail comes directly to the recipient's inbox. Thus, researchers can draw upon direct mail analogies to test copy, salutations, serial positioning, number of links and e- mail format (Ansari & Mela, 2003; Marinova et al., 2002; Tizende et al., 2002). The following section illustrates how experiments help realize e-mail and Web site goals.