Chapter - 8
Implementing an E-Commerce Site Web Presence Goals
To start a business it should have some physical space in which to conduct its activities. They must find a suitable place that is convenient to the customers and with sufficient space and features to the selling activity to take place. It should also have enough room to store inventory and to give employees ample work space and all these should be balanced by the costs of obtaining that space.
On the Web, businesses and other organizations have the luxury of intentionally creating a space that creates a distinctive presence.
A firm's physical location must satisfy so many other business needs that it often fails to convey a recognizable presence. A Web site can perform many images serve as a sales brochure, a product showroom, a financial report, an employment, or a customer contact point. Each entity that establishes a Web presence would decide which tasks the Web site must accomplish and which tasks are the most important, to include. Different firms, even those in the same .industry, might establish different Web presence goals. For example, Coco Cola Pepsi are two companies that have established very strong brand images and are in the same business, but have developed very different Web presence's.
Achieving Web presence goals
• To attract visitors to the Web site.
• To make the site interesting so that visitors stay and explore. • To persuade the visitors to follow the site's links to obtain
information.
• To create the desired image of the organization in the visitors minds.
• To reinforce positive images that the visitor may already have about the organization.
The Toyota site is an ample example of an effective Web presence. The site provides a product showroom features, links to dealers and information about the company and the other services it offers such as insurance and financing. It also shows information about how to contact the company. A good example of how Toyota has created a presence with this page that is consistent with its corporate philosophy is the statement that appears on the page: "So we have built a Web Site that's a lot like our vehicles". The Web site is an attractive and efficient way of presenting 'Toyota for the customers.
The Web can integrate an opportunity for building up the image of the business with the provision of information. Many established organizations build a site just for the sake of image enhancement. Not - for - profit organizations do an excellent job of using their Web site to enhance their images:
They can use their Web sites as a central resource for integrated communications with their varied and often geographically dispersed constituencies. A key goal for much not-for-profit organization is information dissemination. The Web allows them to providing a two- way contact channel with persons engaged in the organization's work. This combination of dissemination with a two-way contact a key element in any successful electronic commerce Web site.
Interestingly, not-for-profit organizations are far ahead of most businesses in accomplishing this combination of elements in their Web presences. Not-for-profit organizations such as American Red Cross and Union of concerned scientists such as Web to stay in touch with existing stakeholders and in this method find a way to identify new needs to serve them.
How the Web is Different
Companies started creating Web sites in the mid 1990's. They built simple Web sites which just conveyed the basic information. Companies did not do' any market research to determine what information the potential customer or visitors needed from the Web site.
Rarely a firm considered what business infrastructure' adjustments would be needed to service the site.
For example, few firms had an e-mail address link on their sites. Those firms that did include an e-mail link often understaffed the department responsible for answering visitors' e-mail messages. Thus, many site visitors sent e-mail messages that were never answered. This failure to understand how the Web is different from other presence building media is one reason that so many businesses fail to achieve their Web objectives.
Also different people visit the site for different reasons with a different purpose and hence it is difficult to create a Web site that is liked by all. The visitors arrive for many difficult reasons including:
• Obtaining general information about the company or
organization.
• Learning about the company's products or service.
• Buying the products or services offered by the company.
• Finding out the service conditions and warranties applicable for
the products they have purchased.
• Obtaining financial information helpful in making investment or
credit granting decisions.
• Identifying the people who manage the company or
organization.
Creating a Web site is a challenging job: Users of different types of needs and different experience levels arrive at the Web site. Not only is the problem of business characteristic variations, there is a problem of technology via a wide variety of communication channels which have varying band -width data transmission rates. There is variety of Web browsers which further confounds the problem. Even if everyone is using the same Web browser ad - in and plug-in software adds yet another dimension to visitor variability. Hence while building a Web site all these variations should be considered which is a daunting task?
To be successful in conveying in integrated image and offering information to potential customers, businesses should try to meet the goals summarized below when constructing their Web sites:
• Convey an integrated image of the organization. • Offer easily accessible facts about the organization.
• Allow visitors to experience the site in different ways and at
different levels.
