Customer's Buying Process through E- Marketing: Most marketers are familiar with the four stages of the customers' buying process, around which marketing activities can be planned.
The four stages are need-and-want recognition, information gathering, evaluation and purchase. Within each stage, marketers have the opportunity to improve the customer experience and influence the customer through all stages toward a purchase. However, the mass adoption of the Web channel among customers has shifted the stages of the customer buying process from a mostly offline activity to an increasingly online activity.Many customers now go through the entire buying process online, or use the online channel though multiple steps of the process.
For example, a customer might recognize a need for a car by seeing an online ad, search for information about the car online, seek out recommendations from others about the car through an online forum and then purchase the car at a nearby dealership. Therefore, marketers must respond with specific e-marketing techniques that address each stage of the process.By 2015, more than 40% of business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce (online and off) will be influenced by addressable branding and advertising, contextual marketing, community marketing and transactional marketing (0. 8 probability).
In each step of the customer buying process, e-marketing technologies can be best placed to help or lead customers toward a purchase. Customer Buying Process E-Marketing Opportunity 1. Need/Want Recognition 2. Information Search 3.
Evaluation 4. Purchase Addressable Branding, Advertising Contextual Marketing Community MarketingTransactional Market Figure: E-Marketing and the Customer Buying Process Source: Gartner (February 2007) Need and Want Recognition: This is the start of the customer buying process that deals with awareness. Here, e-marketing opportunities, such as addressable branding and advertising functionality, can help establish awareness and need. Banner ads, sponsorships, interstitials and others are e-marketing activities that can expose customers to products and services.
Data gathering tools, such as Web analytics and online surveys, can start to quantify different needs and wants.Because these e-marketing activities are addressable, customers can respond to and interact with a brand (click on a banner ad, search for more information or request information) in real time. Information Search: Once customers establish a need or want, they seek information about that product or service. Contextual e-marketing techniques (providing information from explicit searches or questions) are becoming extremely useful as a mechanism to seek information and have become a routine step in the customer-buying process.
The success of Google and its contextual search functionality shows the power of providing tools for the customer to seek relevant information that helps them through their buying process. Contextual marketing, such as search marketing (organic or paid), location-based search (matching the user's location to proximity of product/service), customer-preference management tools and available RSS feeds, is a natural fit to align explicit information gathering with relevant answers.Evaluation: This is the point in the buying process where customers look at the choices available, including the opportunity cost of not choosing the next-best alternative. Considerations, such as service, price and convenience, are part of the evaluation process.
Reaching out to trusted friends, family or social networks to seek out these answers has a substantial impact on evaluation. Community e-marketing functions, such as community marketing, customer feedback, message boards, customer reviews and blogs, will also provide the tools to help customers though the evaluation process toward their purchasing goal.Purchase: The last step in the buying process also has e-marketing opportunity. Transactional e-marketing activities, such as gift registries, e-mail marketing and online dialogue functionality, help customers to final purchase or even additional purchases.
For example, a customer has searched for a digital camera on the company's site, read reviews from others and is led through an online dialogue that displays options for final selection. Once the camera is selected, the customer is presented with a matching camera case before check-out.This can result in a relevant cross-sell, providing a positive experience for the customer and an incremental sale for the company. Lack of E-Marketing Damages the Customer Experience E-marketing technology, when properly placed along the customer buying process, helps provide a seamless link from want/need to actual purchase. In fact, many times, a poor customer experience is the direct result of not having e-marketing tools in place. For example, a customer visits an auto manufacturer's Web site to learn about a particular car.
As the customer moves into the evaluation stage, the site doesn't provide any help with independent car reviews, no compare and- contrast mechanisms or connections to other users' experiences with the car. As a result, the customer goes elsewhere for the evaluation, providing an opportunity for the competition to help the customer complete his or her buying process with potentially different results. This research is part of a set of related research pieces. See "Improving the Online Customer Experience" for an overview. FMCG Category and products:Category| Products| Household Care| Fabric wash (laundry soaps and syntheticdetergents); household cleaners (dish/utensilCleaners, floor cleaners, toilet cleaners, air fresheners, insecticides and mosquito repellents, metal polish and furniture polish). | Food and Beverages| Health beverages; soft drinks; staples/cereals;Beverages bakery products (biscuits, bread, cakes); snackfood; chocolates; ice cream; tea; coffee; softdrinks; processed fruits, vegetables; dairyproducts; bottled water; branded flour; brandedrice; branded sugar; juices etc.
Personal Care| Oral care, hair care, skin care, personal wash(soaps); cosmetics and toiletries; deodorants;Perfumes; feminine hygiene; paper products. | Household care: The demand for detergents has been growing at an annual growth rate of 10 to 11 per cent during the past five years. Consumers prefer washing powder and detergents to bars on account of convenience of usage, increased purchasing power, aggressive advertising and increased penetration of washing machines. E-Marketing can play a vital role in terms of advertisement and thus informing consumers about new products and reminding about the established brands.
