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Step 1 of the E-marketing plan, situation analysis, is to “review the existing marketing plan and any other information about the company’s brands” . Doing this will give me an understanding of where the company wants to go and where the company is now. As an Online Marketing Manager I must “review the company’s environmental and SWOT analyses “. Environmental factors include “legal, technological and market-related factors “. An example of a legal factor could be that if we were selling our clothes online to another country, that country might have rules and regulations pertaining to specific standards that we have not met. SWOT analyses describe the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. One of our strengths may include our superior service because we are a small company. Meanwhile, one of our weaknesses may be that we have a narrow product focus since we are only focusing on men’s designer clothes. An opportunity for the company may be that there are attractive new markets with high profit potential, while an example of a threat can include an increase of online competition or slow growth during a recession period.
Step2 is the E-Marketing Strategic Planning, “Involves determining the fit between the organization’s objective, skills and resources and its changing opportunity ” which includes targeting, segmentation, differentiation and positioning. Segmentation is the process of taking a larger market and breaking it down to smaller markets. This will help us because we can reduce our waste coverage greatly if done correctly. An integral part of segmentation includes looking at the customer characteristics from a geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, and psychographic perspective . These characteristics encompass the sex, income, age and lifestyle of the consumer. This is useful because we can target our customer as a male between the ages of 18-45. Essentially, we only target individuals within our customer characteristics and do not waste our time on those who fall out of the criteria. Differentiation is how we will make our product different from our competitors . Since we are just appealing to men’s high end fashion we can differentiate ourselves with excellent customer service by providing a 24 hour response and offering faster shipping from our competitors. Positioning relates to where the company wants to place themselves against their competition, relating back to how we want to differ from our competitors. In this case, I would make a perceptual map and label my competitors to understand where they are and find a market in the industry that has not been met such as price or customer service.
Step 3 is the objective stage, where objectives can be measured according to “task, measurable quantity and time frame “. In our case, our objective is to attract new customers to the website, and to increase revenue by 10% within 1 year.
Step 4 is our E-marketing strategies where we design our offer, value, distribution, communication and market and/or partner relationship management strategies . Our offer in this case is men’s fashion merchandise, distributed through the internet. The value we will use is dynamic pricing, where we give a discount to new customers in hopes of attracting customers for future purchases. Our marketing communication strategy is to look at our target market and try to understand what websites they visit and how to notify our customers of sales and promotions through emails and blogging sites that our target market is likely to visit. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a relationship marketing tool, which increases average order values . We can do this by cross-selling, so when a visitor buys a pair of pants and they click “finish and pay,” we can recommend an additional accessory to purchase.
Step 5 is the Implementation plan which is the process of “deciding how to accomplish the objectives through creative and effective tactics. ” Some of the tactics we may use for this is web site log analysis, cookies and feedback emails to track what parts of our website need improvement . At the end of the year, we will monitor our success or failure using return on investment (ROI).
Step 6 includes our budget, where we “identify the expected returns from an investment “. For instance, we may invest money on salaries for graphic designers, but their work will entice our customers to our site to make purchases, increasing our profit.
Step 7, the evaluation plan, is the measurement of our success of the e-marketing plan . The success can be measured by calculating the conversion rate of visitors into customers. If the conversion rate is high then we have been successful in attracting new customers. Additionally, we need to see if our revenue goals were met. If our revenue increases by 10%, then we have successfully achieved our goal.
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From the customer perspective, primarily the goal is to build awareness of our site . In order to measure this, we will monitor the number of unique visits through the use of internet protocol addresses, cookie files and page tags . Along with this, it is an important goal of ours to build customer relationships with the youth to secure them as repeat customers. This will be measured through the number of purchases each customer completes, with the use of cookie data to help us monitor this . Additionally, we can also look at the percentage of returning customers as this will help us to determine if our goals have been a success.
