Unit 13: Assignment 1 – E-Marketing and Website Design
In this assignment, I shall be describing the role of e-marketing in a modern marketing context with comparisons to traditional marketing contexts using one business as an example. I shall also explain the benefits of E-Marketing within the marketing mix as well as analysing the benefits of e-marketing to customers. Finally, I shall evaluate the effectiveness of e-marketing in its ability to meet customer’s needs.
E-Marketing, simply put, is any marketing that is digital or otherwise, as the “E” suggests, electronic. Since the dawn of the internet, we’ve been exposed to online adverts which in itself is a form of e-marketing but it is important for us to remember that marketing is not just advertising. Instead, marketing is everything that makes your business who it is from not only the adverts themselves but the concurrent themes within certain company’s adverts, their layout, their branding, their research and much more falls under the umbrella of marketing; e-marketing is all of this only digitised. In other words, e-marketing is any marketing that uses electronic media, whether that’s the internet, the TV or the radio, a button kiosk such as the ones used in supermarkets that ask you to rate your in-store experience as you leave.
The most important thing to realise is the shift between consumer attention trends, previously, television channels would sync their advertisement roll times to be slightly after the previous channel’s, this allowed their viewers who would “channel hop” when adverts came on during breaks, especially during prime times, to be exposed to more advertisements – this was especially attractive for businesses with a smaller advertising budget, forced to advertise on lesser popular channels; problems began to arise when the likes of Virgin Media and Freeview started appearing in the market with different orders of channels although, the core channels (BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) remained in chronological order. Nowadays, however, when a television advert comes on (if we’re even watching television now, I mean, what even is TV? A large proportion of us now watch the majority of our television via on demand services such as BBC iPlayer and 4OD) most people reach for their favourite time killer, their mobile phone or other mobile device. In other words, television advertising is becoming increasingly less effective as people avert their attention towards more attractive subjects such as the suggested pages on Facebook’s news feed which in themselves are adverts but fit into the platform so subtly one can be forgiven for not realising that businesses have paid for your attention as will become apparent later in this assignment.
E-marketing has, without a doubt, expanded the marketing capabilities of companies worldwide, by the sheer volume of individuals who are potentially exposed to electronic media platforms compared to traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and non-digital billboards is dramatically exponential. If we look at the cost of newspaper advertising (up to £450 a day for a half page advert in a local newspaper) compared to the cost of web-based advertising, the savings speak for themselves, Facebook charges approximately 53p CPM (cost per mile, in advertising terms, cost per one thousand impressions – an impression is each time an advert is displayed on a web page or elsewhere regardless of whether it is clicked on or not), I use this comparison as it is most alike in the way that a published advert in a newspaper costs the same regardless of conversion rate. To put it into perspective, if approximately 32’000 people read the Leicester Mercury (assumed from circulation rates of 32’225), that means for £450, your maximum exposure is to those who read the paper on that day, approximately 32’000 people potentially see your advert, likewise, this would be the case with CPM advertising (rather than paying for cost per click, Facebook charges about 18p per click) only your £450 would be costing a business 252 times more per potential view in a newspaper than it would on a social media platform. If my calculations are correct, you are paying 1.4 pence per potential view in a half page newspaper advert whereas, on Facebook, you are paying 0.00056 pence per potential view, meaning for the same cost as newspaper advertising, a business will be exposed to 1785 more people on a penny by penny basis if they opt for social media advertising. Now, for somebody like Amazon who operate throughout the UK (they’re an international company but for the purposes of this example, we are only referring to Amazon’s dealings within the UK), would benefit far better from a non-targeted CPM advertising strategy via Facebook than they would in a company such as the Leicester Mercury.
Amazon fare very well online but they choose to also advertise via traditional media channels also and this highlights how unlikely it is that print based advertising (and more broadly, all traditional marketing methods) shan’t fall into absolute obscurity, instead they will often be utilised by the larger players. Look at television advertising, to advertise during a Coronation Street break with ITV would cost the same as it did ten years ago (obviously, allowing for inflation and other economic factors), from their own website it states, “TV advertising has never been so accessible or affordable – with micro-region targeting and ad tailoring, we can work with you to build the perfect campaign for your business needs and goals. Costs can vary from as little as £2,000 up to more than £1 million – depending on how much noise you need to make!” At those prices, it pushes the smaller businesses right out of the picture which means, these more traditional advertising methods (though television is actually e-marketing) will only ever be accessible by those with a much higher advertising budget than others. Other traditional advertising methods will only survive if they adapt and increase their prices to remain sustainable but what I think we will find as a result is, just as television advertising, it will become inaccessible to smaller businesses.
We will find a rift between large companies and smaller businesses and what advertising methods they will use based on what they can afford, understandably there will be more smaller businesses advertising on social media, hitting their niche target markets with excellence and you’ll find the larger companies advertising in traditional media methods, targeting demographics who may be exposed to these adverts whilst utilising a more cost-effective scattergun approach on social media. We find this especially with the likes of eBay and Amazon who will often target adverts at me for bulk-buy pet food which has little effect on me as I don’t purchase pet food in bulk and in fact, I only receive these adverts as a result of searching “Whiskers supermeat wholesale” as I wanted to buy different flavours of a specific Whiskers product because my eldest cat, Ava, is very fussy and tries to refuse to eat anything else but nowadays, she can make do and go without but less said about my Ava the better, for the purposes of this assignment of course but I can talk all day about my cats and dog… These targeted ads aren’t very targeted, in fact, they embody the scattergun approach I just mentioned. Cookies are sweetly named trackers that are in your web-browser which track your browsing history, they assign your IP address a token which allows advertising platforms to recognise your interests and direct ads, as specified by the companies advertising, to you so if Amazon is advertising a 48 pack of Felix cat food pouches, because I’ve searched for “Whiskers Supermeat Wholesale”, I will be exposed to their advert due to my cookies. I can disable these and in which case I will be shown ‘random’ adverts (which aren’t random, they’re just adverts with no specific target), unless the advertising platform in question has consent (whether informed or otherwise) to view my location in which case, I may also be shown location based adverts.