Personal Care: Skin care and cosmetics, toothpaste, soap, oil all these are personal care products. These products are frequently purchased by the consumers and E-Marketing gives consumers the opportunity to compare the available brands in the market. Food and Beverages: On special occasion or programs arranged for specific purposes like marriage, anniversary etc, a huge amount of food and beverages are required that can be ordered through online by comparing packages, prices, availability with least cost and time. Reasons for losing out FMCG brands through online:As powerful a marketing medium as the Internet is, its potential for targeting and engaging traditional supermarket shoppers is at best variable for FMCG brands seeking to gain new customers and sell products. This is because everyday FMCG brands in the foods, beverages, pet food, household and personal care categories are typically low involvement purchases requiring little more than momentary thought before consumers add them to their trolleys FMCG brands face a far tougher challenge getting consumers to engage with them online.Despite this, nearly every FMCG brand now has its own website which they seek to actively promote, yet consumers don’t typically have the interest, time or desire to visit it! This begs the question - do some FMCG brands have false expectations and do they really understand how their customers behave online? More effort, less impact Apart from the rare few such as Coca Cola and Unilever who are starting to use social media sites such as Facebook, when it comes to online marketing, FMCG brands are still curiously reluctant to engage with consumers outside of their own website.
Brands seem to prefer to invest in independently driving consumers to their own websites, even though it’s often more costly, because they then own and control the brand’s relationship with the consumer. But, not only is this ‘control-freak’ approach out of sync with a consumer’s desire to interact with FMCG brands online, it’s also a comparatively expensive and labour-intensive method of reaching and engaging consumers online. A direct comparison with a multi-brand promotional website aggregating advertisements and offers from multiple brands such as www. eforeIshop. co. uk soon highlights the difference.
When a leading household care brand embarked on a dual strategy of offering a ? 1. 00 off printable coupon - both from its own website and also via a multi-brand promotional site - its media costs were ? 79,000 versus ? 3,000 to achieve the same quantity of coupons issued and redeemed through each route respectively. The brand’s own website required a substantial investment in online and traditional media to drive visitors (traffic) to the site.The multi-brand program on the other hand, which pools together advertisements and offers from multiple brands into a single destination and benefits from shared costs and an existing returning target audience, charged using a cost-per-engagement (pay-on-performance) model. The upshot was that the aggregate site delivered the same results for just 4% of the cost. Pride before a fall The insistence on trying to force unnatural behaviour by driving consumers to FMCG brand websites is puzzling.
Because it goes against the grain, it means brand owners must independently invest heavily in online and traditional media to target potential customers and get them to visit their website where they can then engage them further in the brand, interact with them, sign-them-up and capture consumer data. Any snobbery that pooling brands together online may be somehow demeaning to the brand misses the point. It also fails to appreciate just how sophisticated and creative multi-brand promotional sites can be.The right digital platform will offer advertisers a positive brand association as well as all of the same engagement tools valued by brand owners running promotions on their own websites which can also be combined with a printable coupon to drive measurable in-store sales.
In addition, consumers that visit a multi-brand programme to take advantage of a particular headline offer, typically go on to engage with many other promotions on the same platform. For example, Couponstar (www. couponstar. om) found that when they had 32 offers live within beforeIshop™ consumers typically interacted with or printed an average of four offers during their visit. Keep rivals close When it comes to integrated marketing campaigns, brand managers must adhere to their own common sense.
Brands share shelf space in store and in Google search listings so sharing space with other brands on an aggregated promotional site is surely much the same? That’s not to say that brand owners should see this as an ultimatum between the two options.It is simply that in their attempts to derive the best value from their budgets they should be more open-minded about how best to spend their precious marketing budgets online. It’s natural to push consumer interaction via the brand’s website or enewsletter, but if it’s an everyday grocery product rather than an Aston Martin, there could be a worrying disconnect from the average supermarket shopper’s mindset. An independent multi-brand promotional forum multiplies the return on investment for FMCG brands because it reflects the way consumers behave offline.
In the FMCG sector, winning new customers is a challenge, especially in the current climate. Finding and engaging them doesn’t need to be hard work, idly frittering money on expensive online and traditional media, but rather responding to what shoppers truly need and where they are already spending time online. Recommendations for successful E-Marketing in FMCG: There is a way to make sure you succeed in FMCG, and that is to understand segments better than competitors, then target attractive segments, and position products to best answer the needs of those segments. When planning e-marketing projects and activities, align specific e-marketing technology with the stages of a customer buying process.
• Web 2. 0 ideas centered on community applications for customer input are now top trends. For improvements in customer experience, focus on community marketing technologies in the evaluation stage where it is currently lacking. • Customers will hop from stage to stage, spending much time on one, while quickly passing through another.
Because of this, design flexible e-marketing processes to accommodate the customer process, not yours.
