I would like to share with you one of my favourite website. I really love it and I believe I’m going to order some christmas presents there.

Have a look at:

www.thinkgeek.com

If I could, I would buy EVERYTHING!!! I love those nerdy gadgets, the glowing tshirt, and all those things taht would make me a real geek.

The only thing I really don’t appreciate of that website, is the delivery time.

It takes 3 weeks to have a tshirt delivered in Europe from that website. If I order something now, I’m not sure I will have it under my Christmas tree before the holidays!!!

In addition to this, import taxes are always very high. Grrrrrrrrrrr!!!

I want to move to the United States just to have the Motherboard Christmas ornaments!!!

Have a look at this video

What I wanted was an easily accessible website, fast delivery and low delivery costs. And Apple was able to make me and happy customer (again!).

The process of purchase was very easy, I accessed Apple website, I choose the item I wanted, I paid with my credit card, and that’s it, the order was placed! Apple sent me a confirmation email where it waas stated that the delivery time was approximately 7 working days.

To my surprise, 3 days later I had my Snow Leopard copy in the mailbox! How was it possible? I don’t know, but I was astonished by Apple’s quick delivery!

If we want to apply the principles of digital marketing to this situation, Apple was able to manage my expectations successfully. I believe Apple knows well what ecustomers want and what they need, and they are able to deliver a service which met my expectations and did not leave me disappointed. In this way Apple is one the path of making me a loyal customer, a customer even more in love with that brand!

I was thinking about the successful and unsuccessful marketing experiences online.

I personally believe that many many companies have misunderstood the meaning of digital marketing and they have overestimated this powerful tool.

There are a lot of companies that have dedicated all of their marketing expenses to digital marketing, they have actually changed all their business perspective. They thought that being on the Internet would me the solution to all their problems.

Some of these companies failed, a lot of these companies failed! Why did they fail?

In my opinion the reason of these failures lie in the fact that the Internet is not enough. You should mix your marketing effort, but you should not rely only on emarketing…

Sometimes it can also happen that I see something interesting on the Internet and then I decide to go shopping downtown to look for that particular article. This is what is called Mixed-mode selling.

The only thing I don’t like to buy online are clothes and shoes. I am really worried about the sizes and I spend hours and hours thinking about which could be the size that best suits me. Buying clothing online has a lot of advantages. Think about the availability, but what really makes the difference is the price: I could find a pair of Vans shoes on Amazon which costed HALF of what they costed in the nearby shop!!!

So guess what I do to be sure of what I buy online and save money…

I go to the nearby shop, I try the shoes and then I kindly say “oh, I’m sorry but I don’t really like these shoes!!!”. As soon as I get home, I order them on the Internet.

How do marketers call this kind of behaviour? I would suggest that the name “reverse mixed-mode buying” could fit the situation

“Applying digital technologies which form online channels to market to contribute to marketing activities aimed at achieving profitable acquisition and retention of customers through recognizing the strategic importance of digital technologies and developing a planned approach to improve customer knowledge, then delivering integrated target communications and online services that match their individual needs” (www.theidm.com)

In this post we what to analyses this definition in details:

Digital technologies: a lot of people have access to the Internet; there are a lot of platforms and communication tools that allow us to communicate and interact on the Web. The easiest ay to do that is to use a computer to visit a website, but think about the enormous amount of possibilities we have via email, wireless networks, TV and the Web 3.0.

Achieving profitable acquisition and retention of customers: e marketing has the same objectives of traditional marketing. We want to acquire new customers to enlarge our market but, in addition to this, we want to retain old customer. This has to be done in order to have profitable customers. We have to get rid of unprofitable customers.

Strategic importance of digital technology & developing a planned approach: Marketing is not rocket science. Everything has to be carefully planned and implemented through a pondered strategy.

Improve customer knowledge: this is the core competence of marketing: gain knowledge about your customers. No business is an island. We need our customers to sell our offerings (products or services), but we need to know what customers want, what are their needs and expectations. Marketing and digital marketing are a great way to do that.

Integrated target communications: there are many ways we can use in order to communicate to our customers and exchange information. Sometimes using only one mean of communication is not enough. We need to pick up different means of communication and mix them to make it more likely that the customer will be targeted correctly.

Being connected to the Internet is now everyday stuff. In western societies it is almost impossible to live “unplugged”. Everybody has easy access to the Net and has become familiar with the possibilities we are offered by the virtual world.

Marketers are not aliens, in the sense that they perfectly know how to exploit the usage of the Internet and other mean of communication in order to get their final objective (sales!).

This is why we talk about e-marketing and e-business.

And the Digital Marketing Council (www.theidm.com) has defined Digital Marketing as:

“Applying digital technologies which form online channels to market to contribute to marketing activities aimed at achieving profitable acquisition and retention of customers through recognizing the strategic importance of digital technologies and developing a planned approach to improve customer knowledge, then delivering integrated target communications and online services that match their individual needs”

According to David Siegel (2000)

“E-marketing is not about building a web site, but building a web business… harmonizing the power to customers”

This blog is aiming at exploring the possibilities and the capabilities of digital marketing. We will go into details about the definitions in the next posts.