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Effectively using e-Marketing

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How can an organization effectively use e-Marketing? Why should this be part of the overall marketing? List some examples

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This tutorial is 6,419 words plus 13 references. It begins: THE VALUE OF ONLINE ADVERTISING. Online advertising is a cost-efficient way to relay an organizations' message to potential customers, allowing the organization to reach more of their audience and provide thoughtful and meaningful data to their marketing spend. Online advertising provides direct insight into the return on investment of the marketing campaigns and helps to build a larger customer base and revenue.
Consumers of today not only visit the Internet for technological news and online shopping, they are also using the Internet as a resource to educate themselves on products and services. Online advertising not only helps to drive web site traffic, but it also impacts offline sales as it is a source for building brand awareness. In preparing for the 2004 election, Howard Dean raised more than 60 percent of his funds via the Internet. Political candidates realize that more than 44% of voters rely on the Internet as a major source of campaign information. This information gives them a better idea of where to spend their marketing dollars, where they could do it more efficiently and where they could gain the largest amount of exposure. Three crucial steps lead to a successful online advertising program: (see solution for rest)

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Posting 89724 - USING E-MARKETING
THE VALUE OF ONLINE ADVERTISING
Online advertising is a cost-efficient way to relay an organizations' message to potential customers, allowing the organization to reach more of their audience and provide thoughtful and meaningful data to their marketing spend. Online advertising provides direct insight into the return on investment of the marketing campaigns and helps to build a larger customer base and revenue.
Consumers of today not only visit the Internet for technological news and online shopping, they are also using the Internet as a resource to educate themselves on products and services. Online advertising not only helps to drive web site traffic, but it also impacts offline sales as it is a source for building brand awareness. In preparing for the 2004 election, Howard Dean raised more than 60 percent of his funds via the Internet. Political candidates realize that more than 44% of voters rely on the Internet as a major source of campaign information. This information gives them a better idea of where to spend their marketing dollars, where they could do it more efficiently and where they could gain the largest amount of exposure.
Three crucial steps lead to a successful online advertising program:
1. GET TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
It is important to figure out where to target the audience and what messages resonate with them. Determining customer demographics such as job title, industry, revenue, company size, etc., is only one step in better understanding your audience. This allows an organization to choose the appropriate web sites as well as develop a targeted program that matches the exact demographics.
Looking for target customers who may be closer than the organization realize is a way to cut costs in learning who the audience is. If there is no personal link to the target audience, pair up by capitalizing on the customer database and e-mailing them a short survey. An agency can be hired to conduct surveys and focus group. If the target audience includes co-workers or friends - recruit them to serve as focus groups to give direct and honest feedback on online ads. This can be done in a quick and inexpensive manner.
Educate your organization on the audience's world. Visit their favorite web sites, subscribe to their newsletters and read their magazines. Soon the organization will realize what messages advertisers use and how they are doing it while also finding innovative ways to target their audience.
For example, Rackspace immersed themselves in the audience's favorite web sites and publications then worked to develop a successful banner campaign or that target outlet. They developed a banner campaign that mirrored the Linux operating system since approximately 50% of their technology-savvy customer base operated on Linux. The ad used the same programming that the targeted audience used and they incorporated their message. That way, the ad spoke directly to their audience and as a result brought in several new Linux customers for Rackspace.
2. TEST, TEST, TEST
Once the publications and web sites that the audience uses has been identified, the organization can then identify their budget and goals for their online advertising campaign. The budget and goals should be clearly defined and ready to present to the agency who will be conducting the media buys. If the organization is handling media buys directly, then present goals to the actual vendor. Ask the vendors to work with you to provide the best locations to achieve the desired goals. They are the ones who know the audience the most and knows what has been successful for other advertisers.
Start with small tests and grow as the campaign grows. Negotiate small, short-term media buys, which would allow the organization to deliver the message in front of the audients for an appropriate amount of time. Then expand if it works well.
If the organization is new to online advertising, consider the existing upfront programs. Search engines is a booming industry?sites like Google offer many advertisers a $15-25 credit to their account in order to build a campaign. They even offer a one-stop area to help build keywords, provide pointers on writing creative content and gives and idea of the size budget to expect. Another successful area is third-party or 'opt in' email lists. To abide by anti-spam regulations, these lists contain e-mail names that have opted to receive advertising e-mails from your company. E-mail names can be rented for as low as $.35 per name. E-mail advertising is a great vehicle to drive the precise audience as the list can be structured in the same way that the company direct mail database is structured
