Women decide What to Buy
Allright that’s it! Greatest news in history. Pulitzer Prize awarded – let’s proceed.
Well, my statement is not the greatest surprise on earth, but some new figures for Scandinavia turned up recently. According to IT-tjej - a Swedish it-portal for girls – 4 out of 5 decisions about what to buy are carried out by women. That goes for selections on goods like cars and insurances as well.
And here in Denmark a newly published analysis on e-commerce states that 53 % of all buyers on online shops the last 3 months were women. A few years ago electronics were the most sold item category on the web, but now goods like clothes and holidays are more frequently acquired online.
So the women decide, but what’s in it for online publishing?
Most marketing departments focus primarily on the content. Are the images appealing? Does it have a nice layout? Is the color composition right? But try to take a step back and see what happens if you put your neat-layouted 200 pages holiday catalog online as a PDF. The smoothness disappears. Waiting time drains your patience. And the navigation simply is not the same.
This is the point where I should tell you to choose Zmags to publish your catalog online: The readers –and especially the female ones - adapt the look-and-feel of the physical catalog, thus the need for special it-skills is eliminated, when reading online. But I’m more sophisticated than that…
If your intention is to sell something – and especially if you want to sell something online, you should consider how your potential buyers’ attention is caught. You may have an online shop with plenty of outstanding products, but how do people get there?
Through search, you say. Yes, good.
And carefully managed Pay-Per-Click ads, not bad.
But again, try to take a step back and look at the inspiration point: How do people get inspired to buy something? If you know you are looking for a two-week holiday on a hotel in Sharm el Sheikh in August, search features are a blessing. But if you are just browsing for destinations to your next holiday, your reader is trapped. And this is the point in the buying process where the smoothness of the catalog matters, when presented online.
Our customers often start exploring the possibilities by replacing their PDF with a link to a Zmag, when presenting online catalogs. While getting more experience with the media, some of the enriching features are often used, and especially the possibility to stuff the online catalog with deeplinks to a web-shop - like this holiday catalogue from Star Tour for instance. Once inspired, the desired item is just a click away. This is not e-commerce. This is e-shopping. And we all know what women love, right?
Now we learned that women make most decisions, so why not help them buy what they need by providing an intuitive and smooth way to buy stuff?
