Transcript Presentation5 - University of Worcester

COMP2113: Introduction
to E-business
Richard Henson
University of Worcester
March 2008
Week 5: E-Marketing

Objectives:
 Define marketing & e-marketing
 Compare and contrast different aspects emarketing with traditional marketing use of mass
media (TV, press, etc.)
 Explain how the role of the customer has been
changed by e-commerce
 Explain crucial role of search engines in attracting
customers
 Apply the basic principles of designing a website
that will attract and retain customers
E-Commerce Marketing

Marketing is about:
 identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer
needs and setting out to do so profitably!

E-commerce marketing is about using the
World Wide Web for achieving the above
ends.
 different way to get the message across
 new business challenge

Marketing plans now need to include a
consideration of the E-Commerce channel
E-Commerce
Marketing Issues

What is happening out in the commercial
world?
 typically: site-centric models (product-driven)…
 shifting to user-centric models (consumer-driven)

Huge growth of “customisation”
 one to one service
 driven by effective use of web(site) technologies

Businesses being forced to continual review
their different ways of giving service to the
customer
Egg: an example
Launched by Prudential in October
1998
 £7bn worth of deposits in first year of
business
 Soon expanded into a range of financial
services (banking, credit, insurance)

Egg’s strategy

E-commerce supports two generic
business strategies:
Lowest delivered cost
Highest perceived quality
Egg’s strategy (cont’d)

Lowest delivered cost
 No branch network
 Customers input transactions

Highest perceived quality
 ‘personalised’ service
 Rapid response
 Customer Relationship Management systems

All enabled via the electronic (e-) business
model
What’s different about the
e-Marketing channel?

Customer controls the relationship
chooses to visit the web site…
more formally known as a “pull medium”
(customer pulls the information to him/her)

Opposite of “push medium”
more conventional mediums such as the
press or TV advertising
products “pushed” onto customer
Advantages of the
e-marketing channel

Customer has free choice to visit the site (or
NOT!):
 may look at one page or many…
» could be impressed and make it their home/favourite page
» may never visit again!

Business merely provide the information…
 customer decides whether or not
» to pull that information
» to then read it

To use e-marketing successfully, the business
has to get their website right…
Effective use of the eMarketing Channel

Very many websites been developed to sell
products
 some very successful
 many abject failures…

On-line trading websites now been around for
more than 10 years – well established
guidelines for success
 freely available on the world wide web…
» e.g. http://e-marketing-tips.distinctia.com/analyzingdesign.html
Effective e-Marketing
Many businesses still not following these
guidelines…
WHY NOT?
» Discuss (10 mins) in groups…
The Recent Growth of
e-Marketing

Huge growth area in recent years…
Now attracts large conferences
e.g. “Technologies for Marketing” Earl’s
Court, two days…

Focus on all aspects of using marketing
technologies to fulfil the marketing
function
New Opportunities available
through e-Marketing


Products can easily be marketed to
countries beyond the UK…
Not a light enterprise…
 need to be sensitive to other cultures!
 need to get advice on the local culture(s) before
creating the website aimed at that culture

Famous advice (from whom?)
 “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”

Particularly, what are the local ways:
 to present products
 of doing business
Selling via website to
other cultures

Need to communicate and engage with
the locals:
Some will speak English
Many (most?) will not
consider a translation into a local language
» but has to be accurate!!!

Find out something of the local buying
habits
What NOT to sell
to other cultures

Don’t waste your time selling what the
locals already have in abundance
coals to Newcastle!
‘fridges to Iceland!!
sand to the Arabian Gulf!!!

Or what they make better at home:
cheese to the French (eg recent “The
Apprentice”)
Taxation Issues
and other cultures

For trading outside the EU, need to consider
tax implications:
 here in the UK
 also in your target market

Otherwise, the business may find that:
 the customer has cancelled his/her credit card
transaction
 Their goods are impounded on some foreign
shore with a clearance bill attached
» and made out to them…
The Law and Selling
to other Cultures

The seller is responsible for keeping to the
law:
 where the customer resides…
 AND where the business is based

the Internet may makes the selling and
representation of products easier…
 But nothing changes in terms of the need for you
to trade legally according to the laws of both
origination and destination countries

Ignorance is never a defence in the eyes of
the law !!!
Designing the website
for customers

As with all marketing materials…
 design is VERY important
» used by the customer to assess the quality of product
AND business itself

