Ease of use

So what attracts women to a particular website? Sorry ladies, but the truth is that women are ruled by emotion. For women the entire act of shopping must be quick, easy and most of all, an enjoyable experience.

Contrary to popular belief, women go shopping already armed with the knowledge of what they want to buy. When they go to the High Street, they set out with a goal such as ‘Today, I will buy a pair of brown boots’ or ‘this afternoon I must buy an evening dress’. Any additional items that they buy are those that catch their eye along the way; maybe they saw something they were attracted to in the window, perhaps there was a sale, or they were offered additional extras.

The same process is apparent online: Women get to a search engine with a particular goal in mind: ‘Today, I will buy a holiday in Venice ’ or ‘I must get private medical insurance’. Just as when shopping offline, women know what they want before they use a search engine, and they want to get to there as soon as possible. If a woman wants a holiday in Venice then you must take her to the page of your site selling that particular product in the fewest clicks possible.

How can you do this? Try deep linking so that when she clicks on your search engine entry for ‘ Venice holiday’ the link takes her directly to the Venice page. Otherwise you take her to the home page, from where she has to select Italy , and then find Venice . She has already told you what she wants so why not listen to her?

Prestige and Impatience

The next step is where emotion really comes into play. Your website must convert well. Just as women like brands, women also like prestige. This means that when a woman comes to a website for the first time she wants to see a site that looks both trustworthy and stylish. Graphics should not be cheap or tacky, as women will be turned off by this, and will probably move on to your competitors.

Sometimes companies make the fatal error that the style and graphics of their site do not relate to the product being sold. For example, a company selling baby food which has website graphics of a tropical island will end up by confusing the user, who may well leave the site. This is true for both men and women, but women are more likely to move away due to impatience. This is also the case for flash graphics. Firstly Flash is bad for Search Engine Optimisation because search engines cannot read it (thus reducing the possible footprint of your site), but it is also often unnecessarily long or over the top, with the option to exit the graphics often hard to find or non-existent. As stated earlier, women know what they want and they don’t want to mess about getting to it.

Cross Selling

Above all women want to find a bargain. In a woman’s mind, finding a bargain is like finding gold.

I am not suggesting however that all companies must rush to drop their prices. Just as with my point about her buying additional items she has been attracted to during her regular shop, if she buys a dress and is given the option of a matching handbag, she is likely to buy it too.

This is the same online: If she buys a holiday in Venice and is given the option to buy travel insurance as an add-on, she is more likely to buy it at this point as this saves her making an additional search. In the same vein it is also be worth adding additional menus to your page advertising other products that you sell. Her eye will always wander and another purchase may not be far away. Cross selling works well, as long as you are careful not to bombard her with too much advertising. If she feels the sales push is too forceful then she will be put off the whole experience.

If you only remember one thing remember this…

To succeed in selling online to a woman, simply treat her as the queen she is. Successful fe-marketing translates the basic rules of offline marketing into the online arena. She knows what she wants and she isn’t going to mess about for it. Companies willing and able to adopt the practice of women-specific marketing will be the victors in the long run. With the growing female tinge to internet user stats, men are soon to be a niche market.

The stakes are therefore very high for online companies here. If your female customer succeeds in making a satisfactory purchase, then she will rave about the great deal she found, and she will tell all her friends about you. This is word-of-mouth advertising you just can’t buy!

More importantly, if she has been successful once, she is likely to return to your site in future. However once you have turned her off once, she will probably never return.