E-Marketing: A Game Changer in the Marketing World - Essay Sample

Introduction

The marketing world has undergone drastic transitions over the years. E-marketing has emerged as one the greatest of them all, and hence organization can resist its power. Increasingly, organizations are heavily investing in e-marketing and placing it as a competitive advantage. With the advancement in technology, more and more people have access to the internet and spend more time on different online platforms. Thus, e-marketing reaches a broader audience and hence its popularity in the modern world. Moreover, by choosing a particular platform, the organization can target a specific demographic. The feedback that e-marketing produces can also be used to improve the products and services offered by the organization. Various information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as artificial intelligence, big data, and the internet of things (IoT), help e-marketers design, implement, and control internet products better. This paper seeks to discuss the role that these ICTs play in the designing, implementation, and control of internet products.

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Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is behavior displayed by machines that resemble human intelligence. Its usage is spreading fast in every aspect of society, especially in commerce and governance. It helps cut down the cost of business operations and improves customer relations. These advantages have made artificial intelligence popular in businesses. Content curation and search optimization, chatbots and data learning, voice search, virtual search, and virtual assistants are some of the designs that help in e-marketing (Siau & Yang, 2017). Content curation and search optimization help reach the right audience through the use of data habits, tracking buying patterns to know customers' area of interests, and presenting them with appropriate recommendations. It helps reduce guesswork and has increased accuracy in online advertising. Chatbots and data learning are unnamed customer support services that increase engagement with customers through the use of online services such as Facebook, Twitter, and emails. It helps in increasing sales. They offer services 24/7 and give human-like responses. It cuts down the operation cost since it takes the place of customer care services. Voice search and virtual assistants help consumers to use voice search to look for products and communicate with their desired brands. It is also used at home to give commands to appliances.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality immerses users into completely virtual space by creating a three-dimension environment that gives consumers experiences resembling those in physical stores. They can interact with the product by rotating it and zooming in and out. This improves brand attitude, increases product knowledge, and purchase intention increases, thus increasing sales (Wodehouse & Abba, 2016). It can be used to show consumer reactions to prices and product labeling by observing emotional responses to retail environments and responses to empty shelf space.

Big Data

Big data deals with analyzing large data and obtaining systematic and valuable information from them. Big data analysis helps e-marketers to make an informed decision. For example, marketers can track each customer's purchasing behaviors through online responses to adverts and convert one-time buyers into repeat buyers. It benefits online advertising marketers because it cuts down the transaction cost through buyer-seller interactions online (Akter & Wamba, 2016). So, it cuts on time spent since bargaining and after-sales services are monitored online.

Data Mining and Text Mining

Data mining is searching for new information in large data contained in the internet. This information helps marketers to make wise marketing decisions, and this helps to increase the profits of the firms (Gerrikagoitia, Castander, & Alzua-Sorzabal, 2015). On the other hand, text mining is extracting new information from written sources, such as websites, books, emails, and review articles, to turn text into data for analysis, which in turn helps in the marketing of products.

Internet of Things

Internet of things is an interacted computing device, machines, objects, or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data in networks without requiring human to human or human-computer interactions. It is used in devices and appliances, such as, thermostats and cameras that can be controlled by smartphones and smart speakers. It is an attractive way of marketing and helps to expand the market.

Marketing Concepts That Help In E-Marketing

Individualization

Individualization means that the user of the internet has control overflow of information, while interactivity allows consumers to select the information that is relevant to them. Interactive advertising enables information to flow in both directions that is from the user and source. Immediate feedback is obtained since a touch of button or screen acquires information. The internet is the most interactive advertising medium for doing electronic marketing.

Customer Interface Concept

This is a keypad used for recharges and checking balances of the bills. Used to load tokens of electricity and water. It gives sound alarms when units are almost depleted. It helps to reduce the operation cost of the firm since the consumers pay themselves. The business, therefore, does not have to send a worker to read the meter (Chang & Chen, 2009).

