A recent study of more than 20,000 online shoppers resulted in some key research findings about the effectiveness of various tools for acquiring customers.  As you read them you will see that they provide great insights that can easily be adapted to our industry.

• The #1 reason that a shopper visited a website online was because of familiarity with the brand.  This group also had the highest satisfaction score - 77%.
• Promotional e-mails are an effective marketing tool:  24% of shoppers came to a site because of promotional emails from the company.  This group is more satisfied than those who came to the site because of a search engine and is 16% more likely to buy than those who came through a search engine.
• Search engines and shopping comparison sites bring more first-time visitors, who are significantly less satisfied and less likely to buy.  While the largest group of first-time site visitors came via a search engine or shopping comparison site (29%), this group was less satisfied than first-time visitors who came the site because of familiarity with the brand or promotional emails.
• Word-of-mouth recommendations are more effective at driving desired future behaviors than offline advertising.  Satisfaction for online shoppers who came to the retail site based on recommendation enjoys a slight advantage over that of shoppers who were prompted by offline advertising.  But word of mouth has a significant advantage in driving the future behaviors of recommendation, online purchase and loyalty.

In light of these findings there are several best practices that can help us improve customer satisfaction with the site experience, relative to the acquisition source.

• Ensure complementary messaging between the acquisition source and landing page on the site.  When a prospect comes to a Web sites based on a paid search ad, the page they land on should be closely related to the ad they clicked on. 
• Analyze needs and perceptions of first time visitors.  They have no prior experience with your Web site and they often struggle to understand the organization of the site.  You want to make sure that you understand their greatest concerns so you can do a better job of creating a satisfying first visit that will keep them coming back, time after time.
• Explore what’s driving word-of-mouth recommendations.  One of the most certain and powerful reasons to recommend a Web site is to deliver a highly satisfying experience during the site visit.  The only way to do this is to analyze the high priority areas for improvement, based not only on satisfaction scores, but on projection of the relative influence of improving one aspect of the site experience over another.  Delivering a highly satisfying experience will gain you recommendations as well as future business and ongoing loyalty.