The digital age of the internet and the World Wide Web has transformed and computerized everything. The traditional marketing concept, strategies, and processes have shifted into e-marketing. Marketing over the internet or e-marketing involves more advanced and sophisticated tools. They provide easy access to the analytics and data, so the marketers could align their marketing and business strategies along with it. Now the question is what is e-marketing? Is it good or bad? Today, we’ll find all of these answers;
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What is E-Marketing?
E-marketing comprises all the processes of planning, pricing, promotion, execution, and distribution of products and services over the internet and the World Wide Web. The purpose of using the computerized system is to facilitate the customers and meet their demands. E-marketing serves many important functions both for the customers and businesses as well. The customers would get competitive pricing and businesses would be able to cut down their operational cost.
Many businesses and companies provide the service of e-marketing and retail online-shopping nowadays. The customers can find contact details about your business and product information either from their computer or their smartphones anytime whenever they want.
E-marketing also means that you advertise your products and services online and your targeted customers get ads online; see the pictures of products, get discounted coupons, even purchase the product, and place the order online for home delivery. The traditional concept of visiting the physical store is losing the interest of customers.
Online Customer Behavior (Historically with Statistics)
Online shopping used to be the thing of educated and rich people of the demographic of 20 to 40 years old in the late 90s. The demographic of online users got broader after the 2000s and 2003s, their annual income was 65,000 US dollars, and their age was 40 years old. Out of these online customers, 50% of them were male, and the other 50% of them were females.
According to a study published by the US Department of Commerce in 2004, the 2nd most popular online searches in 2003 were for the product/service information. The demographic of 77% of the US online shopper were teenagers aging from 15 years old and older. They usually acquire the information about the product/service online before going out shopping. People were reluctant to do purchasing online in the being.
The reason people were reluctant and have trust issues in 2003 and 2004 is that 25% of the online retail stores didn’t provide the detail on their customer service page. 88% of the online customers would leave the platform before reaching the checkout page. It’s because 49% of the customers couldn’t find the required information easily.
Advantages of E-marketing
Following are the major advantages of using e-marketing for products, services and brands.
Less Risky
The good thing about using e-marketing is that it doesn’t involve too much risk. The online and social media marketing campaigns are much cheaper compared to TV, billboards, and newspaper advertisements. The e-marketing initiation and operational cost of online retail stores are very low compared to the establishment of physical stores. When you add all of these factors, it makes e-marketing less risky than traditional marketing.
Cost Reduction by Automation
E-marketing also provides the option of automating various processes of your business. For instance, you can send the customers orders directly to the third-party suppliers and ask them to send the order directly to the customers. Here automation is allowing you to save inventory cost, logistic cost, inventory management cost, rental cost, and product delivery costs.
Fast Response
Speed and fast response is the key to the success and widespread usage of e-marketing. It allows you to reply to your audience instantly regardless of the distance. It’s because of the fast response; the world has become a global village. The speed and fast interaction is the main reason behind the technological growth and development in the past few decades. If people were using the conventional modes of communication like newspapers, books, and face-to-face interaction, then we wouldn’t be able to see the current technology.
Easy Data Collection & Evaluation
When it comes to data collection to monitor the performance of your business, there’s no better alternative than e-marketing tools. Consider if you have to collect through conventional and traditional way, then it would months and plethora of monetary resources. But you can do it within a day online. Whether it’s data collection, evaluation, monitoring the performance of your business, or checking the analytics of your business; it’s only possible through an e-marketing approach.
Personalization
Personalized marketing is the latest and modern approach in the e-marketing world. Where you treat your customers like you know them based on the shopping data you have collected from them. It’s almost impossible to remember the names of hundreds of thousands of customers on the tip of your tongue. Only e-marketing allows you to follow the personalized marketing approach in your business.
More Interactions
With the combination of the e-marketing approach with social media marketing, you can increase the interaction with your target customers. You interact with your audience by using the personalized marketing approach. The more you’re active in your interaction with your audience, the more you increase the chances for the success of your business. It’s our human nature; we tend to visit those places where we’re familiar with them.
More Exposure
The most important thing from the business point of view is that e-marketing increases the exposure of your product/service. It’s the main concern of every new business owner that they want their product to be out there in the market where people could see it. More exposure to your products means that it would increase the chances of sales.
Global Accessibility
E-marketing has made it possible for the business to reach the global market. Everyone is familiar with global brands like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. It’s because of e-marketing such brands have become global brands and reach a worldwide audience. Many new brands are rising is because of the advanced e-marketing approaches.
Disadvantages of E-marketing
Below are the important disadvantages of using e-marketing strategy for your products and services.
Relying on Technology
Of course, e-marketing has many advantages, but it’s completely reliant on technology and the internet. You can’t do anything without modern technological tools like computers, the internet, operating systems, software, and applications. If anyone of the tools isn’t working, your whole business would be shutdown. But it’s completely reliant only on technology, and it makes e-marketing and other relevant businesses very risky.
Privacy & Security Issues
Customers’ privacy and their data security are some of the major issues of our technological time. That’s why customers are hesitant and reluctant to join the new platform because of the privacy and security issues. That’s why it makes it very difficult for new businesses to attract customers on their platform.
Maintenance Cost
E-marketing reduces many costs, but it increases the cost of buying tech tools and maintenance costs. You have to hire developers and tech professionals to manage your web-platform. Tech tools are also very costly to buy. When you combine all of these costs, then it becomes a significant amount of expense to run your business.
Higher Price Competition
Since any tech professional can launch an online business and he’s doing all the work. Therefore, his expenses are very low compared to the person who’s hiring other professionals. Resultantly, tech professionals would offer low price products/services to the customers. That’s why new online businesses have to face huge price competition.
Conclusion
After a detailed study about e-marketing, historical statistics, its advantages, and disadvantages; we have realized that e-marketing is very proliferating for your business. Only if you have got a competitive edge and tech expertise on the usage of advanced tools, then you should do it.
