Web Marketing Solutions

By Rohit Sengupta, Marketing Manager

Introduction
In growing numbers, small and midsized businesses are integrating their traditional marketing operations with online tools and services, in order to expand their options for connecting with current customers and prospects. In fact, according to recent research, 10 percent of all small businesses are already using basic e-mail marketing as a promotional tool. This guide explains how Web marketing tools can help your business and provides strategies for launching a Web site and choosing the right Web host for your needs.

What Is Web Marketing?
Web marketing is the process of promoting goods and services online and reaching out to both existing and new customers through Internet-based tools. This can involve selling, advertising, brand management, market research, and customer service.

You can use Web marketing to bolster your current marketing activities. Internet-based marketing tools—including e-mail and list management; online advertising; electronic newsletters; loyalty, referral, and affiliate programs; and a well-designed Web site—allow you to communicate more interactively than traditional promotional methods. These tools help you collect information about customers and, based on that intelligence, provide them with timely, personalized information about your company and products. Consider these popular Web marketing tools:
E-mail—E-mail your customers tailored and personalized marketing messages. The messages may be tailored to customers’ preferences, purchasing history, and browsing behavior. They can range from a simple “thank you for placing an order,” to new product and service announcements, to special targeted offers. But be sensitive to customer privacy, and make it easy for them to “opt-in” or unsubscribe from your e-mail campaigns.
Online advertising—Interactive banner ads are the most common form of online advertising. Online ads can drive traffic to your site and build your online brand. Professional organizations, including the Internet Advertising Bureau, have created standards for ad sizes, including a range of new configurations designed to make Web advertising more prominent and animated. Pricing structures vary.
Electronic newsletters—These digital publications are e-mailed to subscribers and may include colorful graphics and photos. You can customize the information to specific customer or partner commitments community that use or supply your products and services—for example, include product tips and tricks section. By e-mailing newsletters that include direct links to your Web site, you can also increase brand awareness and sales. But be sure you follow online etiquette, and make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe, or “opt out.”
Loyalty, referral, and affiliate programs—These programs offer incentives to loyal or frequent customers. Some incentives include giving discounts or gift certificates for referrals of new customers to your site or affiliations with other sites likely to be of interest to your target customers—and likely to drive Web traffic to you.
Web site—A Web site acts as a virtual window into your company. Typically a company site evolves from a collection of “pages” about your products and services to a retail distribution channel, where customers buy products and services and you collect data on customers’ interests and shopping patterns. Key benefits of your Web site as a marketing tool are the measurability of customer interactions with the site and the ability to personalize communications based on visitors’ interests.

The Web site serves as the hub for many Web marketing activities. Web site development is the process of designing, launching, maintaining, and expanding your site. Web site development solutions offer tools to help plan, create, and build a Web site.

If you decide to outsource hosting of your Internet services, an important component of the implementation phase of your Web presence is selecting a Web Hosting service. Web hosting companies centrally house and maintain multiple Web sites. They also may offer a variety of services and tools to manage, monitor, and store data collected on your site; help you create additional site features such as e-commerce and discussion boards; and provide faster Internet connections to speed customer access to your site (for more information, read the “E-Commerce Implementation Roadmap”).

There are two common types of Web hosting services to choose from: virtual hosting and dedicated hosting. Both are often offered by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). With virtual hosting, your ISP gives you space on servers and other equipment that are shared with the Web sites of other companies. With dedicated hosting, your company rents or buys a server exclusively for traffic on your site. The server is located at an ISP’s facility, and they manage it for you. Which option is best for you depends on factors such as traffic on your site, the services you offer through the site, and your expectations for growth in your Internet services.

Benefits and Examples
Web marketing can expand your market, reduce costs and open new communications with your customers:

1. Expanding Your Market—A Web site and Web marketing campaign can expand your geographic sales coverage and open markets that might otherwise be impossible to reach. It also allows you to expand your company’s brand into areas where you do not advertise or have a physical presence.

For example, a single-location culinary retailer that had a very loyal—but exclusively local—customer base added a wedding registry to its site. Soon, out-of-town wedding guests were using the registry to make online purchases for wedding couples. Without the registry, the sales would have been lost.

2. Reducing Customer Service Costs—A Web site can streamline customer service costs by enabling online customers to retrieve product information and pricing, as well as communicate online to your customer service representatives while making their purchasing decisions (for more information, read the “Customer Care Implementation Roadmap”).

For example, a chain of coffee and tea retail stores added a feature to its site that allowed visitors to locate nearby stores in addition to buying online. Visitors typed an address into a form, and the site generated a customized list of stores plotted on a map. This reduced the number of calls store personnel received asking for directions, and it increased the store’s brand presence in the on- and off-line community.

3. Opening New Communications with Your Customer—Web marketing activities improve information flow to your online community. Your Web site and Web marketing materials—such as e-mailed newsletters—can provide your customers with timely information on products, services and special promotions.

For example, a marine supply company sends e-mail to online customers confirming their purchase, payment, and anticipated delivery date. The company also added targeted discount offers in their confirmation messages based on each customer’s purchase. For example, a customer who selected a marine radio could be offered a matching antenna at a discounted price.

4. Additional Marketing Tools—With Web marketing, you can increase the capabilities of your marketing department to include online market research, test marketing, and promotion.

For example, a chain of shops specializing in Celtic products purchased an ad on a popular online newspaper based in Dublin, Ireland. The newspaper’s audience is Irish expatriates, most of who live in the United States. The ad reinforced the brand to existing customers of the specialty shops and acquired new customers who were longing for products only available in Ireland.