• Provide visitors with a meaningful, two-way (interactive)
communication link with the organization.
• Sustain visitor attention and encourage return visits,
• Offer easily accessible information about products and services
and how to use them. Usability Testing
Most companies fail to achieve their goals in their current Web presence. Certain sites achieve these goals to a certain extent, but they do not provide sufficient interactive contact opportunities for site visitors.
Communication on the Web
Most businesses practice two general ways of identifying and reaching customers: personal contact and mass media. In the mass media approach firms prepare advertising and promotional materials about the firms and its products. This information is passed on to their potential customers by broadcasting them on radio or television, printing them in newspapers and magazines, and mailing them. In the personal contact model the firms' employees go from place to place and search for and contact potential customers.
This approach of identifying and turning people into customers is called prospecting. There is also a distinction between broadcast media and addressable media.
Addressable media can be defined as advertising efforts to specific addressee and include mail and telephone calls. But this form of advertising is not popular, since few users of addressable media actually use address information in their advertising strategies.
There is now a tendency for most businesses to use a combination of mass media and personal contact to identify and reach customers. For example, Prudential uses mass media to create and maintain the public's general awareness of its insurance products and reputation, while its salespersons use protecting techniques to identify potential customers.
Once an individual becomes a customer, Prudential maintains contact through a combination of personal contact and mailings.
The Internet can not be classified as a mass medium although a large number of people now use it. There is a mistaken notion among companies in that they seem to view their Web sites as billboards of broadcasts. Nor is the Internet a personal contact tool.
Although it can provide individuals the convenience of making personal contacts through e-mail and newsgroups. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, has described the Web as the ideal tool for reaching what he calls "the middle", markets that are tool small to justify a mass media campaign, yet too large to cover using personal contact.
Mass media
In this case the most of the process elements involve you as a passive recipient of information. In this model communication flows from one advertiser to many potential buyers, and this is called a one-to-many communication model. In mass media the main characteristic that distinguishes it from other is that the seller is active and buyer is passive.
Before buying a book many people look at the publisher's name. If they have read books brought out by the publisher, their impression about the new book being brought out by the company would be good. You might have been exposed to general promotional messages from book publishers that have created impressions about quality associated with particular book brands.
If your existing knowledge includes a brand identity for the book's publisher, these messages may influence your perceptions of the book. Nowadays, authors are interviewed on T.V., Radio, or newspaper and you might have glanced it which might create an impression either good or bad about it. You might have been exposed to ads. About a book or read its review somewhere. These features all contribute to your accepting or rejecting the book.
Personal Contact
Small dollar-value items are not frequently sold through this medium because the costs of devoting a salesperson's efforts to a small sale are prohibitive.
Contradicting the previous statement, in the case of books, local. Book-shop owners and employees often devote considerable time and resources to develop a close relationship with their customers. It is the general tendency to treat the sale of a book as small transaction but research has proved that people buy many books over time. Hence the book-seIler's investment in developing personal contacts doesn't go waste. In the present scenario the move made by the customer is to go to the book-seller and straightforwardly ask his opinion about the book.
This would usually be a book-seller with whom you have already established a relationship. Research indicates that people go to the same book-shop over time.
The bookseller would offer an opinion on the book based on having read that book, books by the same author, or reviews of the book. This opinion would be expressed as part of a two-way conversational interchange. This interchange usually includes a number of conversational elements (i.e. small talk), such as discussions about the weather, local sports, or politics, that are not directly related to the transaction you are considering.
The Web
The Internet has revolutionized the way information is sought on the Web. Not only is it easy to search, there is an abundant material at your disposal.
To obtain information about a book on the Web you could search for Web site references to the book, author, on the subject of the book.
Other sites might include those of the books' publisher, firms that sell books on the Web, independent book reviews, etc. In the case of Web -based booksellers, they keep searchable space on their sites for readers to post reviews. Say, the author is a famous one, then there might be an independent Web fan sites on him. If the book is about a notable person, incident, or time period, you might find Web sites devoted to those notable topics that include reviews related to the topic.
