E-marketing, as the very name suggests, refers to the use of electronic media or the Internet for advertising, promoting and selling goods and services. Though digital technologies were initially used as supplements to traditional forms of marketing, they are now fast gaining ground and can be used as independent tools to reach a global audience at cost effective prices.

Yet, the basic rules of marketing remain the same. As in the case of traditional marketing methods, you need to devise an e-marketing plan that defines your business objectives and spells out a marketing and advertising strategy to capture a niche or an entire market. E-marketing is particularly suitable for small businesses, as it offers the advantage of economies of scale in terms of reaching a large audience at nominal costs. With more and more people turning to the Internet for their daily source of news, entertainment, shopping and best bargains, you might miss great opportunities if you don't have an online presence.

Web Windows can guide you to develop an e-marketing plan using marketing mix such as email marketing, e-newsletters, e-brochures, web analytics, Internet marketing tools etc and also help you in tracking, monitoring and analysing the results of your campaign.

But before we develop the e-marketing strategy, it is important to first understand the advantages of e-marketing so you get a better perspective of why an online presence is important in the present and evolving marketing scenario.

The advantages of e-marketing

24 X 7 global audience reach: This is perhaps the biggest advantage of e-marketing. Your website can be viewed by people across the globe with access to the Internet 24 hours, seven days a week. Consider the case of people who reach home late and do not have the time to go out and shop. They can go to your website and place an order even if is in the middle of the night. Besides, the benefit of time, which other marketing channel gives you access to a global audience at such nominal costs?

Online flexibility: E-marketing gives you the opportunity to create a flexible template to meet your requirements. For example, you can use tools such as Pay Per Click, Pay For Calls, directory listings, and search engine optimization to not only reach your target audience but at the same time make changes as per the responses you get. For example, you can make changes in the copy of your advertisement to make it more effective or even change your e-marketing strategy to promote one product over the other based on demand.

Personalized marketing: E-marketing gives you the benefit of providing personalized services to your customers. Based on consumer preferences, you can the sell your products and services with the right messages at the right time to each individual shopper, something that is not possible with traditional marketing methods.

Developing your e-marketing plan


Factors governing your e-marketing plan

At the outset, it is first important to decide what e-marketing strategy you wish to follow. If you have a small business, the most cost effective method to reach your target consumers would be through the Internet. However, if you have a localized target audience, you may explore e-marketing as a support tool for complimenting traditional advertising avenues such as print media or PR and events.

The three major factors that should govern your e-marketing plan include:

• Your customers
• Your business objectives
• Your budget

Customers: Having quality products and services to offer in the market is not enough; you need to identify your potential and existing customers to bridge the gap between demand and supply. This will help you build your database so that you can target them individually, personalize your service and take their feedback for assessment and improvement. This will also help you decide if you can totally depend on e-marketing tools or use them to compliment traditional marketing channels.

You also need to focus on building effective relationship between your customers. For example, you send them a mail informing them about your latest product offerings. Some of these people may have queries related to your products. A simple method used by people in online marketing is to provide a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section that answers all queries related to the quality, utility of the products, means of purchasing and return policy etc. The advantages of this are that it not only gives the impression that you want to simplify everything for the customers but it is also cost effective and time saving; as an alternative to this, you would have to hire and train personnel to answer and take care of these queries. You can also have a feedback box at the end of the section asking customers if the information provided was useful to them. Based on responses, you can keep updating and changing the FAQ section. In case the queries of visitors are not answered, you can provide a separate box where they can list their questions and have somebody respond to them promptly. You can in this case also mention the timelines by which your executives would get back with their responses.

When you send a mail, you can also mention an email facility that would address their queries. Again, be sure to have your personnel answer the queries promptly, efficiently and accurately.

Business objectives: Your e-marketing plan will largely depend on your business objectives, which can be:
• Creating awareness of new products and services
• Disseminating information about existing products and services.
• Creating or strengthening brand awareness
• Increasing sales
• Saving costs
• Entering new markets
• Staying ahead of competition
• Creating product awareness before actual launch through online marketing and traditional marketing channels.

Budget: Based on the returns you expect on your investment, you should do a cost analysis of various marketing and advertising channels and then decide on the marketing mix for maximum returns.

These factors will help you plan your e-marketing strategy and also help you decide on the tools to achieve your business objectives.

Choosing your marketing tools

Website: You can opt for a brochurewear or an e-commerce website. Besides, you can also opt for online marketing channels such as sponsored links and banner advertisements of your products and services selling related but non-competing items or services. You can host your website on your own if you have a fast Internet connection and a suitable PC. Otherwise, you can get it hosted through an Internet service provider (ISP) at very nominal costs. Yet, having a website is not enough; you also have to concentrate on search engine optimization tools and technologies to drive visitor traffic to your website. This would mean the use of a right percentage of keywords on each page, submitting keywords to search engines etc.

Keep in mind that the technology you use to build your pages should be fully compatible with all previous and updated versions of commonly used browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. Web Windows recommends that you avoid technologies such as Javascript, HTML frames, Flash and AJAX as they may not be picked up by all browsers.

You can have the most beautiful website and the best of products and services on offer but it would be a complete waste of money if people do not visit it. You can promote it by:

• Direct marketing: Put your website address as your signature in all emails, letterheads and all other printed promotional collaterals.

