Chapter 8

1. Chapter 8 Strategies for Marketing, Sales, and Promotion

2. Creating an Effective Web Presence • Businesses always create a presence in the physical world by building stores and office buildings. • The only contact that customers and other stakeholders have with a firm on the Web is through its presence there. • Creating an effective Web presence can be critical even for the smallest and newest firm operating on the Web.

3. Learning Objectives In this chapter, you will learn about: • Establishing an effective business presence on the Web • Promoting your Web site • Meeting the needs of Web site visitors • Creating trust and building loyalty in Web site visitors • Testing usability in Web site design

4. Learning Objectives (Cont.) • Identifying and reaching customers on the Web • Choosing successful marketing approaches for the Web • Understanding the elements of branding • Considering branding strategies and costs • Choosing a business model for selling on the Web

5. Identifying Web Presence Goals • On the Web, businesses have the luxury of intentionally creating a space that creates a distinctive presence. • A Web site can perform many image-creation tasks very effectively, including: • Serving as a sale brochure • Serving as a product showroom • Showing a financial report • Posting an employment ad • Serving as a customer contact point

6. Achieving Web Presence Goals • An effective site is one that creates an attractive presence that meets the objectives of the business or other organization. • Possible objectives include: • Attracting visitors to the Web site • Making the site interesting enough • Convincing visitors to follow the site’s links • Creating an impression of corporate image • Building a trusting relationship with visitors • Reinforcing positive images of the organization • Encouraging visitors to return to the site.

7. The Toyota Site • The Toyota site is a good example of an effective Web presence. • The site provides: • A product showroom feature • Links to detailed information about each product line • Links to dealers • Links to information about company

8. Quaker Oats • Quaker Oats has created Web sites that did not offer any corporate presence until 1999. • In 1999, Quaker Oats changed its Web page to improve its general appearance and user-friendliness. • The Toyota and Quaker Oats examples illustrate that the Web can integrate an opportunity for enhancing the image of a business with the provision of information.

9. Not-for-Profit Organizations • A key goal for many not-for-profit organizations is information dissemination. • The combination of information dissemination and a two-way contact channel is a key element in any Web site. • The American Civil Liberties Union and American Red Cross have created effective Web presences. • Political parties and museums also use Web site for their image presences.

10. How the Web is Different • The failure to understand how the Web is different from other presence-building media is one reason that businesses fail to achieve their Web objectives. • Firms must use the Web’s capability for two-way, meaningful communication with their customers.

11. Meeting the Needs of Web Site Visitors • Businesses that are successful on the Web realize that every visitor to their Web site is a potential customer. • Creating a Web site that meets the needs of visitors with a wide range of motivations can be challenging. • Technology variation can be another concern to Web presence.

12. Meeting the Needs of Web Site Visitors • A good Web site should give the visitor the option to select smaller versions of the images. • A good site design lets visitors choose among information attributes, such as level of detail, forms of aggregation, viewing format, and downloading format.

13. Trust and Loyalty • When customers buy a product, they are also buying that service element. • A seller can create value in a relationship with a customer by nurturing customers’ trust and developing it into loyalty. • Customer service is a problem for many corporate sites. • A primary weak spot for many sites is the lack of integration between the companies’ call centers and their Web sites.

14. Usability Testing • Firms are now starting to perform usability testing to their Web sites. • As the usability testing becomes more common, more Web sites will meet their goals. • Eastman Kodak, T. Rowe Price, and Maytag have found that a series of Web site test designs help them a lot.

15. Identifying and Reaching Customers • Two general ways of identifying and reaching customers: personal contact and mass media. • An important element of corporate Web presence is connecting with site visitors who are customers or potential customers. • Mass media is a one-to-many communication model, the Web is a Many-to-one communication model, and personal contact is a one-to-one communication model.

16. Measuring the Effectiveness of Web Site Advertising • The pricing metric in mass media is called cost-per-thousand and is often abbreviated CPM. • Measuring Web audiences is more complicated. • Banner ads are often sold on a CPM basis where the ‘thousand’ is 1000 impressions. • Rates vary greatly and depend on how much demographic information the Web site obtains about its visitors, but most are within the range of $1 to $100 CPM.

