Introduction
Considering how many products are launched into the marketplace everyday, creating an ecommerce web site that captures attention is essential. This is even more important in the case of new products or product categories, where new benefits are not immediately understood by ecommerce web site visitors. To ensure a successful online product launch, factors that influence customer attention and understanding should be researched and developed with one mission: increasing online sales. For FormulaXpress, a new, unique baby bottle attachment, Polar Design developed an online store incorporating a multimedia video to help educate and engage potential customers in order to maximize their awareness of the attachment’s benefits.
Challenges
FormulaXpress’ challenge was unlike that of other online retailers that strive to win sales through better pricing, customer service or a superior value proposition. Since there was no customer knowledge about the product, capturing their attention long enough to educate them about the product’s benefits was critical. The product reduces formula preparation time, thereby making feeding babies much easier when parents are traveling, awoken late at night, and so forth. Early unscientific research indicated interest among parents aware of the benefits, but creating interest in FormulaXpress among a non-captive audience (like web site visitors) was a major challenge.
With a new ecommerce store, all sales are directed through the web site which does not allow the customers to actually touch, feel, and see the baby bottle up close creating customer uncertainty. Polar Design proposed a solution: creation of a multimedia video encoded using Adobe Flash to showcase the actual use of the baby bottle in a real life scenario. Naturally, Polar Design was aware of what many believe are major technical challenges in use of multimedia on the web:
- Content in Flash cannot be indexed by search engines, such as Google, reducing the visibility of the site in search engine results for related searches
- Flash presentations requires a lot of bandwidth which creates a slow connection and takes longer to download the Flash - visitors will quit before they have a chance to view the presentation
- Users feel that Flash can be more of an annoyance when they are forced on visitors (e.g., as in the case of “Flash intros”)
- Some users have to download Flash player in advance before they can view the Flash presentation
Solutions
Polar Design and FormulaXpress collaborated to conceive a marketing solution to solve all of the challenges, marketing or technical, faced with breaking through the baby bottle market. Polar Design proposed multimedia / video to help capture the attention of potential customers and educate them more effectively.1 The multimedia video also displays the ease of use and speed of mixing that FormulaXpress offers. While time-pressed, on-the-go or stressed-out parents understand these benefits, actually showing them the product in use can have a stronger, emotional effect. By showcasing the product’s ease of use and functionality, the flash video allows customers to visualize the product and relieves any customer hesitation.
To address a few of the concerns with using Flash, Polar Design utilized its ongoing know how in Flash development. The reality behind the issue of Flash animations’ SEO problems has changed dramatically in recent years. Within the past few years Google has deployed new technology that now allows their spiders to index text within Flash, making it search engine friendly.2 Other solutions include using a CSS element, .div which allows you to add content and it is associated with a JavaScript function called SWFObject.3 Therefore, if certain search engines cannot handle Flash then they will be able to view the primary content such as any links, headings, text, and etc.
Also, the argument that Flash requires too much bandwidth and takes too long to load no longer holds true, at least for FormulaXpress’ primary target market, which is based in North America. Statistics show that the Untied States ranked No. 1 in the world for technology use with 57% of people in the country now having regularly access to.4 As far as users being required to download the Flash player, about 98% of US web users and 99.3% of all Internet desktop users have the Flash Player installed allowing them to see all Flash video.5
Conclusion
For the online marketing campaign, Polar implemented a small focus group of mothers to review the site and give any feedback and recommendations. While unscientific, this survey showed that about 80% of the mothers surveyed understood exactly what the site was selling and gave positive feedback about the site and product, providing very strong anecdotal support to existing research. To further create more buzz and word of mouth, Polar started a social networking campaign highly targeting sites such as Facebook, creating a Fan page, and placing the video on YouTube.
As technology is constantly evolving, so is the notion that Flash is not compatible with search engines, Internet providers, and Internet users’ computer programs. Implementing Flash not only adds a high level audio-visual appeal that captures busy visitors’ attention (keeping them on a side longer to study a product), but it also acts as an educational tool, instructing customers on a product that they might otherwise have difficulty understanding from static images and text.
Thanks to an understanding of the market place and assistance in understanding the benefits and technical challenges of various online solution. FormulaXpress now has a multimedia tool to help it break through the baby product market and find a smooth path to success.
More Examples of Successful Use of Flash in Web Sites
Polar Design has successfully implemented Flash without detracting from web site’s search engine rankings. For example, some of the sites include developing an interactive Flash navigation for www.KalahariTea.com, to creating an animated Flash e-commerce store for www.CheersBoston.com. Other simple yet professional Flash presentations such as, www.court-reporting.com, allows visitors to engage in their services with an aesthetically pleasing site.
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1 Issa, Raja, “Impact of Multimedia-Based Instruction of Learning and Retention” http://cedb.asce.org/cgi/WWWdisplay.cgi?9904117
2 Adler, Ron and Stipins, Janis, “Google Learns to crawl Flash” http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html
3 Enge, Eric, “How Flash Can Be Search Engine Friendly” http://searchengineland.com/how-flash-can-be-search-engine-friendly-13754
4 Hansell, Saul, “Surprise: America is No. 1 in Broadband” http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/surprise-america-is-no-1-in-broadband/
5 Wikipedia, “Adobe Flash” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash