online marketing scenario
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R'tist @ Tourism
Online Marketing Scenario
© Ramakrishna Kongalla, Assistant Professor
R'tist @ Tourism
Advantages and Barriers
Advantages• Reaches a large audience inexpensively. • Markets your mission with more marketing opportunities and more
marketing niches.• Allows renewal/retention at a much lower cost.• Increases new donors, retention and renewal rates, and loyalty. • Makes renewals easier and more effective when you use your website and
email as tools for donor cultivation, relationship management, and stewardship versus purely for solicitation.
• Increases accountability and donor confidence because you can offer easy access to information about where funds are being spent.
• Gives immediate, personalized thank you messages online.• Offers higher response rates than pure direct mail.• Allows you to provide free public service information online in exchange
for email addresses that will help build your core audience.
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• Fosters community.• Creates opportunities for affinity programs in which your organization
gets a portion of sales that originate from links on your web page.• Improves your capabilities for researching individual, foundation, and
corporate support such as who will give, how much, and to what?• Offers new and more effective ways to cultivate donors, such as email
greetings and video. • Reaches higher disposable income group compared to other marketing
methods. • Publicizes traditional fundraising programs.• Offers more fundraising choices, such as partnerships with e-commerce
sites, charity auctions, direct donations, selling web space for advertising and corporate sponsorship, buying or trading web space or links, and selling products and services.
• Attracts new and nontraditional volunteers and allows for volunteer orientations and trainings.
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Barriers• Cost of hardware, software, network connections,
consultants, staff time, and training• Staff and volunteer resistance• Unrealistic expectations• Lots of competition online • Computer glitches and other technological headaches • Legal complexities since online fundraising is relatively
new • Regulations and fees, both for charitable giving and
professional solicitation
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• Credit card laundering or “factoring” when an agent that’s not authorized as a service reseller by a credit card company uses its own merchant account to offer credit card services to others
• Unrelated business income tax when nonprofits partner with for-profits in an online cause-related marketing venture
• Up-front time investment to research and consult with attorneys, and accountants
• Potential unfamiliarity with the technology among donors• Tax implications and possibility of alienating donors by pushing
commercial advertisements on them through corporate sponsorships
• Tax implications of selling merchandise online
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Opportunities
• Opportunity 1: Mobile Advertising - Mobile phones have arrived in a huge way, and present many exciting opportunities to reach consumers in innovative ways.
• Opportunity 2: Social Network Advertising - Social networking sites now offer highly targeted opportunities to connect with potential customers.
• Opportunity 3: Competition for Google - Google has achieved a de facto monopoly on search and search advertising. Almost everyone would agree that Google has revolutionized the search marketing business.
• Opportunity 4: Tablets - Tablet computers have enjoyed an explosive rise in popularity since the launch of the Apple iPad in April of 2010. They have added another option to the way the web is accessed.
• Opportunity5: HTML 5 - The upgrade to HTML, the workhorse of the web, offers some powerful benefits. HTML 4 came out in the late 1990s. Better graphics, Better geolocation, Off-line web applications
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Challenges
• Challenge 1: The Goldfish Phenomenon: Fractured Attention - Goldfish are rumored to have a three-second attention span. Consumers and potential consumers’ attention spans and ability to focus have been degraded by the nature of surfing the web.
• Challenge 2: Global Competition - The web is a great leveler – we do sometimes forget that the first and second ‘w’ in ‘www’stand for world and wide, respectively.
• Challenge 3: Overcoming The “Meh” Factor - “Meh” factor - as in the indifferent shrugging of the shoulders and open hands.
• Challenge 4: Low Conversion Rates - Many sites are still plagued by low rates of successfully converting visitors to consumers.
• Challenge 5: The Field of Dreams Strategy - Field of Dreams was the movie with the voice that whispered “build it and they will come.” Too many organizations rely on the Field of Dreams marketing strategy, building their site and thinking it will be enough to get people engaged.
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Critical Success Factors of Internet Marketing
– 1) Cut away the dead weight and keep what works. – 2) Quality Content is key – 3) Promote Information Products like e-books– 4) Be Patient, It Pays – 5) Attracting the right customers– 6) Delivering the content value– 7) e-loyality– 8) e-learning– 9) Delivering the digital value
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Why Online marketing in India is yet to evolve?
• Internet marketing can boom only if… – (1) there are a lot of online sales & service
opportunities and businesses; and – (2) the Internet is the best proven channel out
there for marketing campaigns.
• In the case of India, both are not yet at their best and the reasons are:
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1. Governance, laws and regulations
– India is still not a very open economy although things have been changing for good since the mid eighties. Our financial and banking rules are not always the best conducive environment for anyone to get started with a business – online or offline. When it comes to online businesses, there are even stricter money transaction rules.
– When it comes to law enforcement and protection against cyber crime, though we have taken some initiatives, how often an online criminal gets caught in this country?
– Widespread corruption is another big issue. Many people don’t want to set up online shops to escape taxes and do things unaccounted.
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2. Cultural issues– Indians are highly social and sociable people –– online can prevent them from getting the best deals out there
from their favorite shops and shopkeepers (and their families) that they know for generations. Also, this gives them excellent F2F opportunity to do maximum negotiation and receive other freebies.
– And festive offers in India during Diwali, Akshay Tritiya etc are unbeatable and probably not feasible to provide such discounts via online mechanisms at the kind of volume involved.
– Further, if you know the shop people well, there is even zero down payment option available for home appliance purchases etc. This is definitely not possible in an online scenario.
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3. Online shopping worries– A lot of computer literate people are still hesitant to
consume online shopping facilities that are available out there in India for the following reasons.• Fear factor: A lot of people still do not believe things that are
not tangible. It’s perhaps more of a cultural issue• Unreliable delivery mechanisms: In India, even the postal
service or the most expensive (and so-called safest) courier companies may not be able to guarantee prompt delivery due to multiple factors including theft, tracking issues and corruption
• Credit card fraud and usage: Like in any other country, swiping a card is not always safe. In India specific cases, there are even scenarios where you have to provide your card number to the customer care executive over the phone which is not the right way it should work
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4. Lack of technical infrastructure– Broadband Internet access is still and expensive thing in
India if you take get one for your home computer and still there are connection issues.
– The backbone of any reliable online service or sales is a strong supply chain. Many times, the delivery of the advertised service or product does not happen due to bad supply chain management.
– Additional issues include the lack of supporting infrastructure such as escrow services, legal advisory for online businesses etc
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5 Marketing philosophies & channels– Due to the social aspects, the Internet is still not the best
marketing channel in India. Television, hoardings and cinema ads are still way ahead of the Internet when it comes to preferred marketing channels. This also results in poor quality affiliate networks, online ad services and everything else.
– Most of the affiliate networks in India do not provide a good commission package to the affiliates making them less attractive. Moreover, there are a lot of inconsistencies and dishonesty prevailing with the networks as well. This has further decelerated the affiliate marketing penetration in India. The CPA (cost per action) model itself is not fully available in most Indian business scenarios.
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Electronics for Online Marketing
• Dial-up• 3G connections• WiFi and WiMax• Broadband - Internet• Computer and components• Mobile, I-pad• Laptop, Palmtop• LAN, Reuters, Servers• Websites• Homepages• Portals• Online gadgets• Online Banners• Internet Equipments