3. TRACK YOUR RESULTS
The amount of data that can be acquired from the online advertising campaign is what is so beautiful about this type of advertising. Vendors will provide a report that tells the organization from their perspective how successful the campaign was. Using third-party software such as Web Trends can help determine what type of action the user took on the organizations' actual site - did they jump off when the clicked on the organization's ad; did they navigate, purchase or submit a form?
A successful campaign should be evaluated by looking at the vendor reports, evaluating the actions visitors took on your web site and lastly, what type of return the organization received as a result of the campaign. Look particularly at the costs associated with driving the traffic and each cost per sale. These metrics can help the organization understand the contribution their online advertising campaign made to the overall marketing strategy.
WEB CONFERENCING
To build a case for web conferencing and to justify the costs for management, is the first step in understanding how the organization an use and benefit from web conferencing. There are eight points to use as a launching pad:
1. Realize cost-savings. Web conferencing and calls costs roughly $1,500 as opposed to $8,000 or more for traveling from one location to another.
2. Hold low-cost committee meetings. A 20 person face-to-face meeting can cost more than $25,000. The same meeting, using web conference, may cost as low as $5,500.
3. Improve staff communication and coordination. Web conferences are invaluable as regular staff meetings or for coordinating staff work between periodic trips to headquarters. For example, using an application sharing feature, remote offices can modify budget spreadsheets in real time.
4. Share timely information with members
5. Feature subject matter experts.
6. Expand the organization reach and visibility
7. Increase opportunities for members to network
8. Create new sources of revenue. If your organization currently offers traditional training or certification programs, web conferencing can provide new revenue opportunities, extending your reach to people with time or budget constraints
ONLINE SURVEYS
Online surveys- an Internet based research approach is catching on. The big and the popular companies of the world like the Microsoft, Ford, AT and T, Compaq, use the online surveys to make various important business decision. For instance, British Airways uses an online survey to gather the opinions of over 9000 executive club members regarding the company services. Similarly, Leo Burnett the leading Advertising Agency used the online survey to test the advertising directed to the 'kid' market. I
The word 'survey' is used most often to describe a method of gathering information from a sample of individuals. This 'sample' is usually just a fraction of the population being studied. Survey provides an important source of basic scientific knowledge. Data collection in a survey is usually carried out by mail, telephone interview, in-person interview and questionnaires. Online Surveys in the other hand are performed by sending questionnaires to the individuals via e-mail or by posing a survey form in the Web or an electronic bulletin board.
To carry out an email survey, an organization draws a sample of the email addresses from its database and emails its questionnaire. The respondents type their answers and send back the email. To answer an email survey, the respondent does not need to be online while filling the questionnaire. In the web survey however, the respondents visit a webpage and answer the questionnaire online. The links to the webpage where the questions are posted are usually sent by email to the respondents.
Benefits of the Online Survey
The increasing popularity of the online surveys is perhaps based upon its innate attribute of being a research approach, which for the first time has enabled the researchers/organizations to quickly and affordably understand the attitudes, behaviors and opinions of the current or target customers.
Online surveys provide one with the ability to acquire targeted, real time marketplace feedback upon which the business decisions can be confidently made. The growing use of the online survey also makes sense because consumers especially the younger generations who are spending more of their time in Internet prefer the quick online methods over the traditional research methods like telephone and mail surveys which consume more time and effort of the respondents. With the number of the internet users growing up even in Nepal no marketer will be able to able to ignore the online survey for long. Moreover the valuable feedback that is required for the purpose of creating a better website, a better online advertising initiatives, understanding customers satisfaction levels through web based services can perhaps be best identified with the help on online surveys of the targeted sample of the Internet users rather than by using the offline methods.
Advantages of the online surveys over the usual offline methods can perhaps be enumerated as follows:
1. Speed: Where it takes months to gather the feedback on the questionnaires sent by mail the online survey questionnaires can be delivered almost instantaneously worldwide via internet and there is no postal charges. In as little as 24 hours (or less) in one business day, you can have the necessary information derived from the feedback of the survey to guide your decision.
With the help of 'adaptive ' questions in an online survey, the researcher can make it easy for the respondent to answer those questions, which are applicable for him/her thus increasing the speed of answering process. For example, if the respondents marks himself as 'Single' the computer will automatically skip say 3 questions related to his family size and their demographics. This reduces the complexity and the time of the respondent in reading and answering the questions related ...

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