We’ve talked a whole lot about adverts but what about other forms of e-marketing? Well, one way I earn cash, or vouchers, is by assisting Indeed.co.uk, the job search engine, in listing their local jobs that otherwise aren’t using online recruitment. If you go to their website and search for jobs in Leicester, you will see many seemingly incomplete listings which are written from information gathered from “Help Wanted” signs around the city. I take photographs of the sign and the shop front and upload them in return for Amazon vouchers. The process of uploading these to their website for potential jobseekers to find is a process of e-marketing as we are displaying the jobs on an electronic media platform, for about 30 seconds of work, I make approximately 25p worth of Amazon Vouchers. I also use an app on my phone called VoxPopMe, I earn 25p per 15+ second video response to market research that is carried out by a range of companies, some notable ones where Pepsi asking their opinion on a new advert they may or may not have released (due to confidentiality agreements, it is unwise to publish these specifics in this assignment), as well as an advert for Paddy Power which I can tell you I have seen on YouTube as a pre-roll ad (these are adverts displayed before a video and are one of the most expensive forms of online advertising though the cost is still dwarfed by traditional advertising methods), the market research I took part in was regarding adverts but VoxPopMe are an app who provide digital market research solutions to businesses, the Market Research is presented to me by the app however, I have been unable to find out the costings of this form of marketing as they work on a quotation basis depending on the needs of their customer.
The needs of customers brings me on to my next point about e-marketing. E-marketing, generally, allows marketers to target their customers based on what their customers need. Google Adwords allows companies to do this extremely effectively; let’s look at the two biggest players currently in the takeaway industry, Just Eat and Hungry House. If you go to Google and type in one of those companies, you can bet your last quid that the other company will show up first, possibly with a faint yellow box around it and, definitely, something that reveals that it is an advert or a caption stating “powered by Adwords”, this (not so) shady advertising practice is used to steal customers either by taking advantage of customer’s curiosity, lack of attention to detail or simply because they expect the first search result to be the company they’re after without actually reading it. All of which aren’t shady in themselves, it’s just how the companies go about competing with one another.
Another prominent form of competition within e-marketing is the likes of British brands poking fun at one another in efforts to create a viral PR stunt as part of an e-marketing tactic, as can be seen in the below example;
Tesco Mobile and Jaffa Cakes aren’t competitors per-se but Tesco supermarkets do supply McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes (whose Twitter handle is @RealJaffaCakes) so, it highlights how risky e-marketing can be. If Tesco Mobile said something which McVitie’s misperceived, it could have disastrous impacts on Tesco’s ability to work with them. Imagine if McVitie’s felt Tesco were trying to say their product was substandard because they put the apostrophes either side of “cakes” which can be perceived as if Tesco are simply saying they’re not cakes, which McVitie’s would obviously contest, rather than picking up on the fact that cakes were sold in the biscuit aisle… It could be seen as facetious by the other brand and could warrant the brand to turn around to Tesco and withdraw their product from their biscuit aisle and their supermarkets completely but McVitie’s aren’t daft and can clearly see the humour behind Tesco Mobile’s tweet. If it were me, on the other hand, I’d be demanding reparations in the form of money-off coupons for Tesco Mobile’s blatant cheek but that’s neither here nor there.
So, now we’ve talked a lot about e-Marketing and the multitude of ways that e-marketing has been utilised by various other companies but now, let’s look at how one business in particular found their entire business model turned upside down as a result of the development of e-marketing solutions. JC Decaux are responsible for owning a large majority of stationary billboards throughout the UK. For years they relied on their employees pasting 48 sheets of paper onto boards that do not move, do not line up and otherwise, don’t do an awful lot of anything, it was like sliced bread when the rotating-triangular-shaped-modular billboards came out, the ones which have about 30 motorised triangles (like a cylinder only triangular shape, like a Toblerone) which on each side would have a portion of an advert, all of these would turn at the same time at a specific time interval, displaying three unique adverts on the same billboard over a set amount of time to reveal the full advert, similar to the holographic texturing used to display a different image depending on what angle you look at it, like the use on the Rigley’s Believe or Not Books (if they’re still in publication like this, they certainly were around 2011-ish). These were cheaper than the original method for customers but more expensive for advertisers to actually advertise on due to increased overheads due to electricity usage and wage increases due to the amount of time to install these adverts.
Then birthed the dawn of digital billboards, like giant iPhones installed into the ground, some of them are fully interactive and others display a slide show of adverts. JC Decaux have really got their foot into the hospitality industry with companies such as Ramada who own Mercure and Ramada Jarvis hotels who allow JC Decaux to install their advertising screens in their hotels. The Sun Bar in Leicester informed me that JC Decaux actually pay them a monthly fee to have their screens displayed in their bar. Premier Inn also use similar devices to advertise room rates in some of their more upmarket (as upmarket as Premier Inn get, they’re not very premier) hotels.