Other sources include advertising material created by the publisher. Not only does the Web give you the flexibility to use a one-to-one model (as in the personal contact model) in which you interact with the Web with an individual working for the seller, or even to engage in many-to-many communication with other potential buyers. The most important feature of the Web is that the buyer has the advantage of actively participating in the search and. also controls the depth, length, and scope of research.
This is because the value of the visitor to an advertiser depends on how much information the site gets from the visitors, say for example, details such as name, address, and other demographic data. It is the wish of the visitor to enter how much information he wants to enter. As a visitor can either accept or refuse to enter data, we can't treat all visitors alike. Some Web specific metrics or site activity have been developed.
A visit occurs when a visitor requests a page from the Web site. If the visitor takes further page loads from the same site, they are counted as part of the visit for a specified period of time. 'This period of time can vary depending on the site. This is defined by the administrators of the site and depends on the type of the site.
The" prime period can range from a few minutes to around fifteen minutes. For example, a site which deals with stock exchanges might use a short time period. This is because visitors may load the page to check the price of one stock and reload the page fifteen minutes later to check another stock's price.
A museum site would expect a visitor to load multiple pages over a longer time period during a visit and would use a longer visit time window. The first time that a particular visitor loads a Web site page is called a trial visit; subsequent page loads are called repeat visits.
"Each page loaded by a visitor counts as a page "view. If the page contains and, the page load is called an ad view. Some pages have banner ads that continue to load and reload as long as the page is open in the visitor's Web browser. Each time the banner ad loads is called an impression, and if the visitor clicks the banner ad to open the advertiser's page, that action is called a click or a click-through. Banner ads are often sold on a CPM basis where the "thousand" is 1,000 impression.
The Web's new marketing approaches
The Web is the very broad and intermediate step between mass media and personal contact. The Web on one side offers many of the advantages of personal contact selling and many of the cost savings of mass media. But there is also another dimension that has to be discussed and that is trust.
People have got sick of advertising especially through Television, and Radio commercials. It is really a sickening thing to listen to a commercial in the middle of your favorite song. People have developed such a resistance to the messages conveyed in the mass media that they have gone mute to the messages like "New and Hygiene". Every ad has a tremendous use of superlatives and this has caused people to mistrust those products.
The thought of recreating mass media advertising on the Web is a ridiculous thought as it is doomed to fail, for the same reasons. Many people will ignore or resist messages that lacks content of any specific personal interest to them. The Web can utilize some of the benefits of personal contact and yet at the same time avoids some of the costs inherent in the approach.
Experts agree that it is not wise to scale down the mass marketing approach to the Web but' rather on the other hand agree that it is better to scale up the trust-based model of personal contact selling to the Web. Gartner marketing report in 1996 concluded that customer centered marketing strategies would be an excellent fit for the Internet market place that was then emerging.
Technology - enabled Relationship Management
The primary advantage of the Web is that there is a two-way communication feature, that is, it allows firms to gather information about customer behavior and preferences. This would not be done using micromarketing strategies. Companies could gather various statistics as customers made enquiries and purchases.
The idea of technology-enabled relationship management had become possible when promoting and selling via the Web . Technology-enabled relationship management occurs when a firm obtains detailed information about a customer's behavior, preferences, needs, and buying patterns and uses that information to set prices, negotiate terms, tailor promotions, add product features, and otherwise customize its entire relationship with the customer.
Dimensions Technology-enabled relationship management Traditional relationships with customers
Dimensions Technology-enabled irradiation
"relationship relationships with management customers
Advertising Provide information
in "Push and sell" a "response to specific uniform message to
customer inquiries customers
regretting identifying and Market segmentation responding to
specific
customer behaviors and references
Promotions and Individually tailored
to Same for all
discounts offered customer customers Distribution Direct or through Through
channels ' intermediaries; 'intermediaries chosen
customer's choice bv seller
Pricing of products Negotiated with each Set by seller for all :)r services customer customers
New product Created in response
to Determined by seller features customer demands based on research
and
development
Measurements used Customer retention; Market share; profit to manage the total value of the
customer . individual customer relationship relationship
Until now, businesses have thought information as a part of the value change supporting activities, but unfortunately, have not taken considered that information it self might be source of value. In the market space, firms can use information to create new value for customers. Consider for example, the Web site CD now. It is an online seller of music CDs and also provides a number of valuable customer services that are got only from activities in the information world. If the customer wishes,
CD now will store an order history, show current information on performing artists in which the customer is interested, and provide recommendations based on previous purchases. Say, a person wants to buy four CDs then he can afford to buy right away. Such kind of people are CDnow's important customers because the site offer say "Wish List" feature in which customers can store the names of the CDs that they want to purchase at a later time.