17. New Marketing Approaches for the Web • The Web is an intermediate step between mass media and personal contact. • Using the Web to communicate with potential customers offer many advantages of personal contact selling and many of the cost savings of mass media. • GartnerGroup reported that customer-centered marketing strategies would be an excellent fit for the Internet marketplace.

18. Technology-Enabled Relationship Management • Technology-enabled relationship management occurs when a firm obtains detailed information about a customer and uses that information for marketing purpose. • It is also called customer relationship management (CRM) or electronic customer relationship management (eCRM).

19. Creating and Maintaining Brands on the Web • A known and respected brand name can present to potential customers a powerful statement of quality and value. • Branded products are easier to advertise and promote, because each product carries the reputation of the brand name.

20. Elements of Branding • The key elements of a brand are differentiation, relevance, and perceived value. • Product differentiation indicates that the company must clearly distinguish its product from all others in the market. • Relevance is the degree to which the product offers utility to a potential customer. • Perceived value is a key element in creating a brand that has value.

21. Emotional Branding vs. Rational Branding • Companies have traditionally used emotional appeals in their advertising and promotion efforts to establish and maintain brands. • Rational branding relies on the cognitive appeal of the specific help offered, not on a broad emotional appeal.

22. Permission Marketing Strategies • Many businesses may send e-mail messages to their customers and potential customers. • The practice of sending e-mail messages to people who have requested them is a part of marketing strategy called permission marketing. • One Web site that offers opt-in e-mail services is yesmail.com.

23. Brand-Leveraging Strategies • Rational branding is not the only way to build brands on the Web. • One method that is working for well-established Web sites is to extend their dominant positions to other products and services. • Yahoo! is an excellent example of this strategy.

24. Affiliate Marketing Strategies • In affiliate marketing, the affiliate firm’s Web site includes descriptions, reviews, ratings, or other information about a product that is linked to another firm’s site that offers the item for sale. • The affiliate site receives a commission. • The affiliate site also obtains the benefit of the selling site’s brand in exchange for the referral.

25. Viral Marketing Strategies • Viral marketing relies on existing customers to tell other persons about the products or services they have enjoyed using. • Viral marketing approaches use individual customers to spread the words.

26. Brand Consolidation Strategies • Another way to leverage the established brands of existing Web sites was devised by Della & James, an online bridal registry. • Della & James offers a single registry that connects to several local and national department and gift stores, including Crate&Barrel, Dillard’s, Gump’s, Neiman Marcus and Williams-Sonoma.

27. Cost of Branding • Transferring existing brands to the Web or using the Web to maintain an existing brand is much easier and less expensive than creating an entirely new brand on the Web. • Promoting the company’s Web presence should be an integral part of brand development and maintenance. • Integrating the URL with the company logo on brochures can also be helpful.

28. Web Site Naming Issues • The legal and marketing aspects of Web site naming can be complicated. • Obtaining identifiable names to use for branded products on the Web is important. • URL brokers sell or auction domain names. • The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) maintains a list of accredited domain name registrars.

29. Selling Goods and Services • The business model of selling goods and services on the Web is based on the mail order catalog business model. • When the catalog model is expanded to the Web site, it is called the Web-catalog model. • Compaq, Dell, and Gateway are examples of selling computers on the Web.

30. Selling Information or Other Digital Content • Firms that own intellectual property have embraced the Web as a new and highly efficient distribution mechanism. • ProQuest is a Web site that sells digital copies of published documents. • The ACM Digital Library offers subscriptions to electronic versions of its journals to its members and to libraries. • Encyclopedia Britannica is an example that has transferred an existing brand to the Web.

31. Advertising-Supported Model • The advertising-supported business model is the one used by network television in the U.S. • The success of Web advertising has been hampered by two major problems: • No consensus has emerged on how to measure and charge for site visitor views • Very few Web site have sufficient numbers of visitors to interest large advertiser.

32. Advertising-Subscription Mixed Model • In this mixed model, subscribers pay a fee and accept some level of advertising. • The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal use a mixed advertising-subscription model. • The Reuters wire service also uses a mixed model in its Web offerings.

33. Fee-for-Transaction Models • The travel agency business model involves receiving a fee for facilitating a transaction. • Now, a number of online travel agencies began doing business on the Web. • Stock brokerage firms use a fee-for-transaction model. They charge their customers a commission for each trade executed.