Mailchimp is a company who enable other companies to use email as a form of e-marketing, it is easy to mistake e-marketing for “email marketing” but in fact, email marketing is just a strategy of e-marketing. Companies build email list and send newsletters to their customers (or leads) email addresses. Just clicking the Spam folder of any of my email clients reveals a 9999+ list of unread emails from such companies who use similar products as supplied by Mail Chimp. Arguably one of the least effective forms of e-marketing however, there aren’t just prominent news stories about older individuals being duped by email marketing scams, not just the ones from individuals claiming to be working for a legal firm informing you of your long lost Nigerian uncle’s late passing and your inheritance that you had no idea about but the likes of Sports Direct (arguably, equally as shady as these email marketing scam artists) also run a daily email newsletter which advertises their latest products, sales and special offers to their customers, I must say, I rarely ever read these newsletters, I get so many they simply clog up my inbox and for this reason, I believe email marketing to be one of the least effective and untrustworthy.
We cannot define a specific role e-marketing has played in a modern marketing context because, for some time now, e-marketing has provided a supporting role to the majority of traditional marketing contexts but there’s no denying that the role e-marketing has played is exponential, we will be able to define a definitive role of e-marketing in comparison to traditional marketing contexts, however, later in this assignment. Let’s look again at print based advertising, anybody who advertises in the Metro printed newspaper also get access to digital advertising within their digital newspaper app which downloads the daily paper (Monday to Friday) in a handy e-format allowing advertisers to add motion and other details they otherwise wouldn’t be able to in traditional marketing formats. Metro (owned by DMGMedia who also owns the Daily Mail) also use Google Adsense to host adverts around their website (another Google advertising product that generates adverts for advertisers to publish, different from Adwords in the sense that Adwords is the control portal for companies wishing to advertise).
The role e-marketing has played in modern marketing is absolutely exponential, it has reduced the costs for a lot of businesses and made marketing in general easily accessible for even small companies or individuals. Companies like Ipsos have been able to lower costs in conducting market research on behalf of companies by digitising surveys and allowing their customer’s target demographics to fill them in online saving material expenses, a server storing data is much cheaper to run and manage than paper based filing systems, after all.
So, what are the benefits of e-marketing? Some of which can be easily gathered from what we’ve already explored but here is a list of some of the other benefits of e-marketing:
Some of the benefits defined above fits nicely into the marketing mix for any business. To recap, the marketing mix helps us to define our target market and better position ourselves to suit the needs of our target market. Below is an infographic to allow us to better understand the marketing mix:
The marketing mix comes into play when a business decides to look at e-marketing, the marketing mix allows a company to also tailor their marketing campaigns to suit their target market. Amazon for example are web-based but have physical, non-web based departments that deal with the operational aspects of the company, their customers however typically only deal with the Amazon website (although there are alternative ways for customers to order), this means they can utilise e-marketing arguably more effectively than non-web based companies. Their adverts will redirect their customers to where they need to be to be in the best possible place to buy their product, that’s the link to their site that the customer will be directed to as a result of taking action on the advert that Amazon had published perhaps on Facebook (again, this meets the place segment of the mix). Because Amazon are web based, customers can purchase wherever they have a data connection.
Amazon can easily assess the price of their products in relation to costs of advertising and income bands of their target market by using targeted advertising methods to ensure their adverts are displayed to customers who can actually afford the product they are advertising. It would be no good advertising a Rolex Yacht Master II to someone who only purchases trinkets at less than £5 per go, it would be a clear indication that the individual buying trinkets at less than a fiver would be less than favourable of a watch with such a high retail value unless, they’d have gathered this data from tracking the user’s cookies.
Amazon can tailor their adverts to promote their products in the most effective way, because e-marketing is very dynamic in the sense that you can edit your advertising campaigns halfway through on most platforms, if for whatever reason Amazon’s marketing team realised their advertising campaign was not performing as well as expected, they can change their promotions accordingly to better suit their expectations and meet their marketing objectives.
Because of e-marketing’s ability to target the individuals you need down to their hair colour, weight, age, location, gender, favourite food, their niche interests, even their darkest secrets through the use of cookies, Amazon can attract the exact people they require, whether that be the affluent, wealthy, posh individual who enjoys drinking the coffee of monkey poo (upon further research, the coffee in question, Kopi Luwac, is made from the digested coffee bean digested by the civet, a kind of Vietnamese weasel, it’s extracted from their faeces) or the everyday Joe Smith who’s simply playing keeping up with the Jones’ and likely to buy a new barbecue this summer like they do every summer, Amazon can directly target these individuals whereas in traditional marketing contexts, they simply cannot.
In the above infographic, it says physical environment, I’m sure this is supposed to be physical evidence, it refers to how measurable the effectiveness of your marketing strategy is and for Amazon, it is very measurable. E-marketing, on every platform I have so far come across, has had an analytics tool, similar to YouTube’s video analytics and Google’s Adsense analytics (as well as Adwords, Microsoft’s advertising platform and Yahoo Ads) which details impressions, views, engagement time, clicks, conversions and return on investment, some even have real-time budget usage monitors. Amazon can track every aspect of their e-marketing campaigns.
Amazon can also easily implement e-marketing into their process far easier than they can other traditional marketing strategies. This is because e-marketing is far less time consuming as mistakes made in haste can be rectified later, this is especially true in smaller businesses, I expect Amazon to make few mistakes from the outset of any advertising campaign given their understanding of their customer’s needs. Nonetheless, implementation is easy and the process of e-marketing is usually very dynamic.
Finally (in the marketing mix at least), Amazon can display a whole range of products in their e-marketing campaigns, in a single advert if they wished, one new advert design provided by Facebook is the slideshow/gallery/advertising reel – I cannot find an example image neither can I explain it very well but it allows Amazon to showcase several recommended item that the person they are advertising to can click between, exposing them to more products without taking up any more room in the advertising space, this is especially beneficial over traditional advertising methods because you are limited in the amount of space or time you have to market your products, often advertisers advertise just one product at a time in traditional advertising methods such as print based advertising.
