By Donnalee Moulton

Quixtar.com of London, Ont. may not be a household name, but it definitely reaches a lot of households. Last year, it sold U.S. $448 million worth of products throughout North America. In a Deloitte & Touche survey conducted for the Retail Council of Canada, the multi-level marketing firm was ranked as the number two e-tailer in Canada.

The key to Quixtar's success has been its appeal to women shoppers, who account for 60 per cent of its online clientele and have made it the leading e-tailer in Canada in both the fashion category and the health and beauty category.

"We've made it very easy to buy shoes, dental floss, and makeup [at one site] in a very short time and have the entire order delivered within seven days," says Lydia Ayora, core brand marketing manager at Quixtar. "I've heard over and over that it frees up their time and gives women more control over their lives. Lots of us are trying to be superwomen - to keep the home fires burning, to take care of our children and husbands, to do our jobs - anything that can be set in front of us to make our lives easier will [be popular]."

More so than men, women are keen to hear directly from others within their gender. First-person stories, interactive columns and e-mail newsletters are all big hits with female Web users. The first site designed and targeted specifically for females, Women.com, now reigns as the most popular online destination for women and one of the top 50 most visited Internet properties worldwide. On average, more than 7.5 million visitors drop by each month. Of these, approximately 3.5 million have signed up for newsletters, membership discounts and personalized services.

Certainly, e-marketers and e-tailers have a strong financial incentive to figure out what women want on the Net. After all, roughly half of all Internet shoppers are now female. And, more than ever before, women have purchasing power: they make more than 80 per cent of all household-buying decisions. While females traditionally have had consumer clout in sectors such as groceries, clothes, books and pharmaceuticals, they're now big spenders on financial services, real estate, autos, travel and consumer electronics, too.

Over the last three years, Cheryl Mont, an investment advisor with Charles Schwab Canada in Toronto, has organized Behind Closed Doors - a series of face-to-face meetings with women in Ontario - to discuss their investment needs. One of those meetings was devoted entirely to exploring what women wanted online. "The message that keeps coming out loud and clear is that women want relevant information they can move through easily," she says.

Even if you're not selling directly online, having a Web presence oriented toward women is a sound business move. "It strengthens our relationship with consumers," says Cheryl Radisa, director of marketing for the Toronto-based fruit juice company Ocean Spray International Services Inc. (Canada). "Loyalty is a key factor in sales. We want [women] to understand how Ocean Spray can become part of their food buying/lifestyle."

But in addition to promoting cranberry juice, says Radisa, Ocean Spray "wanted to give their Web site added value." So the site also offers information on health issues (ranging from vitamins to stress), tips for managing a hectic schedule and advice on how to whip up a nutritious meal for the kids - all relevant to the 65 per cent of its customers who are women. Moreover, the site is not just a copy of the Ocean Spray's U.S. site. Content, measurements, health information and sources are identifiably Canadian. "Our research indicated that women wanted to see more Canadian content," says Radisa.

Women's sites, unlike many gender-neutral sites, often take the opportunity to ask women what they want. "This medium allows you to ask," says Christine Korda, e-commerce and content strategist with CanadaComputes.com, the online version of Canada Computes! magazine. The anonymity of the Web helps women, in particular, to open up. In a survey conducted for the Ford Motor Co. of Canada that examined why women use the Internet, 81 per cent of respondents said it was because they were able to ask what may have been perceived as "dumb questions." (Ninety per cent said it was convenient and 88 per cent said it made them a smart shopper.)

The ability to reach out and ask women exactly what they want is especially vital for anyone operating a site targeted at Canadian females. "Canadian women are different than American women," notes Korda. "Canadians in general are very polite. We're not always the best at saying, 'No, I don't like your back-end fulfillment. No, I don't like your e-mail spamming me.'"

Reitmans Canada Ltd. of Montreal, a women's clothing chain, uses its promotional site to gather customer feedback. "I think there's more two-way communications with women [online] than with men," says Daniel Langevin, vice-president of marketing. "Women communicate to us about quality control, fashionability, store location, service issues. We solicit this in our tips section.

We're actually getting information back as opposed to just disseminating it."

Visitors spend an average of just over six-and-a-half minutes at the Reitmans site - quite respectable for an online address that doesn't offer e-commerce. The company wants to increase that stay to between 10 to 15 minutes. "The success of the site is its 'stickiness' - that allows the Reitmans brand to be front and centre in your mind," says Langevin. "Its relevance to women's daily lifestyles is what makes our site more attractive to women."

As Langevin suggests, marketing to the female half of the population online - whether it's a product, a service, or information - is not the same as marketing to the male half. First, women use the Internet differently. They aren't there to browse; they generally don't have the time. One survey, for example, found that half of all female respondents choose one hour of sleep over one hour of free time. Therefore, a site has to enable quick and easy navigation. That means a clean and simple interface. Heed the eight-second rule: if it takes more than eight seconds for a page to download, women are out of there.

