Editorial Articles

As marketers use more (and more elaborate) promotions to drive traffic to their sites, it is crucial for brand reputation that they have the technology in place to deal with sudden influxes of visitors.

Groupola jumps on the iPhone bandwagon
The launch of the new iPhone has been monopolising the news for weeks now, and savvy marketers have been taking advantage of the opportunity it presents. Friday saw a prime example of this, as Groupola offered its customers the chance to buy one of 200 SIM-free iPhone 4 handsets for the knockdown price of £99. Groupola is a discount website specialising in this type of 'city deal’, built on the concept of group buying, where aggregate demand helps to lower prices. The site sent a marketing email out letting people know that the iPhone deal was coming up, but it turned out that the site was unprepared for the traffic it would generate. Groupola crashed as 5 million people tried to purchase the 200 handsets.

The marketers’ dream
It is the marketers’ dream – a promotion that directs a significant number of prospects and customers to transactional areas of the web site. This however can soon turn to a nightmare, when the huge volume of traffic exceeds the website’s threshold and in turn crashes under the weight of visitors. Promotions like this generate a wealth of interest outside of the usual customer base (particularly as the promotion gained a lot of advance publicity in the press), which is great for the business. However, if a new prospect’s first visit to a website is hindered by downtime, it will not make a good initial impression on them and will harm their propensity to return. This can be seen in the huge backlash on Twitter when sites like Groupola’s crash.

New media, new moaners
Twitter is rapidly becoming the vehicle of choice for complaints when a site experiences slow loading times or a crash. As soon as visitors to Groupola’s website realised that it was not working, rumours began to fly on the social media site. Some people were even suggesting that the whole deal was a con. Although it has emerged that this was not the case, these rumours show how serious the repercussions can be when a site fails to handle its traffic. It undermines the customer’s confidence and reduces the likelihood that they will part with their cash on this, or any other occasion. The nature of Twitter means that negative publicity escalates incredibly quickly and is very difficult to control.

Robust sites retain custom
As the Internet becomes more fast-paced and marketers try to harness this to direct traffic to their site, it becomes imperative that brands have a strategy to cope with this. It would invite ridicule if a high street shop shut its doors during a big promotion (or indeed, at any time) and it should be no different for a retailer online. Price comparison sites have made site performance a crucial differentiating factor in the battle for customers, and retailers need to allocate resources to creating a site that is both stable and scalable. When a big promotion is planned, marketing needs to communicate with IT, so the technology is in place to support the additional traffic. IT can also use traffic management software to route different requests to different servers and block malicious traffic, all of which helps to improve the user’s browsing experience.

New media means that negative publicity about a brand spreads incredibly quickly and can be very difficult to control. This is why it is crucial that there is open communication between marketing and IT, so that sites remain robust and reliable, especially during busy periods.

Graham Moore
e-retail specialist, Zeus Technology