Though mediums such as television advertising are on the decline, it is still the most prevalent form of advertising. In 2016, it was revealed that television advertising made up 37%, with Google, Facebook and Netflix spending 60% of their own advertising budgets on television advertising, according to Katya Lonova, a CNBC analyst. But, with that being said, trends internet advertising suggests that businesses will spend more on this advertising medium than television advertising as early as this year, this is driven by the increasing number of people year on year who own internet connected mobile devices (usually a mobile phone) and as mobile-internet technology advances (I mean, soon we will have 5G… That’s going to take everything technology based to the next level), our mobile phones will replace even our laptops. The chart below from eMarketer.com predicts that, in the USA, mobile advertising will surpass television advertising by nearly two and a half percent this year.
This chart was made in March 2016, the figures for 2014 and 2015 are actual figures and not predictions. Over time, we can see the decline in television ad spending, print and radio advertising year on year and further declines predicted for the following years.
Thinkbox.tv states on their website “Online businesses invested £639 million in TV during 2016, an 8% increase year on year” and this suggests that in fact the television advertising industry is in fact growing, which it is. Total advertising revenue from television advertising was up 0.2% higher in 2016 than it were in 2015. This is, however, misleading. Earlier, we discussed how the not-so-big guy will be priced out of the television advertising strategies completely. Well, it’s already happening. For companies who display adverts on television, for them to stay afloat in the changing market and to maintain the capital to remain relevant, they have to increase their prices. This affects their customers but the problem isn’t so much that television advertising is dead, I feel it is more the case that viewers don’t have the patience to watch the ads which is why companies have to be more subtle, like my earlier examples of Facebook.
So, we could argue that companies should spend their advertising budgets on YouTube instead, Google themselves claim that it is more effective than television, according to The Guardian, it is claimed that viewers on average spend 1.4 percent of their total watch time viewing adverts whether it’s the invasive mid-roll adverts, the pre-roll adverts or the pop-up adverts or the advert that appears often in the top right hand corner, or used to, of their site. The point Google make is that people actually watch their adverts. I’ve never knowingly gave into an advert I have seen on the television since I became an adult, with that being said, I rarely watch television, however, I use several apps and websit.es such as Grammarly and Interactive Investor as a result of YouTube advertising.
Moving on to email marketing and taking into account the amount of times I click junk… I daresay email marketing isn’t very effective. For me to open an email, the sender has to at least not look dodgy and alarm bells shouldn’t start ringing until at least after you’ve opened the email. Take a look at my Outlook email account (I use this as an example as a result of their poor spam filtering system);
We can see that very few of these emails come from trustworthy sources, with the exception of Metro, Lottoland and SurveyMonkey. Often, I get emails from so many companies with their daily, weekly, monthly newsletter and their third party sponsors and every other Tom, Dick or Harry who somehow happens across my email address, I rarely read any of them. When I get junk email to my Gmail account, which I’m not going to be showing, it often catches me off guard as Google do have good filtering systems. However, with all of this being said, 82% of B2B and B2C businesses use email marketing systems, according to CampaignMonitor. Alongside this, the Data and Marketing Association (DMA, not to be confused with the more reputable Direct Marketing Association) claim that email marketing is more effective than direct marketing with a conversion rate of 66% (highest email conversion rate) and the majority (71%) of these conversions were 45-54 years old. McKinsey states “Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter” which is believable, how many company’s pages have you “liked” on Facebook and actually made a purchase from? Further evidence is provided by CampaignMonitor who state that you’re 6x more likely to get a click-through from a link in an email than you are from a link in a tweet, however you could argue Twitter’s algorithms may prevent these tweets being broadcast as wide as a tweet without a link, Facebook uses algorithms to prevent wide-reach of YouTube videos being shared on their platform, instead they favour their own video-hosting platform and give those further reach.
A customer of mine, Nim’s Boutique, used Facebook video and livestreaming, as well as other livestreaming apps and websites to thrust herself into the spotlight when she opened her new brick and mortar store in Leicester, with her privacy settings set to public, she was able to showcase her inventory to her friends and family and their friends who were notified that so and so was watching Nimmi’s live stream. People also began to share her stream and subsequently, she has maintained regular customer bases both on and offline as a result of her livestreaming and low-budget yet seemingly highly effective marketing strategy.
So, how effective is livestreaming as an e-marketing strategy? Livestreaming.com seems to think very much so with a whopping 80% of individuals surveyed would rather watch a live stream from their favourite brands than read a blog and I don’t blame them, my parents can vouch for the three days it took me to read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince the day it hit the shelves. I used to love reading whether it was books, magazines, blogs, fiction or non-fiction but since the advancement of online video, the lack of utilisable storage space and the ever growing demand of day to day life, reading has took the bench for the foreseeable future. It was common place to see people reading a book on a train just seven years ago and nowadays, you rarely even see Kindles. Most people have their noses buried in a screen with headphones in. With livestreaming accounting for 113% growth year on year, it is understandable as to why the time consuming nature of reading has started to decrease. With that being said, reading still maintains the attention of its audience far better than video with the average time spent watching on demand video (such as typical YouTube videos) and livestreaming being less than 5 minutes before an individual stops watching. Back to online video in general, 100 million internet users watch online videos daily and four times as many customers would rather watch a video about a brand than read about it, which further indicates reasons behind the decline of the popularity of print media, showing that video is a far more effective e-marketing strategy than writing blogs.
