Question

Review the website you selected for your Week 3 assignment.

Create a 16- to 20-slide Microsoft^® PowerPoint^® presentation with speaker's notes about your selected website in which you complete the following:

• Assess the pros and cons of using an e-mail or newsletter strategy to help build and maintain a core customer base.
• Describe any content and/or strategies you believe will help improve customer e-mail open rates and interaction.
• Explain how this e-mail/newsletter strategy can be integrated with other social media marketing efforts and online communities to improve brand recognition and website performance.
• Evaluate the metrics that should be used to measure the success of the new strategy and processes (i.e., how will you know if your proposed marketing efforts are making an impact?).
• Recommend a plan for moving from the current marketing strategy to your proposed strategy.
• Assess whether new target customers, products, or services should be included in this updated marketing plan.
• Summarize the main points of your strategy and include one-, three-, and five-year projections for the growth you believe will result from the implementation of your strategy.

Answer 1

Introduction:-

Marketing efforts, in today’s time, are at the core of organizations and help in developing them and creating higher value for the customers and aims at ensuring that they receive higher returns in the long run respectively.

With rapid urbanization and the use of information technology, the need for marketing has changed an evolved over time into different models. The most prominent one among these is the internet technology which uses email, social media, newsletters and similar modes to complete the marketing process from planning to execution to customer and client feedback respectively.

A brief overview of Amazon tells us that the company was formed in the year 1994 in Seattle United States. The company has turned recently its attention to emerging markets such as India and aims at selling the products worldwide through the use of digital technology.

Case Specifics:-

1) Assess the pros and cons of using an e-mail or newsletter strategy to help build and maintain a core customer base.

The pros for Amazon to implement an email or news letter strategy arise from the fact, that it is primarily an internet based company and can thus target a specific set of people extremely easily. The strategy allows for the company to expand its user base and allow a personalized touch to the user. It is a known fact that internet giants can collect data on what consumers browse on their websites and through the active use of technology can thus enable themselves to market via an email or a newsletter strategy that would enable them to sell their products in a better manner to the end consumer.

Emails and newsletters can contain feedback surveys, invoicing details and also promotional offers which are relevant to the user or customer and thus enable the company to reach out to the customers in a better manner respectively.

The cons of this is that customer engagement on emails and newsletters is still by far very less and limited i.e. not every consumer who purchases something needs or wants email and newsletter communication and since most view it as spam they often do not even read the same.

2) Describe any content and/or strategies you believe will help improve customer e-mail open rates and interaction.

The content or strategies that can help in consumer opening their email more often and increase interaction can include the company sending out only specific ones to reach out to the consumers than flooding their inboxes.

Further all communication that takes place should be relevant example- the company can adopt policies in which each invoice reaches the customer directly on their email and they can easily check for all their queries using the same mode. Also returns if any can also be filled using similar techniques.

Communication further should be built in a custom manner example people who are interested in buying a new phone from their browsing history should only get specific emails relating to their products of choice.

Further the company should disallow spamming by any means to encourage consumers to open emails and increase interaction by finding the emails as relevant and not disturbing.

3) Explain how this e-mail/newsletter strategy can be integrated with other social media marketing efforts and online communities to improve brand recognition and website performance.

The new strategy can be integrated with other social media marketing efforts by ensuring, that there is seamless collaboration among the two. All complaints arising out of the social media platforms of the company can be easily documented using email so that the consumer and the company both have a documented version of the conversation to avoid any confusion.

Further, social media communication should be replicated through emails for example promotional strategies should be implemented on both platforms at the same time hence ensuring that the same message reaches out via both modes. Further, feedback information can be integrated among both and this will broadly help in increasing website performance.

4) Evaluate the metrics that should be used to measure the success of the new strategy and processes (i.e., how will you know if your proposed marketing efforts are making an impact?)

To assess whether the strategy of the company is doing good or not, the company can devise methods to access whether or not the emails actually get read. This is usually done by read receipts in emails to ensure that the customer is reading the communication which reaches out.

Further an increase in reverse emails by the consumers can also be checked with regards to product queries, feedback and complaints and the consumer’s mindsets can be analysed from the same.

Further, the links to the products which are sent via email can be analysed if they helped the buyers in making relevant purchase decisions or not. And in the end a trend analysis strategy can be used to assess whether or not the decision making resulted in higher sales and revenue for the company.

5) Recommend a plan for moving from the current marketing strategy to your proposed strategy.

A concrete plan for moving the current marketing efforts to the proposed strategy can include means wherein on trial all customer engagement can take place via email only. This would encourage customers to be more serious about the technology and would induce them into making a better buying decision for them.

Further using the same mode, customer feedback can be collected to analyse whether or not the strategy was a success.

6) Assess whether new target customers, products, or services should be included in this updated marketing plan

The strategy should, indeed be inclusive of all products and services and must include all target customers. In practice, it should try its initiatives more on the younger generation since as a trend; they are more responsive towards such strategies than others.

Further, all products which the company is currently selling can be brought under the strategy and can be thus actively marketed using the same.