MARKETING TO WOMEN ONLINE
Women are often the biggest spenders in the household by a wide margin so it makes sense to reach them just as effectively online as offline. Here's how.
10/01/04- Direct Marketing News

SuperWoman Syndrome is alive and well in the 21st century. And to assist with their never-ending "to-do" lists in their multi-role lives, women are turning to the Internet en masse. Big brands are realizing that women are online and are now using the Internet to develop strong brand relationships with this powerful consumer group.

Got your attention? As a marketer, you should contemplate the following.

Women are multi-tasking "achievers" and they are forever seeking new ways to complete their multitude of household management tasks at a record pace. As a result, they have embraced the Internet for its convenience for researching products, for communication, for shopping, for advice, for information and for entertainment. If only husbands were this useful around the house.

With traditional media becoming too fragmented and too mass, smart marketers are using creative and compelling digital marketing campaigns to captivate women in the digital space. And the women love it. They're developing actual "relationships" with brands that "speak to" them online.

How do you do this, you ask? Well consider the different consumption habits of the Internet by gender.

While men use the Internet as a quick-reference tool, women use the Internet to do what they do best - communicate. The result of this gender difference is an opportunity for marketers to develop a powerful long-term "committed relationship" with women online.

More than just girl talk
Want to start a conversation with your female target group? Consider the following truly interactive media tools as a part of your marketing mix.

Newsletters
A strategically written newsletter, sent to your database in regular timely increments, is a wonderful way to stay top-of-mind with your female audience. Make sure you use an experienced digital copywriter for compelling "call-to-action" content and an experienced graphic designer for a polished professional look. Also, make sure there are links to your Web sites and ways for the women to respond to you, if they wish.

Contests & promotions
As with offline contests and promotions, online contests and promotions are meant to build your database or to provide you with short-term sales gains. Women are statistically more apt to respond to contests, making online contest campaigns great tools for increasing databases. Include a viral component to let your database build your leads list for you.

Blogs
A blog is an online bulletin board, of sorts, that sits on your Web site and is populated with content from your consumers. Since anyone can post anything, it is a potentially dangerous situation. But if you already have a glowing reputation with your consumers, let them communicate with each other about your brand via a blog.

The advantage of a blog is it provides continually fresh content for your site, posted by actual users of your brand. This encourages higher visitation to your site than with just static content.

Testimonials page
Testimonials pages are similar to blogs, but you have much more control. If you are catering to a female demographic, you should consider adding a testimonials page to your Web site.

Women just LOVE to give advice, so let them submit, via email, their advice for your brand community to see. You might think that you will get inundated with emails from your database, but we have found that only about one percent of subscribers actually respond.

Women are a unique and wonderful consumer group. Women have purchasing power of up to 80 percent of the household buys. And the brands that are successful marketing to women online are the ones that understand how to communicate interactively with the female demographic.