But how exactly does this benefit customers? It does so in several ways. On YouTube, mid-roll adverts in videos (those similar to an advertisement break halfway through an episode of The Simpsons on Channel 4 (if it’s still shown on Channel 4 that is) are seen as very invasive and are the most unpopular kind of advert on YouTube (citation needed) according to my personal opinion gathered from the multitude of complaints on the YouTube product forum, the same is likely to be the case for other video and audio platforms such as traditional marketing methods such as television or radio, therefore, companies like Facebook and their adverts benefit customers in a way where they do not feel obliged or even forced to view adverts as a result of the subtle manner in which they are presented to the consumer. So, the main benefit is increased comfort and level of enjoyment, this is especially popular for a company who masquerades as a social network, like Facebook, when in fact they are big, fat, mean, giant, sophisticated advertising machines whose secondary product is the social media platform that we see, their main product is data about us which they use to allow their customers (business customers I mean) to target their adverts and Facebook does the rest to implement the adverts into their platform, in front of their end consumer, Facebook’s customer’s desired audience, in a way which seems non-invasive but still effective.
There are other benefits to e-marketing too, including the opportunity to easily and quickly compare providers of goods and services, two notable examples of these are online based CompareTheMarket.com who compare a range of products from utilities to car insurance and MySupermarket.co.uk who compare the price of the items in your shopping list to the supermarkets online websites and then directs you to where to go to get the cheapest shopping. These websites are great but on the other hand, companies like Direct Line Car Insurance who do not appear on comparison websites like GoCompare and CompareTheMarket meaning that these companies don’t get the same recognition for their low prices as companies like Aviva who do appear on comparison websites. This gives consumers more bargaining power because if a customer doesn’t like Aviva’s price, they can scroll down and find a price and product that better suits their needs. The rise of the internet has allowed customers to be able to, at the click of a button, go elsewhere without the need to worry about the cost of public transport or petrol or time it would take to go from Supermarket A to Supermarket B because Supermarket A didn’t have the goods you need in stock.
Speaking of supermarkets and companies who supply a large amount of products, especially the likes of Amazon and eBay, they are in a stronger position for their online customers as opposed to their face-to-face customers (although Amazon and eBay don’t have the latter customer type) because they can provide more in depth, comprehensive product information on their listings as opposed to a supermarket who are constrained to a small price tag and information on packaging of products which, for some products, the information provided on the box is terrible. Alongside this, customer service representatives may not have the product training they need to give the best advice to their customers about the products their customers are enquiring about. An online listing removes the cost of staff-training and allows you to really expand on the information you provide about the product.
Speaking of eBay and Amazon, who are the biggest purveyors, in my opinion, of the next benefit we will discuss. E-commerce allows companies to use dynamic pricing strategies that are becoming more popular in physical stores with the rise of artificial intelligence and pricing management software. However, this dynamic pricing strategy has allowed online companies to alter their prices depending on supply, demand, popularity and over/understocking. Amazon will launch daily deals to clear the stock that they’re struggling to shift from their fulfilment centres for the items sold and fulfilled by Amazon and they use lightening deals to clear stock sold by a third-party seller under Amazon’s Fulfilled by Amazon service who store the third-party seller’s items in their fulfilment centre to provide a better, more fluid customer experience in the sense where items sold and fulfilled by Amazon and items sold by third party sellers and fulfilled by Amazon will ensure the entire order arrives together (or as closely together as possible if some items are in a different fulfilment centre). This ability to quickly change prices at a moment’s notice also allows companies to take advantage of rapidly changing online environments, for example, CEX hiked the price of GTA V to £31 when they released their latest big update of 2017, this is because they knew demand would be high. CEX sell second hand electronics. Retailers like Tesco however, decided to lower their price of the same game and they sell it brand new, their price was £21. This was then taken advantage of by people buying the game from Tesco and reselling on eBay at auction (another dynamic pricing strategy, probably the most notable) at the same price as CEX only for the item brand new yet people were still willing to pay extra for the second-hand version of the game.
The next benefit, whether or not it is a benefit, is the rise of online ticket vendors (and, unsurprisingly, online ticket ‘touters’ – the, in my opinion, perfectly acceptable act of purchasing high-demand tickets and reselling at a premium), previously, if you wanted to go on an airplane or to a concert or a show, you’d have to go to an official ticket vendor (for airplanes, this would be the airports or possibly travel agents; do they even have travel agents now? For concerts, it would be the venue or a shop that has partnered with the venue), now you just click a couple of buttons or open an app and browse all the shows available. However, this has allowed ticket touts to be able to quickly purchase tickets the moment they’ve gone on sale to resell them, lately, companies have been working together to stop this underhanded practice but I personally think this is acceptable, after all, small independent retailers have been buying wholesale stock to sell for profit, others even buy multipacks and, against trading laws, break them down into singular quantities for resale. Some even purchase special offers from supermarkets to sell at RRP in their own corner shop, how is any of these practices any different from purchasing a ticket to sell for a profit?
Customer service has changed, previously, your options were to go in-store, call head office or write a letter. Now, we have social media, email, online chat, Amazon Fire have the “Mayday” button which allows you to video call a help representative (unsure if this feature is still supported, Amazon use a call back feature (Apple also have this), webforms (contact forms). This has allowed customers to resolve issues faster and utilise other channels of communication when regular channels may be congested or unfavourable to the customer. Customers can also talk with one another on public forums such as Facebook brand pages, this allows them to share reviews and ask one another questions about items and further benefit their product awareness.
