If you think what e-marketing is, READ THIS!

When people hear the word e-marketing, another word comes to their minds: Internet.

But e-marketing is about much more than just Internet.

It comprises other technologies that enable customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, resource planning, digital TV and bar code scanners. E-marketing helps your company to use digital resources to sell your products and services, as a way to entrance in the mass market at reasonable prices.

Nowadays Internet is a basic source of information, a key element of the global economy and a major driver for new business, it offers the opportunity to reduce cost compared with the cost of traditional marketing. Online advertising and promotions can provide both value for money and accountability in terms of insight into the success of particular campaigns.

E-marketing is growing faster than any other form of marketing being a value complement to traditional marketing regardless the size of the business.
It has impacted upon the barriers to export entry and has provided hope to millions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) attempting to enter foreign markets by allowing to communicate globally as efficiently as any large business (Gallagher, Gilmore and Henry 2007).

SMEs are the main drivers of the economy, and represent the 99% of all the enterprises in Europe. A lot of SMEs are tight on cash, and are pouring half of their marketing budget into advertising or direct mailing. An effective use of e-marketing can provide the SMEs the opportunity of lower costs on their transactions, and help the companies to have a rapidly return of investment (BIS 2009).

Using e-marketing, a company can advertise the products through e-mail reaching more markets at less cost, avoiding for example printing materials like catalogues. In addition if they create a professional web site they can improve their image, credibility, reputation and conduct marketing research in other markets. Internet opens the companies to the world of potential customers.

One of the main advantages of the use of e-marketing is that helps to develop corporate image, competitive advantage, increase sales and perform marketing research.

Being part of e-marketing is a way to expand the borders of companies, wider market opportunities to expand businesses. The possibility to use viral marketing to easily contact with the target market more effectively, establish a relationship with them using direct mailing, in order to get feedback, so the company can satisfy their necessities more effectively are some of the uses of e-marketing. Using a web page, with a nice web design, clearly organized, easy to use and to get access to, for example being on a search engine or as well as being part of a social network as it can be Facebook or Twitter provides the company the opportunity to attract new stakeholders (Chaffey and Smith 2008).

The basic statements of the traditional marketing remain within e-marketing, delivering the right message to the right customers doing it better than the competition. Many companies have realised of the benefits of the use of e-marketing and how a good strategy can make the difference between success and failure.

So, are you going to start thinking how to perform it in your company?

If you can’t, just hire someone to do it for you because it is vital to success.

And for those who are more interactive, as we were talking about interactivity in our last post, visit the next link with many case studies of Campaign Enterprise software, the first personalized email marketing application designed for personal computer.

http://www.arialsoftware.com/casestudies.htm

Also, the next videos explain in a very easy way all the benefits of using e-marketing;

Don't miss the opportunity to learn a bit more about this topic:




How they do it in the Silicon Valley:




There is a free lunch:



http://www.yola.com/


References

1. Gallagher, D., Gilmore, A., and Henry, S. (2007) “E-marketing and SMEs: operational lessons for the future”. European Business Review, 19 (3), 234-247

2. Chaffey, D. and Smith, P.R. (2008) eMarketing eXcellence: Planning and Optimizing Your Digital Marketing. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann

3. BIS, Department for Business Innovation & Skills (2009) ‘Directorate: Small and Medium Enterprise Statistics for the UK and Regions’ [online] available from http://stats.berr.gov.uk/ed/sme/smestats2008-ukspr.pdf [20 February 2010]