Does Your Site Have Personality?
Creating an emotional response online
One of the hardest parts of successfully selling online is giving people a reason to come back. As we all know, you can only compete on price for so long before your profit margins completely dry up, so you need to create an emotional response. For PoolDawg, we achieve this by pushing our company's personality.
We don't want to be seen as some faceless site that just sells the same pool cues at the same prices as everyone else. We're not big and we're not corporate, so the last thing we want is a site that "feels" like a faceless "big box" store. We want our customers to see that we have a real passion for our industry and the game of pool. We figured out early on that we can't physically be at every major pool event so we had to figure out a way to be there in spirit. The result was our ceramic mascot Frank the PoolDawg and our touring pro Debbie Schjodt.
As mentioned in a previous blog post, Debbie takes Frank to WPBA events and interacts with fans. We get hundreds of candid pictures of Frank and Debbie with both fans and other pros like the picture here of Frank with Debbie and fellow touring pro Sarah Rousey.
The pictures act just one of many tools for PoolDawg to show its personality. We also talk to our customers through two separate blogs. We even try to display our personality in our weekly emails that we send out.
The result of this is a customer response that goes beyond price. Many customers have reported to us that they buy from us instead of our competition because they feel like they know us and because we care about pool.
People will look beyond price, you just have to give them a reason to do so.