Another way e-marketing is beneficial to customers is that e-marketing has the potential to be more informative to customers, especially those who are time poor and skim-read or simply skip past printed adverts, because they tend to be more dynamic, no longer are you stuck with a set amount of room to display one single message on, with just a bit of coding knowledge, a business’ advert can easily be a slideshow of images and writing and information about their new product meaning that, if a person is reading a blog, when they get to the right hand side, instead of being exposed to the same image after every line of text like you would in the early HTML days and in newspaper adverts, you could be exposed to the same business displaying several messages, each one different by the time you reach the end of the line or paragraph you’re reading. This allows the customer to take in more information whilst keeping the cost to the business the same.
In the early days of online advertising, HTML banner advertising was all the range, my favourite was the interactive adverts that involved doing something to “win a prize” (such as the “Shoot the Duck” banner advert (see below for similar) from 2004, seems like only yesterday that online advertising was taking its first big steps) which was more than likely going to be a competition entry or something similar in exchange for your details to be sold on as leads, non-invasive again, you just check the box to accept the terms and conditions of your details being sold on to third parties without ever reading them (most people don’t, evidence of this can be seen in the more than 7500 customers who sold their soul to now-defunct Gamestation after agreeing to a clause they didn’t read hidden in Gamestation’s terms and conditions; https://www.ft.com/content/7158c690-2596-11e0-8258-00144feab49a), to businesses to later follow up and provide you with an inbox full of spam like my previously displayed Outlook inbox.
Because of advancements in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), SEO being strategies used to rank higher on internet search engine search results, customers are better able to find the information they need from their Google searches. This means less time is spent looking for what they want and this time can instead be used in more productive ways, such as being exposed to adverts for longer (as the individual will stay on the page they need to be on longer than viewing multiple different pages, looking for the one to fit their need. Need based customers are rarely influenced by impulse and therefore, once their need is satisfied, it is more likely an advert will achieve a click through or conversion), which is productive for the business and maybe not so much for the customer’s wallet but who am I to suggest that maybe not every single advert I am displayed is useful or relevant…
The biggest benefit to customers, in my opinion, is the fact that internet marketing isn’t constrained by time like traditional advertising is. For example, an advert displayed in today’s newspaper may not be in tomorrow’s but if you can’t remember the brand of product it is you saw, you have little chance of finding that product again unless you see it advertised elsewhere in a similar format. If the shop you buy your newspaper from has closed for the night, there’s even less chance of being able to find the advert again until at least the next day, with online marketing however, you can just refresh the page a few dozen times until the advert reappears. The amount of times I’ve been shown the same advert (and many different ones since) for Grammarly is unbelievable, especially given they had me download the app months ago! With that being said, because advertisers are better able to target their customers online, they’ve established I have the free version and I notice in their advertisements lately, their paid-for services are far more prominent in their advertisements; whether this is due to metrics telling Google’s advertising algorithms I have the app installed already or is simply just a change in advertising strategy or what, I do not know.
Now we’ve discussed the benefits of e-marketing to businesses and customers, it is time to explore the effectiveness of e-marketing in meeting the customer’s needs for one specific business to help us to understand better how effective e-marketing is. Boohoo is my favourite online company so far over the past two years and I’ve not spent a single penny with them, on the other hand they have made me a very pretty penny over the past year as a result of their performance on the London Stock Exchange which itself is as a result of strong growth, high earnings potential and fantastic market positioning. Their global marketing strategies are on point, including their e-marketing strategy. By obtaining data from their customers (in terms of age, clothing size, style preferences, etc) they’re able to position themselves online in a way which is more favourable amongst their younger audiences such as video advertising on YouTube and Facebook advertising using targeted advertising methods and simultaneously position themselves in front of their middle aged customers (of which there are fewer) through their email newsletters. They also advertise on, arguably their biggest, competitor’s website, Asos as well as use them as a sales platform, a very strategic move on Boohoo’s part as they will siphon off some of Asos’ sales and claim some of their loyal customers for themselves as a result of cross-platform promotion.
Boohoo also advertises on the television, targeting the millennials who live in homes with parents who finish work just to sit in front of their television for the night, evident by the fact they’re advertising on television when young people watch on average only around 2 hours per day yet feature models of a younger age than companies like Dove would use for their marketing campaigns. This marketing strategy is effective because it targets their target customer’s parents and their target customers themselves when they sit down in front of the television (with or without their nose buried in their smartphone) to eat their dinner (evident in the 60% of Britons who do not sit around a dinner table according to studies carried out by RedTractor), their television adverts follow a similar format to one another, very little to no speech, pop music instrumentals and showcasing this seasons fashion collections. This format is useful because it can be used internationally without having to spend money on audio-dubbing or translation.
Boohoo PLC targets 16-24 year olds in their ‘lifestyle’ clothing brands, Boohoo and Boohoo MAN, they also own PrettyLittleThing.com which they proclaim to be a forward thinking fashion brand but originated as an accessories only online retailer back in 2012. Without a doubt, they have met their customer’s needs, including providing plus size options which most fashion retailers still fail to provide for, and met their marketing goals through a mix of traditional and e-marketing methods. With Boohoo being primarily an online based company, they have had to use traditional marketing methods and e-marketing methods to meet their goals of growth, customer retention and social responsibility.