Think and behave like a “local” customer
 design pages accordingly…
 may mean different sites for different markets
Designing the website
for customers

Customer perception of “quality” will come
from all aspects of interacting
 web page fonts & colour scheme
» “corporate feel”
 ease of selecting products
 security of their personal and financial data
 assurances about;
» delivering the product?
» the goods performing as advertised
» dealing with complaint/problems
Site design

Use ALL principles learned in
COMP1141:
http://www.worc.ac.uk/departs/bm_it/viv/c
omp1141/resources/activities.htm

Choose the URL (site locator on the
www) CAREFULLY:
“guessable” URL will get more hits
URL based on a/the brand name will
probably get more hits
Bad design features
Scrolling
 Poor navigation between pages
 Large graphic files
 One page only
 Irrelevant or boring information only
of interest within the organisation
 No telephone number or email
address

Good design features
Plenty of opportunity for interaction
 Multimedia/sound
 Support “streaming” so sound/video can
be appreciated in real time rather than
having to wait for the whole thing to
download
 (eventually!) smell – via hardware
device attached to the user’s computer

Other good features of a
well-managed site




After sales service info!
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Use of email for customer reaction/feedback
Response to emails
 manage it and action it!
 Otherwise, goodwill will suffer


Have an infrastructure to support enquiries look after customer relations
Refer to telephone help-line and call centre to
deal with high volume after sales service
“Adding Value”
via the website

In the early days, the rate of hits (visits) to the
website WAS the value of the “virtual” (i.e no
physical shop) company (!)
 formula based on hugely optimistic hits-sales ratio
 Caused stock market BOOM… and BUST!

Formula revised downwards, but same
principle applies…
» e.g. every tenth visitor will be a customer…
» Website value to the business is a function of it’s “hit
rate”
Getting a good “hit rate”
for the Website

The business won’t get ANY benefits from
increase in sales if there are no visitors
 however excellent the site may be


MANY, MANY ways to maximise the number
of visitors to a site…
Suggestions? Group Activity…
What are Search Engines?



Computer systems designed for locating
information on the web
Accessible, free of charge, through the
Internet
Consist of:
 a database of keywords, URLs, and websites
 a program which allows Internet users to search
through its indexes, normally using keywords, in
order to find sites of interest
 special web-browsing programs known as ‘spiders
’or ‘robots ’
How do Search Engines
work?


Gather keywords through “spidering” around
websites
The spiders:
 crawl round the net looking out for keywords in
web pages
 retrieve keywords
 take keywords back to the search engine
database


A program automatically adds the lists of
keywords to the database
All the information in the database is
continually available, via indexes, to users
Why are Search Engines
crucial to Marketing?

FREE!
 all of the search engines provide a free service to
both shopper and merchant

Make their money through advertising…
 based on their own HUGE volumes of traffic


Harnesses the most powerful and most
frequently used technology on the web
But use needs to be monitored:
 the site should be re-submitted on a regular basis
 the content, especially the searchable ‘tags ’,
should be kept ‘fresh ’ (i.e. representative)
Search Engine Tips



Search engine searching is based on page
content as well as the URL
Essential to choose the keywords carefully
Use keywords in:
 title tags & “metatags” (page description and
keywords) - kept up to date!
 first paragraph of page content

Search engines should be monitored to see if
the site is no longer featured
 if so, resubmit…
Effective Use of
Search Engines (1)

Search engines like Google categorise
pages based on (amongst other things):
hit rate
number of external links on site

The Objective should always be:
to use appropriate techniques to cause the
search engine display your site in its “top
ten”
Practical Exercise
(on your own – 10 min)
Think about the website you started to
develop last week
 Write down six keywords to represent
your site
 Now include a short paragraph for the
home page that includes as many of
those keywords as possible, as often as
you can…

Effective Use of
Search Engines (2)

Once an e-commerce site does achieve the
dizzy heights of a “top ten” placing with the
search engines for appropriate keywords…
 you’re in the big time!
 short-term, a lot of traffic can be expected to the
site

HOWEVER…
 The real challenge is to KEEP IT THERE…
 The rest of this lecture looks at strategies for doing
just that…
Direct Advertising

Put the URL everywhere you can…
 TV, radio (expensive)
 newspapers, magazines
 email messages
 paper correspondence
 business cards
 side of the van
 in a field adjacent to a motorway
Email Advertising



Business needs to capture an email address
before can send mail advertising its website
Need to have a means of capturing and
storing email addresses on the website
Blocks of email address actually sold based
on perceived interests of (potential)
customers
 on-line customers can be targeted with products,
based on clicking behaviour
Stickiness!