That's not to be confused with the three-click rule. Searching must be easy - three clicks or less - or this female demographic will move on to the next site. "A lot of Web sites hide information," notes Rodmell. "They have flash and gizmos and all the nonsense. Women wear so many hats when they go on to the Web that they want the information, and they want it now.

Language is also an important issue. "We word things to attract a bigger audience - an easier language," says Korda. "Men aren't very good at expressing themselves." Eliminate the buzzwords and technobabble. In their place: words that communicate to the target audience.

"We are often guilty in the [investment] business of retreating into investment babble," admits Mont. "It's a challenge to provide concrete, useful information." It is, however, essential. Schwab Canada, by addressing its online visitors clearly and concisely, has helped boost the number of hits on its Web site by 21 per cent in the last six months. The brokerage doesn't know how many of these hits are from females, but it does know that women demand simple language or they leave for another site.

Design is another critical component of a female-friendly Web site. Add more graphics, make them pleasing to the eye and select softer lines, advises Korda. At Moxie.ca, the first women's online network in Canada, pink predominates. Originally, the intent was to do something "girly," says founder Carly Milne. However, it turned out pink was too closely associated with youngsters. Many people drop by thinking it's a teen site instead of one aimed at women 18 to 34 years old. That problem will be addressed in the site's next incarnation, (due later this year), which will feature more red and burgundy.

Be careful, though, that a site doesn't become too heavy through unnecessary colours and graphics, cautions John Yonker, president of Byte Level Research in Boston, Mass. Often, the more a Web site weighs (the total number of kilobytes the site consumes), the slower it will be to download and navigate. The slower the site, the more quickly traffic - especially women - will take a detour elsewhere.

A recent report by Byte Level concluded that nearly half of all Web sites need to shed a few pounds, including some heavyweights in the women's market such as JC Penney and Victoria's Secret. Faster sites, such as Yahoo!, take only five seconds to download using a 56K modem, whereas slower sites such as JC Penney require 30 seconds.

Even for the most appealing of the women's sites, however, these are tough times. Two of the most popular U.S. sites, Women.com and Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen, announced major layoffs late last year. Ironically, the downsizing came shortly before Rogers Media announced that it was going to launch Women.com's Canadian sister, Springboard.ca, at the end of February. Its target audience is women aged 25 to 49, specifically mothers with children at home, single women and newlyweds. The goal is to make their lives less hectic. "According to our research, 68 per cent of Canadian women online are turning to Web sites for information and interactive tools that will help them streamline their daily juggling act," says general manager Pam Gilbert. That help, she adds, takes the form of expert advice, virtual management resources and practical information.

The first Springboard.ca channels to go live were Wellness and Money, to be followed by Living Space, Food and Parenting channels. Rogers obviously isn't daunted by the setbacks at Oxygen and Women.com - nor should it be.

Their difficulties have little to do with the volume of traffic being driven to the sites. At Women.com, for example, 500,000 new members are signing up every three months. In the third quarter of 2000 (the last quarter for which data is available) average page views had increased by 150 per cent over the same quarter of 1999. And average duration on the site was 16 minutes, double that of a year earlier.

Furthermore, the red ink that besmirched Oxygen and Women.com was certainly not unique to women's Web sites. In general, it was a result of carefree spending, tiny profit margins and lacklustre business plans, according to Webmergers.com, which notes that 130 Internet companies failed in 2000.

That, of course, is a mortality rate that makes advertisers very uneasy. "Many companies have been waiting to see who was still standing and where they should put their advertising dollars," says Milne. The irony is not lost on her. Two years ago, she couldn't find more than a few Web sites for women in this country. Now, a growing number of sites are conspicuously wooing women - and counting on them for their survival.

women want online/off-line relationships

Marketing to women online means reaching out to women off-line. Why? Because women want to have a one-on-one relationship with the companies and the Web sites they frequent. "Women are the communicators," says Christine Korda, e-commerce and content strategist with CanadaComputes.com. "We are into personal relationships. We want that human contact."

One way to establish such a relationship is to give women something extra, to keep returning to a site. For Carly Milne, founder of Moxie.ca, CanadaÕs first network for women, that means regularly making small additions to her site, specifically quizzes and daily news. For its part, Oil of Olay, the beauty products company, discovered it could make a splash with free samples of moisturizer.

Meanwhile, Store Runner, a California-based e-tailer that represents 500 retailers and carries 8,000 products, found an instant-win contest paid off. Its first such contest, which ran last year, drew 3.5 million visitors and resulted in 40 million page views. Nearly 60 per cent of the visitors were women between the ages of 25 and 34.

The idea is to let women see a sample of the merchandise up close. This, in turn, will help drive them to the Web site to see the rest of the merchandise for sale. Handsmiths.com also offers customers the option of buying online or buying through a toll-free number. That lets women speak directly with a sales rep - something that appeals to those who want to build a relationship with the companies they matronize.

It's a powerful selling technique. Research shows that e-tailers who rely on the Internet alone sell goods to only two per cent of visitors, whereas those who complement their Web presence with a toll-free number fare much better; 30 per cent of consumers, usually women, who call a toll-free number end up making a purchase. "It's a concept of serving the customers the way they want to be served," says Schelew.