Customer Relationship, Customer Experience, and Customer Co-Design

The goal of customer relationship management is to coordinate business customer interactions to ensure repetitive buying. Online advertising is used to address issues of sharing and managing customer-related information. Customer relationship helps to arouse and awaken interest in the consumer to purchase. It ensures user-friendly internet advertisement by using attractive colors and decent language while advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. They also ensure that the consumer has easy navigation throughout their site. Customer experience is critical in the creation of loyalty. Firms should, therefore, endeavor to give exceptional services so as not to lose customers to competitors. The quickest way to keep communicating with customers is through customer service because lately, people are spending more time on the internet Customer co-design focuses on the use of online services, mobile, in-store and digital media to help in electronic marketing. It allows researchers with insights to improve and adapt interfaces for customer co-design.

Real-Life Situations Application

Due to its ability to reduce time, and the cost of marketing, the use of artificial intelligence has dramatically risen in recent years. Areas that artificial intelligence is used include anonymized location data, ride-sharing apps, and commercial flights. Using anonymized location data from smartphones helps reveal incidents like construction and accidents. It also helps to locate routes with less traffic jam. Ridesharing apps such as Uber, use a machine which can determine the price of the ride and how to match with other passengers without time-wasting. Commercial flights are also fitted with artificial intelligence capabilities.

Chatbots are replacing phones, emails, and texts since they provide quick service and transactional support in the banking sector. Transactions like balance inquiry, loan queries, and bank details account are effectively carried out by chatbot. Its advantage is that it is cost-saving since few workers are employed to deal with complicated issues. It is also easy to use because it utilizes a conversation interface to guide the user. Chatbots gives financial advises by analyzing consumer habits and transactions. Hence, the tool can notify the consumer of better money management (Navimipour & Soltani, 2016). When someone is online, the chatbots keeps on informing about particular accounts and can inform one's decision to open one. The other advantage is that it operates throughout.

Conclusion

The use of information communication technology is critical in marketing, regardless of the size of the firm. Any company that wants to grow should focus on ICTs to improve customer services and demand. It also helps in database development and market research. Online advertising has evolved to become one of the most effective marketing strategies in modern times because people spend a lot of time on the internet. Various social media platforms are used to reach multiple audiences. Internet marketing has numerous advantages. First, it offers a global reach hence provides businesses with a broad base for their goods and services. It also operates all the time without having to be closed. Low costs are incurred since less labor is needed due to a lot of activities being done through the internet. Most importantly, e-marketing builds a lasting relationship since inquiring about a product and getting immediate responses, motivates a customer to purchase the product. This leads to a rise in sales. Different ICT technologies help enhance the capability of e-marketing to achieve this by improving its design, implementation, and control. Some of the ICT technologies that are widely used include artificial intelligence, virtual reality, chatbots, among others.

References

Akter, S., & Wamba, S. F. (2016). Big data analytics in E-commerce: a systematic review and agenda for future research. Electronic Markets, 26(2), 173-194. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12525-016-0219-0

Chang, H. H., & Chen, S. W. (2009). Consumer perception of interface quality, security, and loyalty in electronic commerce. Information & management, 46(7), 411-417. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378720609000901

Gerrikagoitia, J. K., Castander, F. R., & Alzua-Sorzabal, A. (2015). New trends of Intelligent E-Marketing based on Web Mining for e-shops. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 175, 75-83. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042815012367

Navimipour, N. J., & Soltani, Z. (2016). The impact of cost, technology acceptance and employees' satisfaction on the effectiveness of the electronic customer relationship management systems. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 1052-1066. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215302144

Siau, K., & Yang, Y. (2017). Impact of artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning on sales and marketing. welve Annual Midwest Association for Information Systems Conference (MWAIS 2017). Retrieved from https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=mwais2017

Wodehouse, A., & Abba, M. (2016). 3D visualisation for online retail: factors in consumer behaviour. International Journal of Market Research, 58(3), 451-472. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2501/IJMR-2016-027