Boohoo’s slogan is “24/7 Fashion”, this indicates convenience and is easy to place in advertising, it also indicates reliability, coupled with Boohoo’s affordable prices, allows them to meet their customer’s needs even when they host their products on competitor’s websites. Back in 2014, Boohoo hadn’t yet made its mark on the fashion industry and it had to differentiate itself from the rest of its competitors, the way it did this was roll out an advertising campaign, their biggest at the time, across all platforms including direct mail, email marketing, television advertising, video advertising, social media advertising, blogger outreach (sponsored blog posts) and digital display (such as digital billboards). All of this and it flopped, profits were down over a quarter. The truth is, a lot of online companies see a format that works and tries to mimic that, another fashion company called Misguided had a very similar television advert, for example, with scenes lasting only a few seconds, switching between dark and light contrasting outfits in alternating frames, both featured blonde, female models of the same age and though the music was different as well as the tempo and speed of the advert, the emotions were the same, the attitude presented by the models in both videos were the same, they were both punchy and ended with their logo being displayed on similar backgrounds and the same logo, both were recorded on a beach scene. The only notable difference other than the music was that in Boohoo’s advert, at the end, they said their brand name whereas Misguided did not. Because of their lack of differentiation, they were not able to meet their customer’s needs but how can they differentiate when, seemingly, Misguided and Boohoo shared a very similar lifestyle-brand?
In their marketing campaign for their 2015 Autumn and Winter collection, they wanted to make some noise but not the same noise as everybody else like they had the year prior. Predominantly a British brand, they chose to host their advert with the London skyline in the background, featuring a pop-chart topping singer, Charli XCX, in a bid to demonstrate they are relatable to their target market. To me, Boohoo comes across as an aspirational brand, their clothes have something about them that is modern and fashionable, some of it is rather eccentric whereas other ranges fit a more professional look. Boohoo is adaptable in any fashion-based scenario and fits the lifestyles of those who want to live the “high-life”, for lack of a better term, with the fancy cars and permed hairdos and contour kits (I’ll pretend I don’t know what these are). I’m not a fan of most of their target market, nor am I a fan of their clothing ranges but there is no denying the strategic performance of their e-marketing campaigns, especially when we also take into account their positioning on external sites such as Asos and Amazon.
But what else has Boohoo done to meet their customer’s needs through their e-marketing strategy? Well, the most attractive thing they have done for students is partner with discount providers who serve students such as NUS and UniDays in a bid to generate new customers and win back previous customers who ae students. The majority of 16-24 year olds are still in learning whether that’s full or part time school, college or university and therefore this meets their needs very effectively.
Another thing they have done is partnered up with universities to tempt students to become student ambassadors, like an Avon representative of the fashion industry, hoping to tempt their peers to attend events run by and buy products from Boohoo. This is similar to the affiliate scheme they also run which allows bloggers to earn a passive income from sales generated as a result of visiting Boohoo.com via an affiliate link which further increases exposure and pays based on sales conversions meaning advertising costs are kept to a minimum in affiliate advertising strategies, affiliate advertising is one of the most common revenue streams for blogs alongside AdSense revenue (for displaying Google ads).
Boohoo also released an app in the second half of 2015 which took off with amazing success for a new fashion-retail app, however, it could be argued that Boohoo’s popularity as a brand was gaining such momentum that it is likely Google’s algorithms promoted it on their app store, further exposing Boohoo who their demographic (recently there have been rumours that Google favours some brands over others in their search results based on those who are more likely to be interested in certain content from these brands, there is evidence to support and contradict these rumours though). Their app allowed Boohoo to better connect with their customers build customer value and loyalty as well as expand market reach.
Finally, in regards to Boohoo meeting their customer’s needs and how they became a successful brand as a result of better e-marketing strategies, they partnered up with casting agency Feels to offer one of their customers a part in one of their future adverts, this allowed customers who are also aspiring models and fashionistas to really feel involved with the brand, increasing loyalty and favour in the Boohoo brand. Did it work, though? Of course it did, their customer base grew over 30% during the #WeAreNow ad campaign in Autumn 2015 (the one we have discussed after their ad-campaign failure in 2014) and continues to grow. Boohoo also make the majority of its revenue in the UK which further iterates the importance for Boohoo to make their customers feel at home, something they achieved by using iconic British celebrities and singers/songwriters (most of whom I confess I have never heard of but it’s no secret my music tastes are a bit before my time).
Now, we will look at Boohoo’s website to evaluate how effective the website is in meeting their customer’s needs. On the next page is a series of screenshots of their homepage that have been stitched together to allow us to easily analyse their home page;
Immediately, we can see that their target audience is female and they’re meeting this need quite well by using 15 female models on their homepage compared to one male model, hidden at the lower half of their page. Boohoo do have a men’s brand which is BoohooMan (which can be found at its own dedicated website www.boohooman.com) where they follow a very similar page structure only, in my opinion, BoohooMan has a more rustic appeal to their website, it is as though they are targeting mostly the indie/surfer style.
My immediate criticism is that they are not relating to plus-sized models, which they do cater for (according to www.boohooplc.com, they cater for UK clothing sizes 16 and up) because of the absense of larger-set models. In fact, you have to hover your mouse over the link that says “Womens” to see the dropdown box (at the top of the previous screenshot) and then look for “Plus Size & Curve” which Is at the bottom and isn’t as forefront as I’d expect Boohoo to have had it given it is part of their product strategy to increase awareness of this fashion line. If we look at the models featured;
And in particularly the second model from the left, we can see that these ladies aren’t exactly “plus sized”, therefore I can’t imagine a person of larger stature to be able to relate with this plus-size range. Alongside this, if you look closely at the second model from the left’s hips, there is evidence of “nudging” and “pinching”, where photo-editors will deliberately edit the shape of a model’s body to make them appear slimmer and more attractive – for a plus-size range, I do not think this is appropriate or necessary. If we look at Dove’s Real Women campaign, it better highlights why I feel this way, Dove does very little in the way of editing, if any, their body structure, in other words, Dove keep it real. A capture of their Real Women campaign is on the following page;
Simply put, I feel that Boohoo have not actually met the needs of their plus size audience in the manner that they themselves would hope. If I were purchasing for a plus-sized lady, I’d enjoy the experience of looking at Boohoo’s choice of model for their plus size range however, if I were a plus-sized lady, I would rather purchase clothes modelled by a lady who is equally plus sized even if that does mean some scoff at the models and make dim-witted comments likening the larger sizes to table cloths. Surely, it is better to be scoffed at by those who aren’t your target audience for that range and appeal better to your actual target market as opposed to the other way round?