Strategic Business Considerations and Questions
Your company continually needs to address and adapt to customers’ expectations, competitors’ strategies, and new developments in your industry. The same is true of your Web marketing activities. Consider these four points:

1. Customers Expect a Strong Web Presence—Customers expect to visit the Web and easily obtain information about your products and services, news, pricing, contact information, and more.
How do your customers get information about your new products and services?
Is your information meeting your online audience’s needs?
How do your online customers make their buying decisions?

2. Competition—Your competition is probably already online and conducting Web marketing activities.
Are you losing customers to online competitors because of their Web sites?
How advanced are your competitors’ Web sites and marketing efforts? Do they offer online interaction with customer-service agents? Online purchase options? Interactive products demonstrations? Links to their affiliates’ sites for mutual traffic generation?
How do your site and Web marketing campaigns compare to your competitors’ sites and campaigns?

3. Future Business—Many marketing initiatives have, or will soon have, an Internet-based element. The Web has become a definitive medium to market to customers.
Have you planned to invest in Web marketing activities?
Are you losing sales to competitors because of the Web?
What business advantages do you expect from using Web marketing activities?

4. Customer Feedback—The success of your products and services can be determined on how well you adapt to your customers’ needs. Collecting their feedback is vital to retaining your customers.
Do you get customers’ input in developing your products?
How can you use the Web to increase the quantity and quality of customer feedback you’re getting?

Deployment Considerations and Questions
Here are five areas to consider before launching a Web site and marketing campaign:

1. Strategy—Develop a vision for your site and your Web marketing efforts, and gain the support of your senior management.
How do you think your Web site will improve your business?
Do you have a method for gathering customer registrations or feedback on your site?
What are the short- and long-term goals of your Web site and Web marketing activities?
What image do you want to project?

2. People—Consider the resources needed to launch and support an online presence that is available
24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Does your staff have easy access to the Internet? Do they have the equipment and skills they need?
What technical expertise do you need to contract or recruit?
How will you scale your staff to meet growth, or will you outsource this work?

3. Process—Understand and define the methods and practices, including policies and procedures, needed to launch and maintain your site.
Have you considered what is involved in building and maintaining a Web site and launching Web marketing activities?
Who is your Web audience? Have you considered this audience when designing the Web pages and writing the content?
Have you planned for managing and updating content, including pricing, on your site?
How you will integrate your Web presence and Web marketing activities with your traditional marketing activities?

4. Technology—Keep in mind that reliable, scalable, secure, accessible, and manageable software applications and tools are essential to support these activities.
Would you consider outsourcing your Web hosting needs? Have you evaluated the costs and benefits of outsourcing these activities?
Have you considered the security needed to collect customers’ credit or private information online?
Are you prepared to provide real-time customer support to answer questions about your products, services, and policies?

5. Service and Support—In addition to people and technology, you will want to consider outside services for rapid deployment (planning, design and implementation) and operation of your Web marketing solution. Consider:
Can I reduce my time to market and/or my costs if I hire a services organization with expertise and experience deploying Web marketing solutions, rather than training my staff to perform this one-time task?
What is the cost to my business if the system is not available? How can I proactively identify and resolve problems?
How will I migrate my system to higher levels of performance?
If I really had to go it alone, would I implement a Web marketing solution?
Timeline
Deployment timing depends on the needs of your marketing activities and the depth of your Web site. The following table provides a sample work plan for a 100-person company that is launching its first Web site. Because of the company’s rapid deployment requirements, the timeline illustrates only the major phases of a Web site development project. Deployment includes the basic phases of:
Business Assessment and Strategy Development—Examine the current state of your company’s Internet activities, obtain senior management’s support, and develop a strategic vision for the company’s Web presence.
Design and Branding—Create the visual aspects of the site. Branding involves user research, determining identity, and a developing a Web strategy to communicate that identity through the design.
User Experience Development—Create a plan that tailors the site structure to the needs of your audience.
Content Strategy—Identify the content needed for your site’s audience, including whether existing content can be tailored for the Web or new content needs to be developed.
Technology Implementation—Address the hardware, software networking, and hosting needs of launching and maintaining the site.
Success Measurements
Following are several Web site development and marketing metrics to help you measure your Web site’s activity and effectiveness. Web site metrics track customers’ behavior in real time and help identify the effectiveness of the site’s information architecture, content, and design:
Web site traffic—this can be measured several ways, including counting the number of unique visitors or registered users.
Web site use—this can be measured several ways, including counting the total number of Web pages viewed, the number of times the home page or other specific pages are viewed, or how long users spent on your site on any given day. Web marketing metrics track the effectiveness of Web marketing-related activities.
Click-through rate—the number of times people visit your site by clicking on a link in an ad or newsletter or on a partner’s site.
Response rate—the number of potential customers who reply to your Web marketing campaign. For example, you launch an e-mail campaign that points customers to a specific Web address within your site. The number of “hits” on this page indicates the approximate response rate to the campaign. Remember that another critical metric is conversion rate—the number of people who actually make a purchase after receiving your e-mail promotion.
Look-to-buy ratio—the ratio of the number of people who visit your site to the number of people who buy on your site.
Effectiveness of Web marketing campaigns—the number of responses, new sales, and new customers.

Summary
Web marketing solutions can enhance and expand your existing sales and marketing activities. Using Internet-based technologies, your marketing department can help you grow your customer base, reduce customer service costs, and build a personal communication line to current and potential customers. Your business can stay competitive, obtain customer feedback, find areas for growth, and can meet customers’ expectations for the convenience of online communication and buying. Plus, you can measure your online business performance and funnel that information into making improvements in both your Web marketing efforts and your overall business strategy.