This is about using techniques to keep users:
 looking round the site
 returning to it once they have discovered it


Different problem to getting them to the site in
the first place
The concept of “stickiness” drives web site
development commercially
 every site owner wants to get plenty of hits
 but also plenty of repeat hits…
Stickiness Tips

Site must have plenty of content
must be the right sort of content for the type
of visitors expected…

Content must also be:
easy to find (navigation!)
up to date

Continuous change and improvement
are therefore required…
Stickiness Tips

Offer additional services:
 free email
 calendaring service

Thinking behind this:
 can cause considerable inconvenience if email
address is changed or calendar entries have to be
re-keyed
 therefore “gets the user hooked”
» unlikely that their Internet behaviour will change…
» Would be too much hassle!
Looking after visitors:
reward them!

Just by visiting your site and registering
the prospective customer can get
“points” (or e.g. air miles)
My points
Nectar points
The personal details may then be used
for marketing purposes
 Buying products from the site might
bring them more points…

Looking after visitors:
publicising discounts
Award discounts to customers ordering
online
 Let it be known that such discounts are
only available from the website
 Examples:

Go - discount for booking tickets online
Train tickets - online discount provider of
train tickets
Other Promotional Ideas




Develop trade links with other sites with
related interests/collaboration
Regional/trade/interest group - spine or
“feeding chain” approach
Newsgroups - take care however as they are
not meant for promotion
Use “portals”
 enriches value by providing an information
service

Hot links (agreed and mutual)
 switch to the site from another site/vice versa
Gathering Marketing
information on customers

Using the web to gather valuable market
information:
 overtly e.g. “Mypoints” collects customer
information by insisting that a form is filled in
 Anonymously
» e.g. using cookies
» e.g. analysing web server log files

MUST (privacy issue) look after customer
data
“Cookies”

Files that sit on your computer and tell web
sites:
 your personal “clicking” preferences
 e.g. how many times you have visited a particular
site



Controversial – write data onto the user’s
hard drive, probably “on the sly”
Each participating website will store its own
cookie, with its own security arrangements
Cookies take up very little disk space (e.g.
256 bytes)
“Cookies”

Potentially a privacy issue:
should be helpful to the consumer and add
value
should not be intrusive
Should not be accessible to anyone else!

Cookies can be “switched off” (i.e.
filtered out/deleted) as a browser
preference!
Analysing web server log files

Most types of web server support this. Examples:
 Microsoft IIS
 Apache
 LotusDomino
 Oracle
 Netware

Gatherable information :
 Who has been using your site?
 Which parts of the sites were visited most


Can be done manually
Best to use specialist packages
 e.g. Log Analyzer v5.0 from WebTrends cost £300
Customer led advertising

Possible to track a customer’s web habits so
adverts can be appropriately targeted
 e.g. Doubleclick.com

Portals could link to e.g.
 local purchasing consortia
 rswww.com (RS components online engineering
catalogue)


Software available to learn about users' buying
habits and consequently direct aim
Aim news feeds and advice content at
users/potential customers to maintain their
loyalty
Technologies for
Improving Hit Rate

Many specialised applications:
 Some very simple
»
»
»
»
counters
meta name generators
date/time/special effects, etc. (client end)
links to code located on other sides (e.g weather
forecast)
 Others more sophisticated: two categories:
» watch/record visitor behaviour

Example: ASP Sheriff
» provide more features for the site

Any number of possibilities
The Low-Tech Business:
Getting someone else
to do it for you…
Fine, but web design and e-Marketing
are two different things
 Suggestion:

web designer to create the site
E-Marketeer to use appropriate methods
from the above and work with the designer
to enhance the site so it will always appear
in the search engine top ten…
Cost of e-Marketing

Needs to be seen in terms of Return on
Investment (ROI)? or payback?
 many SMEs report they have had little benefit from
their investment in getting a web presence
 ROI therefore zero!!!

Usually this is because:
 they have not promoted (or been advised to
promote) their site sufficiently/effectively
 not aware that the initial and ongoing cost of
appropriately marketing a site may exceed the cost
of developing/maintaining the site!

Invest a little and get nothing back – or invest
several thousands, and get a big response…
Next week

Specific features of an e-commerce web
site