· Buying patterns. There is a growing body of information on how consumers of different ages and demographic groups shop on the Web. This is vital information for your marketing plan, even if you have to pay to get it.
· Media Used. How do your targeted customers learn? What do they read? What magazines do they subscribe to? What are their favorite websites? These are all pretty obvious to developing a marketing campaign.
(Web Marketing Today. April 1999)
We have just touched the surface here, but we hope it gives you an idea of the process. After you have collected this kind of information from a wide variety of sources, you are ready to write a description of your best customers. Distill all you have learned into a maximum of three or four paragraphs, even though you may have spent days or weeks researching.
Once for good measure, all repeat together: “The core of our Internet Marketing Plan is understanding our customers.” Get this right and you can carve out a successful business on the Web. Be careless in defining your customers, and you will doom your online marketing, no matter how much money you throw at it.
You can learn about your site visitors in a number of ways. But before we look at any of them, we need to talk about privacy. One of your visitor’s chief concerns is the steady erosion of his privacy. If you want to gather information, you will need to show integrity about the way you use the information. It is strongly recommended that you develop a site privacy policy, link to it from every form (and preferably from every page in your site), and abide by it rigorously.
Here are eight ways you can learn about your site visitors:
1. Monitor E-Mail Inquiries and Complaints
It is vital that you find a way to monitor e-mail inquiries and complaints from your site visitors. Even if you have an employee handle this e-mail for you, have them print out an extract of key questions and complaints so you can keep your finger on the pulse. We have found that my blind sides are quickly spotted by visitors, who’ll fire off an e-mail. Do not look at these e-mails as enemy fire; these are your friends who will help you improve your site. When you spot a question occurring repeatedly, it is a sign that you need to deal with it more fully or more visibly on your site. And, it tells you what is important to your visitors.
2. Provide Online Questionnaires
You might want to create an online questionnaire with which you can gather information from your site visitors. What kinds of questions are important? ?Internet World subscription form? is an example questions asked by a Business-to-Business magazine (http://www.iw.com/subs/subs.html).
3. Send Out E-Mail Questionnaires
The strength of online forms is the ease with which the data can be collected for analysis. The downside is that online forms are essentially passive; they wait until someone comes to them. E-mail questionnaires, on the other hand, are active; the recipient can fill it out and reply without having to open a web browser.
E-mail questionnaires, however, may be the survey of choice because of their immediacy and ease in sending.
4. Use Cookies Strategically
Another information gathering strategy is to use cookies. Cookies are tiny pieces of information that can be placed on your site visitor’s web browser for retrieval later. These are widely used to display banners, keep track of shopping carts, remember passwords, track affiliate referrals, etc. Let is say you want to learn how many of the people who responded to a certain ad actually made a purchase. One way to do this is to create a special web page URL for the ad. When someone clicks on the ad URL, they come to the special page where JavaScript code places a cookie on their web browser indicating that they came from a certain ad. When a purchase is made in the site ordering system the cookie (if any) is retrieved and a record is made of the source of the sale.
5. Examine Order Files
Another way to learn about visitor shopping patterns is to analyze individual order files as well as summaries. Once a visitor places an order or provides an e-mail address, any information collected about that individual can be used to develop a personal profile. Amazon.com uses such information to offer recommendations of other books or purchases based on your previous purchases.
6. Provide Site Personalization
Larger company sites are employing database tools that harvest information about visitors by what products they look at or purchase, which banners they click on, etc. Then this data is merged with other databases providing demographic information by ZIP code, etc. to give a customer profile.
7. Study Your Traffic Logs
Considerable data about your customers and their surfing habits can be gained from studying the traffic logs for your website. These can tell you how the visitor came to your site, browser used, route used to surf through your website, most popular pages, domain name of visitors, and much more.
8. Employ JavaScript on Your Site
In addition to placing cookies, JavaScript can be programmed to harvest information contained in the visitor’s web browser, such as plug-ins available, the resolution of his computer monitor, operating system used, and version of browser.
The information you learn from each of these methods can help you gain a clearer picture of those visiting your site. Use the data with integrity; adhere to your privacy policy. But use what you learn about your visitors to fine-tune your website sales and revenues, and you’ll come out ahead. Careful attention to customer data is a major factor in distinguishing successful from unsuccessful sites. Neglect it at your peril.
(Web Marketing Today. Nov. 1999)
II. Segmenting your Internet Market
Once you have studied the customers who are likely to purchase your products or services, you may find that there are several kinds of customers, each with different interests and needs. When you segment your market in this way, you increase your chances of success.
One of the most profitable exercises you can conduct is to segment your site visitors into specific categories. This takes market research on your customers and then careful analysis, but it will enable you to be much more successful in your website marketing efforts. Then include in your Internet Marketing Plan a paragraph or two explaining how you segment your potential customers. Later in the plan, you will indicate which products or services are most suitable for each segment, and a marketing strategy to reach each segment of your market.
From a web-marketing standpoint, one of the difficulties you face when you offer a number of products aimed at different groups is to segment visitors quickly and move them to their own section. Imagine the problems with a company as diverse as Microsoft (http://microsoft.com), for example. Their website uses these kinds of categories:
Product Family Sites
BackOffice
Developer Tools
Office
Windows
Web Services
bCentral
MSNCustomer Sites
Home & Personal
Business
Developer
Education
IT Professional
Partner/Reseller
Notice the redundant way they segment by both product/service family as well as by customer type. We think Microsoft does a pretty good job at this.
(Wilson, ?Web Marketing Today?)
