E-commerce Chapter 6: E-commerce Marketing

E-commerce Marketing and Advertising Concepts

• Online marketing and advertising strategies involve traditional marketing techniques like search engine marketing, display ads, e-mail campaigns, and affiliate programs.
• Marketers need to consider other media channels like social media and mobile devices for attracting an audience.
• A comprehensive multi-channel marketing plan consists of five main elements: website, traditional online marketing, social marketing, mobile marketing, and offline marketing.

Strategic Issues and Questions

• Managers of startups or commercial websites face strategic questions like where to focus first, whether to develop a website, blog, or social media presence, and how to allocate resources.
• Integrating different marketing platforms into a single coherent branding message is a major challenge.
• Resource allocation is another challenge, as different marketing platforms have different metrics to measure effectiveness.

The Website as a Marketing Platform

• A firm's website is a major tool for establishing the initial customer relationship.
• The website performs four important functions: establishing brand identity, informing and educating the consumer, shaping the customer experience, and anchoring the brand in marketing messages.
• The website is the one place where consumers can find the complete story about a brand.

Native Advertising

• Content marketing creates a content campaign for a brand and tries to secure placement on various websites.
• The aim of content marketing is to increase website visitors, organic search rankings, and brand engagement via social media.

Advertising Networks

• Advertising networks connect online marketers with publishers by displaying ads to consumers based on detailed customer information.
• Ad exchanges are auction-based digital marketplaces where ad networks sell ad space to marketers.
• Programmatic advertising is an automated, auction-based method for matching demand and supply for display ads.

E-mail Marketing

• Direct e-mail marketing involves sending targeted e-mail messages to interested users.
• Benefits of e-mail marketing include mass reach, trackability, personalization, and ability to drive traffic to websites.
• E-mail marketing faces challenges like spam, software tools that eliminate e-mails, and poorly targeted purchased e-mail lists.

Affiliate Marketing

• Affiliate marketing involves paying commissions to affiliate websites for referring potential customers to a website.
• Affiliate marketing generally involves pay-for-performance, where the affiliate gets paid only if users click on a link or purchase a product.

Viral Marketing

• Viral marketing is the process of getting customers to pass along a company's marketing message to friends, family, and colleagues.
• It's the online version of word-of-mouth advertising, which spreads even faster and further than in the real world.

Social, Mobile, and Local Marketing and Advertising

• Social marketing and advertising involve using online social networks and communities to build brands and drive sales revenues.
• Social networks offer advertisers various advertising formats, including banner ads, native advertising, videos, and sponsorship of content.
• Influencer marketing is another form of social media marketing that began initially with bloggers and has since expanded to other social networks.

Source of Information about Online Consumers

• A primary source of information about online consumers is the transaction log maintained by all web servers.
• The transaction log is built into web server software and records user activity at a website.
• Transaction log data becomes more useful when combined with visitor-generated data trails like registration forms and the shopping cart database.

Technologies that Support Online Marketing

• Database is a software application that stores records and attributes.
• Database management system (DBMS) is a software application used to create, maintain, and access databases.
• Data warehouse is a database that collects a firm's transactional and customer data in a single location for offline analysis.
• Data mining is a set of analytical techniques that look for patterns in data or seek to model customer behavior.
• Big data is huge data sets, often from different sources, in the petabyte and exabyte range.
• Marketing analytics software collects, stores, analyzes, and graphically presents data on each stage of the conversion process on e-commerce sites.