In terms of the internal perspective, our initial goal will be to have a web server in operation 24/7 . This can be measured by tracking the percentage of up-time of the server . Providing customers with optimal availability greatly affects customer satisfaction, which brings us to our second goal of improving the quality of our online service . Essentially, we can measure the quality of our online service by providing customers with a brief survey questioning if their standards were met. It is only through customer feedback that a company can improve itself in terms of meeting the customer’s needs and being able to truly measure their success in a marketing campaign.
Within the learning and growth perspective, the goal is to enhance online service innovation . The way this could possibly be measured is through the monitoring of the number of new service products that are marketed in a year . The measurement of these new service products can be directly correlated to the attraction of new customers as well as providing ample opportunity for repeat customers. Additionally, a measurement that can be directly linked to the increase of new customers is the number of new service features that our company provides, but that are not provided by our competitors . Undoubtedly, the increase of new customers and repeat customers will determine the success of our campaign. Moreover, a second goal within this perspective is successful penetration of new markets . Although at this point our targeted audience is Canadian youth, eventually the company will want to expand into a new market in order to increase our potential customers. A way in which this could be measured is by calculating the percentage of the company’s sales in each new market . Calculating the successful expansion rates will indefinitely prove that the marketing campaign was successful.
One of the goals from the financial perspective is to increase the conversion rates at the website . This could be measured by monitoring the number of orders divided by the number of visitors on the site . Basically, a high conversion rate means that we are grasping the Canadian youth’s attention and are leading a successful campaign. On the contrary, a low conversion rate indicates a campaign failure. Moreover, a second goal is to obtain a higher level of sales growth . This could be easily measured by dollar volume of sales from one fiscal year to the next . This way we are able to compare last year’s sales to the current fiscal year’s sales, and if there is an increase in the current year’s sales we are able to attribute the increase to the success of our marketing campaign. Similarly, if a decrease were to occur between last year’s sales and the current year’s sales, this would determine the campaign’s failure.
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The introduction of the internet has caused a unifying effect among people in various parts of the world. The increased use of the internet has brought together over 12 billion people , which has created a more homogenous global marketplace, affecting styles, tastes and products. People are now able to transmit their ideas and information at the click of a mouse and this has played an important role in globalization. The internet has enabled individuals to see what other people in different parts of the world are engaging in and allowing them to take these ideas and fit them into their culture.
Our styles, tastes and products are reflecting a sense of conformity among all internet users. Essentially, internet users are exposed to the same company web pages, where a desire for certain products is created. The geographic location of an individual no longer matters because they are able to view the same web page as someone in a completely different continent.
For instance, eBay was a North American phenomenon, yet it did not take long for this idea to be introduced to other continents, such as Asia and Europe. Take for example eBay Hong Kong. It follows exactly the same format as North America’s eBay. The only difference is the language it is written in and the pictures of the people that appear on the advertisements. The language and people in the advertisements are depicted in such a way to fit the culture of the country.
Basically, it can be argued that people around the world share an internet culture together and this has reflected conformity in styles and tastes. Typically, North American culture has been to like large sized products such as large vehicles, large products, and the like. With the emergence of being able to transmit information rapidly through the internet, China has changed the type of products we desire. As a result of the smaller rooms and living spaces in China, the country has had to develop products to accommodate this lack of space. North America has been influenced by China and has developed an increased demand for products of smaller sizes. Haier is a great example of a Chinese company that has impacted North American culture in this way. Haier has become globally recognized for their smaller refrigerators in dorm rooms and is now carried in Wal-Mart. It is of significant importance to realize that a large majority of stores are developing smaller products.
Moreover, the global internet has developed similar music tastes all over the world. American’s hip hop culture has been spread into various parts of the globe. The internet has allowed its users to listen to songs from different countries, with the use of sites such as Kazaa and BearShare. For instance, internet users in China are able to follow America’s top 40 charts and download songs. As a result, through the use of the global internet, the same taste in music is acquired. Moreover, people in Greece are able to hear American music, take the beat and compose a song with the use of the original melody.
Evidently, the global internet has played a pivotal role in the globalization process as well as bringing people of different cultures together to follow the same trends. As more people use the internet, we will be able to see a more unified global market place where the tastes, styles and products will continue to grow in homogeneity.
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