Iomega Corp., Roy, UT, relaunched its Web site this month to reach a broader base of consumers and establish a direct sales relationship with them. The company said it hopes to use the site's enhanced data-collection capabilities to improve both its own marketing efforts and those of its reseller partners, against whom it is suddenly competing.
“We want to find out as much detailed information about our customers and the segmenting of those customers as possible,” said John Moran, director of e-commerce for Iomega. “Then we can go back to our retail partners and our channel partners with that information … not detailed information, but segmented information that we feel might help them market their products better.”
Among the plans are the test-marketing of bundles of products targeted to certain customers based on aggregate sales data and individual transaction records, which had not been available from the company's original site, www.iomega.com.
Located at www.iomegadirect.com, the revamped site offers Iomega's complete line of products, which include data-storage disks and related software and devices. The company, which previously had linked its site to five online resellers through a “Buy it now” button on each page, still offers consumers the option of linking to those resellers. The original site had been receiving 1.5 million to 1.8 million visitors per month, Moran said.
Based on feedback from customers and working with Web-site developer Organic, San Francisco, Iomega relaunched the site with a more powerful data-gathering system that captures individual transaction records and detects information about how the customer navigates through the site.
“What we attempted to do was develop a site with Iomega that would deepen its relationship with traditional customers as well as the new, broader customer base,” said Patrick Rorke, client partner at Organic.
Although Moran said Iomega has a strong following of techno-savvy customers who require high-capacity data storage solutions, the growing popularity of the Internet and the increasing number of home-office workers is expanding the target audience for Iomega's products.
The first print ads mentioning the new site appeared earlier this month, and the company plans a more focused campaign in late August using print, e-mail and banner ads directing people to the new site. The company also continues to build a database through opt-in surveys and contests, through which it obtains information about demographics, what computer products its customers own and how they use them.
Other plans call for the company to add features to the site that will enable visitors to personalize how they view the site to suit their own specific needs. That also will allow Iomega to direct more focused marketing efforts toward its customers.
