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SUE WADDINGTON’S SALES AND MARKETING COLUMN

Visit, say, the Continental Airlines website or, for that matter, the website of Tekno Bubbles and you will meet the latest online sales tools: avatars.

Avatars are animated online characters used to represent a person or brand. Originally confined to virtual worlds such as Second Life, avatars are increasingly making their way onto commercial websites as businesses seek new methods of interacting with customers. By performing tasks such as greeting visitors and fulfilling orders, avatars can enhance a website’s sales and service. They can also reduce the costs of live customer support and provide a sense of personality and playfulness.

Adding an avatar is surprisingly inexpensive. The simplest takes as little as half an hour to create and costs less than £10 a month to maintain. Site Pal, a service of the interactive marketing firm Odd Cast, offers a gallery of more than 250 stock avatars, with options for customising their facial features, wardrobe and background scenery. Other companies, such as Code Baby, Virtuoz and Next IT, design custom avatars for clients. Most avatars can be programmed to deliver specific messages about a company’s product or services. Some use text-to-speech technology to convert written scripts into spoken messages. For a more natural-sounding voice, you can record your own greetings to visitors.

Avatars work best for companies whose websites are the main venue for purchases, lead gathering or customer assistance. They are better suited for companies who sell to consumers rather than to other businesses. If you think that your site might be an ideal candidate for an animated helper, make sure that your avatar serves as a helpful guide – instead of an unwelcome or even creepy nuisance. Remember that animations that abruptly leap from a page or bear too much resemblance to a live person tend to turn visitors away. They make the most impact when they are used to encourage some kind of action on the part of the customer, such as filling out a contact form. As with videos, it is best to keep their messages short, no longer than 30 seconds each. They should also have an off button for visitors who prefer to browse without assistance.

 

Exhibition tips

Planning to organise an exhibition? Here are some tips to make sure that your event is a success:

  1. Get the right location. Exhibitions should be held in prominent, convenient and/or desirable locations near transport networks.
  2. Write out your exhibition as a single story. People understand exhibits in the context of things that they already know and understand. By writing the story, you can work out the order of the exhibits, where the story subdivides into natural chapters and what they might represent to the visitor. This works surprisingly well for all kinds of exhibits. Even trade fairs.
  3. Make your exhibition easy to navigate. Like most magazines or newspapers, exhibitions should be arranged in a way that feels natural but with headings or signage so the visitors can find their way around.
  4. Decide what you want your visitors to learn. If you are really specific at the outset about your goals, you have a much better chance of achieving and measuring them. People tend to enjoy shows where they have learnt something new.
  5. Study your audience. Some exhibitions attract well-defined visitor groups with strong likes and dislikes. It is the exhibitor’s job to research their audience and provide experience that can be appreciated and understood by the visitor. Scientists, executives, schoolchildren and art enthusiasts, for example, will have sharply differing interests.
  6. Avoid the temptation to show everything. Exhibitors are often tempted to show everything in their collection or to explain everything about their business. This leads to a cluttered environment. Think about the people who attend and what you want them to see.
  7. Use sophisticated tools. Exhibitions have moved on a long way since visitors were asked to tramp around poorly lit displays with just a few labels for guidance. Modern shows need great video, sound, graphics, interactive devices and illustrations to tell stories to a critical, modern audience.


New apps for every step of the sales process

The right sales tools can go a long way towards bolstering the bottom line, particularly in a tough business climate. Here are four new applications that can help you set prices, make pitches and chase down leads: