Forcing open the channels of communication with the
marketing departments will help IT directors stem the rate of
website crashes and overloads.
As many as a quarter of website crashes or overloads are caused
by a communications breakdown between the two departments, so says
a study by web testing service SciVisum. Some 26% of marketing
departments confessed they never told IT departments about upcoming
online campaigns, which meant the IT department was ill-prepared
for the influx of site visitors. Only 22 % said they always
involved IT.
Three quarters of internet marketing campaigns are impacted by
sites crashing. More than a third of these crashes were so serious
they jeopardised the success of the whole campaign. These crashes
could easily have been prevented if the marketing department
understood technology better.
‘It’s hugely counterproductive to invite customers to your
website that you can’t support and end up driving away,’ comments
SciVisum chief executive Deri Jones.
‘UK marketeers urgently need to bridge this yawning gap with
their IT departments – or they will end up destroying customer
confidence in e-commerce and damaging their corporate
reputations.’
Nearly two thirds of the marketing professionals had no idea how
many transactional users their site could support.
But it’s not all the marketeers’ fault: when 49% of them tried to
find out why visitors were abandoning transactions, almost half
were told that it was too complicated or that the investigation was
too inconclusive.
The SciVisum Internet Campaign Effectiveness Study 2005 surveyed
marketers at 100 UK companies.