Marketing and Selling on Internet

Marketing on the Internet

Marketing on the Internet involves Online Advertising to reach out to Potential Customers. It requires creativity like designing, development and technical aspects like marketing and advertising.

Different facets of Internet Marketing includes:

• Affiliate Marketing,
• eMail Marketing,
• Search Engine Marketing,
• Interactive Advertising
• Sales,
• Public relations,
• Information management, and
• Customer service.

Ever since the advent of Internet, it is widely used for all kind of purposes. Among the advantages of Internet, some helps in doing business, shopping, etc. from the comfort of the house. According to a research, a quarter of the Internet users shop on-line. It has contributed significantly to the global grow of Electronic Commerce. Internet Marketing is a substantial part of Electronic Commerce. 

Direct Marketing Techniques

Direct Marketing Techniques like radio and television commercials, mails, and newsletters are the inspirations for Internet Marketing, which involves Direct Response Marketing Strategies and is rapidly growing.

Internet Marketing Business Models

Business-to-Business, also known as B2B, and Business-to-Consumer, also known as B2C, are the two Business Models to which Internet Marketing can be linked.

• B2C companies were the first to start when Internet Marketing originated. They are companies that sell directly to the customers.
• B2B companies are meant to do business with each other.

Internet Marketing Websites

Websites built for Internet Marketing are slightly different than others.

• There are Peer-to-Peer Modeled Websites which are used to exchange products and services between each other.

• Another is Name-Your-Price, where the customers have to specify their price range that they can spend and select products that fall in that price range.
• www.Priceline.com is an example of such a website.

• Find-The-Best-Price Model, where customers can find the lowest prices. Is another model.

• www.Amazon.com is a website which is based on this approach
• Last are Online Auctions sites, where items are bid.
• www.Ebay.com and www.tripleclicks.com/indexAuctions.php are examples

The companies who use Internet Marketing are at an advantage. They don’t need to put in huge amounts of energy and time in Internet Marketing like other traditional methods. With the help of only few resources national and international markets can be reached.

Because of very low investment, even small businesses are turning to Online Marketing. Websites and Blogs have been developed for this purpose.

• Internet Marketing is advantageous in the sense that the data is easily available on the Internet.
• Newsletters can be directly sent to customers and if it doesn’t contain the information they are looking for, they can search for information about the product online, make a decision and purchase it online itself.

One of the factors that hinder the growth of Online Marketing is delayed loading of the page.

• The web pages that take a lot of time to download test the patience of the consumer.
• To add to that, if the businesses design complex web pages with lots of graphics and animations, it will slow down the speed even more.
• Another minus point of online marketing is that the customers cannot feel, taste, smell or try products in order to make a good decision.
• To over come this, some of the online stores have created liberal return policies with the help of which the customer satisfaction is guaranteed.

The Biggest Threat

Another biggest threat of online shopping is identity theft.

Paying online using credit cards, e-checks are susceptible to hackers and information can be stolen and used.

Many hackers and websites have been caught who were involved in buying and selling of personal information.

Most of the websites have taken measures and incorporated good security on their websites.

• One of the best methods is encryption.
• When the data is being transferred between two computers; there is a possibility of a hacker intercepting it.
• So the data is changed by applying some encryption algorithm and is sent through the network and upon receiving, the decryption algorithm is applied to bring back the data to its original form.

 The Internet for all businesses

Online selling is influencing all kinds of businesses like banking, advertising, music, etc. Instead of going to a store for buying cassettes and CDs, music can be bought online.

Bank transactions like depositing, withdrawing, transferring funds, and paying bills are all performed online. Astronomical amounts of money is  invested every year in online advertising alone. 

Why not you?

Get your act together and you can claim a share of that online gold mine; however small it may be.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a derivative of Internet Marketing where the advertisement publisher gets paid for every customer or sales provided by him.

Basic Approach

Affiliate Marketing is the basic approach for all other Internet Marketing Strategies. With this form of marketing, affiliate management companies, in-house affiliate managers and third party vendors are effectively utilized to use of:

·         E-mail Marketing,

·         Search Engine Marketing,

·         RRS Capturing. and

·         Display Advertising

for the success of the product.

Web Traffic

The Web Traffic can be traced with the help of a third party or own Affiliate Programs. A lot of work is involved in this process. The invention of complex algorithms and advance security have made it safer for doing business and shopping online. This even led to the better scrutinizing of the terms and conditions by the merchants.

More Opportunities = More Competition

Affiliate Marketing became more profitable with the opening of more opportunities but at the same time it also increased the competition in marketing.

High-Level Marketing Skills Invested

Due to this pressure in-house Affiliate Programs for merchants became a thing of the past and were replaced by out-sourced programs. The companies that offered this service have expert Affiliate and Network Program Managers who have various Affiliate Program Management techniques.  These Affiliate Networks have publishers associated with them who help them with the advertising part.

Origin

Affiliate Marketing was started by www.cdnow.com who had music oriented websites. They placed list of music albums on their site and they paid others if they put those links in their websites when a visitor bought their album through their site. The first company to link with www.cdnow.com was Geffen Records.

Two months later, Amazon was offered by a woman that she would sell Amazon’s books on her website and she should be paid a certain percentage in return if she sold Amazon’s books through her site. They liked the idea and started the Amazon Associates Program. It was more of a commission program where they received a commission if a visitor clicked their links and banners on other’s site and bought anything through it.

Growth

Since its invention, the Affiliate Network has been adopted by various businesses like travel, education, telecom, mobile, gaming, personal finance, retail, and subscription sites, the most common being adult and gambling sectors.

Compensation

The Compensation Methods used are:

• Cost per Sale (CPS);
• Cost per Action (CPA);
• Cost per Mile (CPM); and
• Cost per Click (CPC).

The first two are the more famous methods today. This is because in CPM and CPC, the visitor which turns up on a particular website might not be the targeted audience and a click would be enough to generate commission. CPS and CPA have a compulsion that the visitor not only clicks on the link but also buys something or signs up for some service after it which proves that he is among the targeted audience. Only in the above case the Affiliate gets paid. So the Affiliate should try to send as much Targeted Traffic as possible to the advertiser in order to increase his/her returns.

Affiliate Marketing = Performance Marketing

For this reason Affiliate Marketing is also known as Performance Marketing because it totally depends on the performance of the Affiliate. The Affiliate Team can be differentiated from a sales team from the nature of their jobs. The job of the Affiliate Team is to drag Targeted Traffic to a point and from that point it’s the job of the sales team to influence the visitor to buy the product or the service.

This is a very effective kind of method because the money is being paid only when results have been achieved. The publisher incurs all the cost except that of initial setup and development of the program, which is incurred by the merchant. Many businesses give credit to this method of marketing for their success.