• Indirect marketing: These involve search engine optimization techniques such as the use of keywords in content, submitting keywords to search engines, and driving traffic by building site visibility in social networking sites, forums and blogs. Remember, all search engines index sites differently and even the time by which they index a site varies.

E-commerce facility on website: This is your direct e-marketing tool. To win consumer confidence, you also have to provide for safe and confidential transactions by securing your website from unauthorized and unauthenticated users and hackers. Ensure you have logos like Hacker Safe and VeriSign at strategic places on the website so that the customers know that it is a safe place to shop.

Web Windows Design can create your website as per your specifications and also incorporate tools required for safe, confidential and secure e-commerce facilities. We can also optimize your website for higher rankings on search engines and driving traffic to your products and services offerings.

Pay per clicks (PPC) campaigns: You can advertise your site with many PPC providers such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. Your advertisement would appear as sponsored links on search engine pages when visitors type in a search keyword that matches with the product or service you provide. As an advertiser, you have to pay only when a visitor clicks on the link to reach your site. These sponsored links would also appear on other member sites with content that is related but non-competing with the products and services you provide.

Reciprocal linkings: This means that you provide your banners and advertisments on some websites with similar services and in return, let them provide theirs on your website. This works more or less in the same way as PPC for Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter.

Direct emails: You can reach your target customers through direct email campaigns to inform them of new products and services or any updations in existing ones. You can get your visitors to register on your website and provide their contact information including their email addresses to build your customer database.

Implementing your e-marketing plan

Before implementing your e-marketing plan, make sure everything is in place for its successful implementation. Let us, for example, assume you are launching a new product in the market. To implement your e-marketing plan, you would have to ensure:

• Creating a database: You need to have a database of your existing and potential customers. One way is to collect and record the number of visitors who register on your website.
• Creating your communication campaign: You have the content ready for your communication campaign. This can be in the form of a direct email or in the form of e-brochures or e-newsletters. Remember packaging is important; you can also personalize the design in terms of customer preferences. For example, some customers would prefer simple mails while for others a well designed mail would make the right impact. When you send mails, also mention an unsubscribe message so that people are not troubled with unsolicited mails.
• Deciding on formats and designs: You will also have to take a decision on whether you want to send the mail in the plain text format or HTML format. Here again, you would need to research on the type of systems your customers are likely to use. If for example, you send a mail in HTML format, it might not open on your customer systems.
• Using mass mailing software: You have mass mailing software and the people trained to use it to send mails.
• Using autoresponders: You can use autoresponder services to automatically reply to response mails. This is all the more necessary on weekends and holidays when your staff may not be available to respond to customer queries. Then again, it may take some time to respond to customer queries; sending them autoresponders with messages such as our executives would get back to you in, let us say, two days, would create a positive impact with the customers as they would feel you are giving them adequate attention.
• Creating customer relationship management: Have a customer relationship management (CRM) in place. No online initiative can survive the competition without an efficient CRM. Based on web analytics, surveys, feedbacks and customer queries, the CRM can analyze data on sales patterns, customer responses, marketing trends and also predict for future plan of action. You also need to have a well trained staff who is aware of all aspects about the product in terms of its quality, utility, benefits and price. The staff should be able to handle all customer queries effectively and confidently.
• Maintaining a schedule: You should maintain a schedule for all activities and ensure that each process is implemented as per plan. Any delays in implementation would give an edge to your competitors for a lot depends on who reaches the market first.

Monitoring your e-marketing strategy

Once you have sent the mails, you need to monitor your e-marketing campaign for its effectiveness.
• Train your customer care executives: Your customer care executives should maintain a record of all customer queries and keep the marketing personnel in the loop, so that they can carry forward any lead that may arise. In fact, any marketing activity requires the participation of a number of departments in a business entity and not just customer care and marketing. Your processes should be defined in a manner that there is no communication gap between all concerned departments and there is a smooth and instant flow of information between them.
• Using software to track results: There are many software available to monitor the effectiveness of your campaign. For example, you can use software to trace how many people actually clicked on your mail to read it. Then again, the number of requests that you receive would serve as important pointers to the effectiveness of your campaign.
• Using web analytical tools: You can use website analysis tools to monitor visitor movement on your site. For example, these tools can monitor the search engines and the route the visitors took to reach your site and once they are there, which pages they are making the maximum use of. The tools can also track new and returning visitors. You can download free website analysis tools such as Analog or take the services of any web development company that provides for web analytics.
• Conducting surveys: You can also conduct surveys at regular basis by sending survey forms to your customers for their feedback on your products and services. Remember that your customers are also time constrained so plan and design you questionnaire such that it does not take more than 5 to eight minutes of their time. In fact, when you write to them to take the survey, do specify the time it would take for them to answer the questions. Again, keep your questions objective so that they simply have to select a choice; you can ask them for comments at the end of the survey.
• Visitor registration: You can also ask visiting members to register on your site. But remember to provide some basic information that arouses enough interest in the visitor to motivate him to register. You can then use the customer data for marketing purposes. Again, do not ask too many questions or the visitor may just decide to move on.
• Taking feedback: Another option is to have a feedback form on your website itself. Visitors can comment on your products and services and also on other factors such as how simple or difficult they found it to navigate through the site and locate information about the product and services. Remember, users will simply ignore these forms if you ask too many questions.

Web Windows can provide you online marketing and web analytical services for successfully creating, launching and implementing your e-marketing campaign.