Many CD now customers order Cps a swift or others, so the Web site provides a way to store gift recipient 1ames and addresses to make repeat shopping easier.
The CD now also has a "Gift Registry" in which customers can list CDs they would like to receive as gifts. Gift-givers can then obtain gift CD references for persons in the registry by entering the recipient's e1ail address.
Not a single one of the features discussed occur in the physical market place but occur in the virtual information world of the market space. All these features that it has built into its site adds due for customers. But here comes the factor of trust. CD now can only provide these features to customers who are willing to interact with the site or allow it to track their behaviors.
These are all personal information and most people will not want to divulge these to others. All of these market space site features must be actively selected by the customer.
Successful in Web marketing approaches all involve enabling the potential customer to find information easily and to customize the depth of that information, and should encourage the customer to. Firms should track and examine the behaviors of their Web visitors, and then use that information to provide customized, the added digital products and services in the market space.
Companies that use these technology-enabled relationship management tools to improve their contact with customers will be more successful on the Web than firms that adapt advertising and promotion, strategies that were successful in the physical world but that are less effective in the virtual world.
Creating and maintaining Brands on the Web
'A brand name which is known and respected can present to customers a powerful symbol of quality, value and other desirable qualities, in one recognizable element. It is easy to advertise branded products and to promote them because each product carries the reputation of the brand name.
Elements of Branding
Researchers at the advertising agency, Young and Rubicam, have found out that the key elements of a brand are differentiation, relevance, and perceived value. The first condition that has to be taken into account to create a product or service brand is product differentiation.
The product service brand is product differentiation. The product should stand' out in the market and must be distinguishable from all others in the market. Hence it is difficult to brand commodity products such as salt or plywood. Relevance which is the second element of branding is the degree to which the product offers utility to a potential customer.
People will acknowledge a brand only if they can visualize its place in their lives. Perceived value which is the third branding component is the major factor in creating a brand that has value. Even if your product stands out in the market place, people will not buy it unless they perceive value.
Element
• Meaning to customer Differentiation • Relevance
• Perceived Value
• In which way is the product different from its competitors? • What role does this product play in my life?
Is the product good?
A brand can be said as well established if it is different from other brands and that is relevant and also proves its value of worth to potential customers. Customers will buy such brand and become familiar with how it provides value.
Rational Branding vs. Emotional Branding
Companies have traditionally used emotional appeals in their advertising and promotion efforts to establish and maintain brands. One branding expert-has defined "brand" as an emotional shortcut between a company and it~ customer. Such emotional appeals serve' their purpose when ads are displayed on Television,' radio, billboards, and in print media, because the ad target are in a passive mood of information acceptance.
There is a general notion that once a brand is created, it is for eternity. There are many cases in which a brand loses its value over time. Brands lose their value if the environments in which they have become successful, changes. A very striking example is digital equipment corporation (DEC), which was a leading manufacturer of midrange computer.
The market for computing shifted to personal computers but DEC's branding did not transfer to personal computers that it produced. The consumers did not transfer to personal computers that it produced. The consumers did not perceive any special value in their personal computers just as they had seen in their midrange systems for years.
The Web is still evolving and charging at a rapid pace and hence it is an important element of branding for, Web -based firms to remember. Marketers are attempting to create and maintain brands on the Web by using rational branding. Rational branding offers to help Websites in some way in exchange for their viewing an ad.
The emotional appeal of television ad is replaced with the cognitive appeal of providing functional assistance. For example, Web e-mail services such as Excite mail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! Mail gives users a valuable service an e-mail account and storage space for messages. In exchange for this service, users see an ad on each page that provides this e-mail service.
