Contents:

Table of Contents Branding Financial Services on the Internet Executive Summary 10 Overview of branding and the rise of the Internet 10 Characteristics of financial services and their implications for consumer evaluation 10 Creating a website that incorporates brand values 11 Generating traffic for a website 11 Evaluating website effectiveness 11 Online security 12 Chapter 1 Overview of Branding and the Rise of the Internet 14 Summary 14 Introduction 14 The importance of brands 14 The impact of the Internet 18 How do we migrate our brands to the Internet? 20 Migrate traditional brand online 20 Partner with an existing brand 21 Create a new digital brand 21 Attracting a different customer 22 Chapter 2 Characteristics of Financial Services and Implications for Online Branding 30 Summary 30 Introduction 30 Online customers are less forgiving than their offline counterparts 31 Financial services characteristics and their implications for branding and relationship management 31 Intangibility 32 Implications for branding 32 Inseparability 33 Implications 33 Service quality 34 Researching service quality 34 Research objectives 35 Research methods 36 Regular customer surveys 36 Customer panels 36 Transaction analysis 37 Mystery customers 37 The SERVQUAL methodology 40 What to measure 40 Reliability 40 Responsiveness 40 Assurance 40 Empathy 40 Tangible 41 How to measure 44 Example 45 Chapter 3 Creating a Website that Incorporates Brand Values 58 Summary 58 Introduction 58 How to create a website that incorporates brand values 58 Who is involved in a website project 65 Site sponsors 65 Site owner 65 Project manager 66 Site designer 66 Content developer 66 Webmaster 66 Stakeholders 66 Reviewing competitors’ websites 67 About the company 67 Products and services 67 Customer services 67 General information 68 Designing content 69 Familiarity of the customer with a product/company 69 Familiarity of the customer with the Internet 69 Types of customers 70 Consistency 71 Simplicity 71 Context 71 Elements of effective website design 72 Example 72 Consistency 72 Simplicity 73 Context 73 Brand message 73 Interaction 74 Using interactivity to move customers through the buying process 75 Learning 75 Example 76 Deciding 76 Buying 77 Graphic design 77 Example 79 Completion of online forms – best practice 81 Explain why information is being collected 81 Indicate mandatory fields 81 Validate 81 Provide opt-out 81 Provide prompt confirmation 82 The web designers’ perspective 82 Planning communication for the Internet 83 Web segmentation 84 Embody the brand 85 Segmentation of users on the Internet 86 Example 87 Selection of web values 89 Example 90 www.standardlifebank.com 90 Development of the brand platform 91 Role 91 Personality 92 Achievement 92 Brand backup 92 Brand alignment among staff 93 The number of repeat visits 99 The number of minutes the visitor spends per page and in total 100 The number of minutes the visitor spends on average on the main activities of the website 100 The number of individual visitors 100 The user’s behaviour at the website 101 The website that the user thinks of first 101 The website’s sales and income 101 The extent to which the website encourages behavioural change 101 Chapter 4 Generating Traffic for the Website 104 Summary 104 Introduction 104 Traffic targets 105 Techniques 106 Timing 106 Search engines 106 How do search engines work? 107 Optimising search engine positions 107 Directories 109 Search engine registration 110 The purpose of banner advertising 110 How well does banner advertising work? 111 Locations for banner advertising 113 Portals 113 Generalised news services 114 Specialised interest site 114 Making banner advertising work 115 Offline traffic building 116 Incidental or specific advertising 117 What are we communicating offline? 117 Word-of-mouth 117 Public Relations 118 Direct mail and physical reminders 118 Chapter 5 Evaluating Website Effectiveness 120 Summary 120 Creating a measurement process 121 Highlighting the need for metrics 122 Identifying metrics 123 Introducing techniques to collect metrics and summarise results 123 Reviewing the metrics 124 Acting on the results 124 Which measures to use? 124 Level 1: Business effectiveness measures 125 Level 2: Marketing effectiveness measures 126 Level 3: Internet marketing effectiveness 127 Online measurement methods 128 Online web metric and server log files 129 Hits and page impressions (views) 129 Offline methods of metric collection 130 Offline web metric 130 Selected offline measures of Internet marketing effectiveness 130 Evaluation of promotional methods 131 Chapter 6 Internet Security 136 Summary 136 Authentication 138 Privacy and confidentiality 138 Integrity 138 Non-repudiality 138 Availability 138 Methods of increasing security 139 SSL 139 SET 140 Chapter 7 Interview With Michael Winney – eCommerce Consultant, Standard Life 144 How are the brands positioned against competitor products? 145 Which methods have been most successful? 146 Were the websites piloted before launch? 147 What are the major growth areas for your online services? 149 Chapter 8 Appendix 152 Related links 152 Internet customer questionnaire 153 Consumer profile 153 Internet purchase profile 155 Internet purchases from this site 157 Experiences 158 Outcomes 160 List of Figures Figure 3.1: What do you want the consumer to gain from your site before, during and after their visit? 86 Figure 3.2: Staff’s intellectual and emotional buy-in matrix 94 List of Tables Table 1.1: Summary of branding benefits 16 Table 2.2: A comparison of different online metric collection methods 39 Table 2.3: A comparison of different online metric collection methods continued 39 Table 2.4: Banking service product quality (1 dimension) 42 Table 2.5: Customer service quality (10 dimensions) 43 Table 2.6: Online systems quality (6 dimensions) 44 Table 2.7: Expectations of an excellent online bank 46 Table 3.8: Top UK bank sites' navigation scores 62 Table 3.9: Ten key reasons for returning to site 68 Table 3.10: Daily Telegraph complaints against financial institutions, 1999 96