Next, we will look at the section of Boohoo’s homepage that demonstrates the availability of their mobile shopping app. This suits their customer needs perfectly because of the rising trend of mobile and tablet users as shown by the below infograph provided by emarketer;
The infograph shows that, over time, mobile has become the most popular medium for people to spend their time consuming the internet with and desktop/laptop users second the mobile usage. Other connected devices will refer to smart televisions, games consoles, etc whereas mobile will refer to mobile devices including tablets.
The positioning of their mobile advertising tile is incorrect, studies have shown that when a user visits a picture dense website, like Boohoo is, they do not read the page like they would a book, instead their eyes travel downwards centrally and are drawn outwards by points of interest, these points of interest will be triggered by vibrant colours. As a result of their mobile app tile not being very vibrant in colour (though it does match the lower-central tile in colour format), I feel it would be better suited in a more central location to really get the attention it needs to fully take advantage of the change in how we access the internet.
Boohoo is very active on their social media accounts and like to project that they are an ethical company. This is demonstrated by the vast array of social media icons displayed at the bottom of their webpage just before the navigation section. Alongside this, users can find specific fashion ranges from searching the hashtags across the different social media platforms, one of their hashtags is on the main focal point of their website, the #WeAreUs Summer campaign tile that spreads the width of the page and is the first thing you look at (because the subsection you will find after hovering your curser over one of the top navigational links (new in, womens, mens, etc) isn’t displayed until your curser hovers over it).
One unfortunate mistake that has been made on their homepage, in my opinion, is the tile that shows 40% off menswear and also the navigational link. These both takes us to the men’s section of the Boohoo.com site and therefore limits the amount of traffic and awareness to Boohooman.com. In fact, I was only informed of Boohooman.com when I was listening to one of their annual report webcasts. I have yet to see any actual advertising for Boohooman.com.
I feel their ever present header displaying their logo is really invasive, especially when you visit parts of their site like “Inspire Me” as seen below;
To me, it looks cluttered and doesn’t do the company justice at all, quite frankly, I do not enjoy looking at this section of the website, it reminds me of the age old Tumblr, a social media platform that has fallen into obscurity and used by mostly introverts who, in my opinion, have very little about them, I feel that Boohoo have tried to take inspiration from Pinterest’s and Tumblr’s structure in this part of their website but as a result, it comes across as too cluttered and too labour intensive to move our eyes from the far left to the far right with very little that is interesting in the central column of the page, it also doesn’t fit the uniform layout of the rest of their website. I think they could make this far better by allowing the header to disappear as the user scrolls down the page otherwise, should the header remain in the current style it is where it is constantly present, perhaps the better alternative would be a vertical list format instead of the all-over-the-place style they are currently using.
In fact, now I think about it and taking into account my analysis, there are some issues that need fixing, especially the ever present header, it wouldn’t be so invasive if monitors were made with double the height whilst retaining the same width though this would likely be impractical for most computer users. With that being said, there are a lot of good things to say about the website. Does the website alone meet their customer’s needs? I think so but I do think there is room for a lot of improvement in the areas highlighted so far.
To conclude, there is no denying how much of an impact e-marketing has had in the modern marketing context. The role e-marketing has played is absolutely substantial and is set to grow even more! Whilst this is true, it is important to not forget traditional marketing methods however, they will inevitably become less popular and as a result, companies will either have to increase prices or diversify and increase sales in other departments to make up for the losses, especially in print based advertising which, contrary to data gathered in previous assignments, is becoming less and less popular over time in favour of more cost effective and outright cheaper online, digital and mobile advertising. Although it is easy to think traditional marketing contexts are dying, it is not the case; the scenario is nonetheless the same as the Amazon Kindle vs physical books.
It is apparent that there are a number of benefits compared to far fewer negative factors in e-marketing when compared to traditional marketing methods and e-marketing remains dynamic when used within the marketing mix (the 7 P’s), e-marketing campaigns can be adjusted mid-course which is the biggest difference between traditional and e-marketing methods.
E-marketing also has numerous benefits to customers, from better informing them with real-time, up-to-date information to being less invasive and therefore allowing customers to fully enjoy their online and, especially, social media browsing fully. E-marketing is also easier to track and the data is easier to collate and analyse with real-time analytics systems available for most, if not all, e-marketing platforms. Even electronic market research has real-time benefits as opposed to traditional market research methods which involved manual data collection and inputting, market research has become far more interactive between the researcher and participant with the rise of e-marketing and due to digitisation of market research methods, data is processed faster and on a more automated basis.
Sources/Reference:
http://cnbccatalyst.com/why-moving-your-ad-spend-away-from-tv-can-cost-you-more-than-you-think/
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/20/google-youtube-ads-tv
https://thedma.org/blog/data-driven-marketing/saturday-stat-series/
https://livestream.com/blog/62-must-know-stats-live-video-streaming
https://www.ft.com/content/7158c690-2596-11e0-8258-00144feab49a
http://marketingland.com/interactive-advertising-from-shooting-ducks-to-now-22343
https://www.webpagefx.com/internet-marketing/how-does-internet-marketing-benefit-consumers.html
https://youtu.be/4I5uXmPbWK4 – Misguided video advert
https://youtu.be/QbjUyUzhRcY – Boohoo 2014 video advert
https://youtu.be/szXTiw1x75A – Boohoo 2015 video advert