Targeting the best online customers

Target market should be defined in terms of demographics, psychographics and special characteristics of niche markets, if applicable. Segmentation of the key market into homogenous buyer segments is just as important to online dealers as it is to traditional ones.

The web market could be considered a very large niche or target market to some advertisers. It is important to understand the uniqueness of the online audience. It has been rapidly congaing and will continue to evolve.

E-commerce ventures, just like retail stores, will sell their merchandise to three types of customers: the customers who know what they want and go get it, the customers who want to buy something but are undecided, and the potential customers who merely browse the Web.

Due to largely to the friendly, easy to use nature of the online shopping environment, potential and present customers/consumers are more likely to be attracted to visit presentations made to them.

This is particularly the case when the sites are properly designed and positioned in such a manner as to create high motivations to lure visitors to even very remote sites.

The more directed the shopper, the easier the sale – as long as that shopper can quickly and easily find the product online, get all the information on the product and then complete the purchase. Therefore, websites should concentrate on the shopper who came for a product and wants to quickly and easily purchase that product.

There are now many different classifications of online customers, all of which weight either shopping motives or values and lifestyles more heavily. In addition, there are approaches to classifying non-online shoppers.

If the company sells products online especially the target is mostly women - social shopping sites should be parts of the plan. No matter what market the company serves, male or female, young or old, B2C or B2B, customer generated reviews and ratings are all-important.

They will gravitate to and be guided by the reviews and advice of shoppers like themselves.
Targeting the best online customers

What is Marketing Information System?

Every firm organizes the flow of marketing information to its marketing manager as a support for his marketing interventions. Information systems that claim to support managers cannot be built unless one understands what managers do and how they do it.

Marketing Information Systems is that part of Business Information Systems which meets the information needs for an organization in sales, distribution, advertising, market analysis, market intelligence, product research, service management, customer profile and other marketing functions. It is a set of interacting facilities and procedures intended to bring together disparate items of data into a coherent body of information.

Companies need a marketing information system to enable them to define and measure opportunities.

Information must be obtained from customers, competitors and internal company records to obtain a reliable measure of past performance and future market opportunities.

A Marketing Information Systems consists of people, equipment and procedures to gather, sort, analyze, evaluate and distribute needed, timely and accurate information to marketing decision making.
What is Marketing Information System?

Marketing Information System

For many firms, the competitive nature of today’s business environment has brought home the realization that strategic advantage will accrue to the firm doing the best marketing job.

Effective marketing requires information. Every firm must organize the flow of marketing information to its marketing managers. Companies are studying their manager’s information needs and designing marketing information systems (MIS) to meet these needs.

A marketing information system (MIS) is a system which is used to collect, analyze, report, and take action on information which is critically important to the marketing function of any organization.

To carry out their analysis, planning, implementations and control responsibilities marketing managers need information about development in the marketing environment.

It is useful only if it can help a marketing manager to make a decision. In order to be useful, information should be of high quality, relevant, timely and complete. It should provide a good picture of reality and it should thus to be accurate, valid and reliable.

The role of the MIS is to assess the manager’s information needs, develop the needed information, and distribute the information in a timely fashion to the marketing managers.

The Marketing Information System operates as a decision support system to the following four systems:
*The internal accounting system
*The marketing intelligence system
*The marketing research systems
*The analytical marketing system

The needed information is developed through internal company records, marketing intelligence activities, marketing research and marketing decision support analysis.

The information will includes data on economic and business trends, consumer buying behavior, market development, competitive products and prices as well as data generated by market research.
Marketing Information System

After sales service of e-commerce

Providing effective service and support to customer before, during and after sales has always been major challenge.

In economics characterized by sophisticated products, customer service and after sales service are a major cost for many firms, often accounting for more than 10% of operating cost.

But customer care has become even more crucial with the advent of electronic commerce, which has added a vast electronic marketplace in which companies must compete for online customers, who can switch an instant to their competitors.

The customer will be able to get effective and immediate help in any problems he might encoder with a product he purchased.

It is becoming increasingly common for manufacturing industries to tailor their operation to be more in line with their customer requirements than 15 years ago.

Certain company has responded with a new call center which integrates phones, E-mail, and chat system for communicating with online and offline customer.

Customers can across database or ‘smart’ manuals directly; this significantly cuts costs while improving the quality of service.

Some company has added Internet telephone capability to their customer support interactions because they found that their customers prefer a more personal types of communications to discuss their banking matters studies shows that such strategies do contribute significantly to improving a computer acquisitions or retention of online customer.

A customer may do product research and initiate an order online but pick up the merchandise and obtain after sales service in a physical outlet.

The advantages for consumers of having better coordination of after sales services may translate for the company into marketable value added or increased competitiveness.
After sales service of e-commerce