Put The 'E' Into Your Marketing

E-marketing and the e-tools used should be part of the overall marketing strategy for a business, integrated and supporting the more traditional methods of marketing, and vice-versa. Used together, the e-tools outlined here constitute a powerful marketing approach for any company. They complement one another and each one serves to build and support upon the success of the other tools. E-marketing is now the norm for companies wishing to capture the attentions of their target market. The degree of importance placed on e-marketing can be judged by the corporate spend in this area and the increase in spend which will occur going forward. E-marketing is within the budget of all businesses and should be part of the strategic business plan.

A number of factors affect the propensity of companies to incorporate e-marketing tools into their marketing mix. Few of these are:

• The time needed to devote a consistent effort and approach to e-marketing.
• How familiar on a personal level individuals are with the various e-tools.
• Unsure of how to define the strategy for using e-marketing; objectives, design and implementation, delivery and measurement.
• Understanding of how e-marketing and traditional marketing integrate and work together.

There are 7 functions of the eMarketing that stay at the base of any eMarketing strategy and they have a moderating character, unlike the classic Marketing mix that comprises situational functions only. These are:

1. Personalization

The fundamental concept of personalization as a part of the eMarketing mix lies in the need of recognizing, identifying a certain customer in order to establish relations (establishing relations is a fundamental objective of Marketing). It is crucial to be able to identify our customers on individual level and gather all possible information about them, with the purpose of knowing our market and be able to develop customized, personalized products and services.

2. Privacy

Privacy is an element of the mix very much connected to the previous one: personalization. When we gather and store information about our customers and potential customers (therefore, when we perform the personalization part of the eMarketing mix) a crucial issue arises: that of the way this information will be used, and by whom.

3. Customer Service

Customer service is one of the necessary and required activities among the support functions needed in transactional situations.

4. Community

We can all agree that eMarketing is conditioned by the existence of this impressive network that the internet is. The merely existence of such a network implies that individuals as well as groups will eventually interact. A group of entities that interact for a common purpose is what we call a "community" and we will soon see why it is of absolute importance to participate, to be part of a community.

5. Site

We have seen and agreed that eMarketing interactions take place on a digital media - the internet. But such interactions and relations also need a proper location, to be available at any moment and from any place - a digital location for digital interactions.

6. Security

The "security" function emerged as an essential function of eMarketing once transactions began to be performed through internet channels.

7. Sales Promotion

At least but not last, we have to consider sales promotions when we build an eMarketing strategy. Sales promotions are widely used in traditional Marketing as well, we all know this, and it is an excellent efficient strategy to achieve immediate sales goals in terms of volume. This function counts on the marketer's ability to think creatively: a lot of work and inspiration is required in order to find new possibilities and new approaches for developing an efficient promotion plan. On the other hand, the marketer needs to continuously keep up with the latest internet technologies and applications so that he can fully exploit them.

To conclude, we have seen that eMarketing implies new dimensions to be considered aside of those inherited from the traditional Marketing. These dimensions revolve around the concept of relational functions and they are a must to be included in any eMarketing strategy in order for it to be efficient and deliver results.