Why Community?
It’s simple. To succeed in e-commerce, you need to succeed in e-community. Every site is fighting to attract and retain users. By adding interactive community features, your site can grab their attention, keep them on the site, and encourage them to return. The ability for interactive sites to keep users on their sites longer (three times the average according to Businessweek), extends the opportunity to get users interested in the site’s e-commerce initiatives. It is the combination of content and community that will make your site "sticky".
By engaging your customers with a netVillage interactive community site, you’ll realize the following benefits:
- Increase Traffic. Community builds relationships between people, and once they have relationships with other members of your community, they come back. And traffic makes your online property a more valuable and important place for advertisers
- Increase Advertising Revenue. Community members segment themselves into interest groups, providing a ready-made audience for focused advertisements and other messages. For sites that support themselves with advertising and sponsorship, specialized communities provide the most powerful form of targeted advertising.
- Increase E-Commerce Revenue. CD-Now has found that return visitors buy 150 percent more product than first-time visitors. According to Forrester Research, members of a community are 36% more likely to buy than non-members.
- Build stronger customer relationships -Online communities help companies create and maintain a two-way dialogue with their best customers. Companies can use community to understand and respond to their wants and needs on an ongoing basis.
- Increase Brand Loyalty - Reports show that community members are more loyal to and remain customers of an e-business 50 percent longer than people who choose not to join these virtual marketplaces.
- Tap Market knowledge - Community provides an important source of consumer feedback on products and services, allow you to examine trends, and learn more about the behavior of your customers. Forget about commissioning expensive marketing research, communities are an opportunity to engage a real live focus group.
- Viral Growth - Through word-of-mouth marketing from community members your site acquires new users at no cost to you. Research indicates people share their experiences with colleagues and friends, since it's not uncommon for a community member to refer up to 20 new users to a business.
- Viral Marketing - Online communities bring your company closer to loyal customers or partners who strongly identify with your product or service, putting their energy and enthusiasm to helping you build your business faster.
- Higher Visitor-to-Customer Conversion Rates
- Highly Targeted E-marketing - Focused areas allow delivery of targeted messages to just the right members.
- Realize Cost savings - Leveraging chat and discussion forum technology for technical support can result in significant manpower cost savings.
- Cost Effective Content Strategy - Communities will generate its own relevant and authentic content. Member-generated content includes such things as postings of text, images, and sounds by members, polls and ratings, and shared best practices.
- Engage your customers - Forty percent of visitors to your web site want to connect with other visitors to discuss your content, services, and products, according to Jupiter Communications
Why Outsource?
Everyone is realizing that static web pages are not enough. It is "community" that makes a site "sticky", and keeps users reading advertisements and purchasing products. The trend is clear, as evidenced by today's leading portals attempting to add community to their offering.
However, creating a community-enable web site "in-house" often requires a large investment in capital, technology, and hard to find software development talent. To create a complete online community typically requires leasing Internet bandwidth or co-locating at an ISP, finding and purchasing various software packages from different vendors (i.e. a shopping cart, an auction, chat room software, etc.), and acquiring hard-to-find software development talent to build the complete system and weave it all together. Typical costs for a site can range from $500,000-$1,000,000 and take 8 months to a year to complete. In today's fast-paced Internet economy, he who hesitates is lost.
NetVillage provides a one-stop-shop end-to-end whole product outsourced solution, freeing you to concentrate on your business and not the site infrastructure or technical details. By using our facilities, hardware, and manpower you can quickly get your business on the information superhighway.
NetVillage is an e-community Application Service Provider (ASP). ASPs enable customers to use mission critical enterprise applications in a better, faster, and more cost-effective manner. They do this by giving their customers access to the latest applications in a way that offers financial benefits, and which eliminates the customer's need to add staffing and resources that would otherwise be irrelevant to them.
Key Outsourcing Benefits:
Faster time-to-market
Access to expert technology people without having them in-house (cost of geeks)
In-depth application and community expertise
Better cost control
Faster time-to-market
One of the primary motivations for companies to outsource is the rapid time-to-market for going live with your service. In an age where being late to the Internet game may spell doom for your company, it's crucial to be able to deploy rapidly and cost-efficiently. Many of the small and medium-sized companies that do not have the infrastructure in place nor the manpower to staff their IT initiatives turn to netVillage for their solutions.
Access to expert IT people
It is increasingly hard to find and keep top technology talent in today's booming high-tech job market. Software developers, engineers, and consultants are in short supply and expensive to retain. Using netVillage keeps that expertise at your fingertips when you need it.
In-depth application and community expertise
Companies with little or no tech staff find that the experience and expertise offered by ASPs is crucial to opting for the outsourcing model. NetVillage's expertise and community tools pre-dates even the web - we when built online communities for dial-up services. We know what works, and what doesn't, in the community space.
Better cost control
Software and hardware require constant maintenance and upgrades that could ultimately prove cost prohibitive for many small and mid-market companies. The netVillage ASP model makes economic sense for companies with limited resources but rapid-growth aspirations, because it allows them to pay for advanced applications and their support infrastructures as they use them, rather than making large up-front investments. For large and small companies alike, paying one flat monthly fee over the term of a contract allows the customer a predictable cost model as well as a faster return on investment.
Is outsourcing for you?
If your company meets any of these criteria, outsourcing may be appropriate:
A need to deploy rapidly
Technology is not your core competency
Attracting and retaining tech staff is difficult
Start-up with little cash to make significant investment in technology
Need to dedicate personnel, cash, and focus to core business