IV. E-Commerce in Lebanon
The Internet invaded the Lebanese market in 1995, where at that time few companies (ISPs) monopolized the market. However, in less than five years, companies working in this sector rose to more than twenty companies competing to have a higher market share and attracting more customers, which led to many price wars recently. At the beginning, Internet was only sought for the fun and entertainment part of it, not knowing how important this technology is for trade, economy, knowledge, etc. But with time, companies got to understand the importance of business on the Internet, leading to the existence of a new sector in the national economy, that of information and communication. This evolution paved the way for e-commerce to flourish the Lebanese ?E-Market?.
A. Lebanese Companies on the Net
Roula Mousa, managing director of Netways, could hardly control her excitement while speaking on the global implications the World Wide Web will have on the world?s future.
Speaking at a workshop hosted by the ministry of economy?s trade information center she pointed to the range of benefits that being plugged into the Net could bestow.
If a company needs to know how their stocks are doing on the Beirut Bourse, it can always just punch in *www.bse.com.lb* and get the day?s closing prices.
Want to check out new real-estate investment opportunities in the country? Check out *www.homesandland.com* and you can get a listing of land and property for sale according to your specifications.
The possibilities are endless, but ?it?s a war here,? she said. If a company wants to compete in today?s global village, it needs to learn how to market and sell its products, recruit employees and search out clients, all over the Net. For this reason, the ministry of economy will be hosting free Internet workshops for Lebanese companies on a monthly basis.
There are more than 100m Internet subscribers across the world, of which 60 per cent are in the US.
Of that number, 100,000 are from Lebanon, half of them university students.
There are more than 8m websites on the World Wide Web and, according to the estimates, more than 5,000 Lebanese companies are represented on the Net.
Some have made it into a valuable tool.
Exotica is an example. Through its website at *www.exotica.com.lb* a client can order, pay by credit card and have delivered an order of flowers or a potted plants, without having to do more than click a mouse button.
The typical Internet E-Commerce includes catalog-shopping merchandise, distribution, wholesaling and other commercial activities. The success of these solutions will be driven by consumer confidence in the security and confidentiality of their transactions.
The basic way to handle commerce via the internet is to setup an HTML form where users can enter the items they wish to buy, shipping address and credit card information. By using a secure socket layer (SSL), server and browser will ensure that third parties cannot discover the credit card information.
Alternative way to increase the security of credit card transaction is to use a trusty transaction company between the merchant and customer, so the merchant does not see the customer’s credit card number.
II. Customer Adaptation to E-Commerce Websites
Reaching the world, and more specifically lucrative Arab markets, does not need grandiose planning. Computers are spreading and making Arab citizens potential consumers to an electronic form of commerce dominated by multinational firms with huge financial and technological resources. Despite foreign competition, the Internet can fuel economic growth in our country.
E-commerce is practiced differently between the two powers that dominate virtual business in the world, Europe and the United States. European e-commerce is mostly comprised of retail selling, such as buying flowers, cameras and computers on the Internet using credit cards, or other ?secure? payment methods designed not to let financial accounts fall into the wrong hands.
In the U.S., there is a large and increasing consumer appetite to buy goods and financial services on the Internet, but firms also rely on the Web for their supplies and to keep stocks at a minimum through what is known as ?business to business? transactions.
In Lebanon, the volume of both types of virtual trading is negligible. Businesses tend to think of the Internet as a method of displaying their goods and services on-line, not as a tool to increase sales and cut costs.
At the global level, forecasts for e-commerce growth are quite daring: From $59 billion last year, international consultants Deloitte says that virtual trade would cross the $1 trillion barrier by 2002, mainly from business-to-business deals.
Asia, it seems, is destined to continue lagging behind with a less than $50-million share compared to more than $800 million for U.S. businesses. Such calculations cast of grim shadow over the Arab East, which is already being left behind the rest of the world economy in the traditional fields of industry and services.
The vast majority of Asia?s e-commerce is conducted in advanced nations such as Singapore and Japan. What can we expect then from Arab businesses? How can we avoid being confined to another footnote in the globalization story?
The Arab virtual market is small. The U.A.E. is the most virtual with more than 200,000 Internet surfers up to April. Lebanon is in good shape with respect to its Arab neighbors and is not very far from 100,000 subscribers. The Syrian government limits the spread of the Internet to its citizens who dial-up using Lebanese providers.
Saudi Arabia is finally booming after the government allowed a highly censored Internet to reach the population. In terms of personal computers, we notice that Saudi Arabia has formidable infrastructure (almost 1 million PCs), which justifies the Internet explosion there. The Levant enjoys much less purchasing power, but hopefully economic liberalization will finally hit the whole region, raise the standard of living and spread computers more rapidly to an eager, multi-lingual and educated population.
One of the very few studies I managed to come across showed that 9 percent of Arab Internet surfers make on-line purchases. But the market for credit cards, the main settlement mechanism on the Internet, is also growing. Lebanon?s 30,000 credit cards two years ago are have exceeded to 100,000 in 1999, and is expected to rise to 300,000 in 2001 with banks such as Credit Libanais working to introduce state of the art chip-based plastic.
Lebanon defines itself on the virtual map by a set of encouraging numbers and some innovative approaches to e-commerce. A liberal business code has allowed the spread of tens of Internet firms that are competing primarily by undercutting each other?s prices and making the costs of accessing the Web among the lowest in emerging markets.
Lacking huge R&D budgets, Lebanese firms are devising low cost, yet effective, ways to wipe consumer fear of the Internet. Fransabank began by introducing a credit card with a monthly limit of $100-$200 to be used when making on-line purchases. If a credit card number is stolen, the resulting losses would be minimal.
Other banks among them Lebanon & Gulf Bank, Credit Libanais, Blom, Audi, Inaash have followed with even lower limit Internet pre-paid cards. Local service providers are teaming up with international firms to market the secure payment methods adopted internationally, such as Data Management, which linked with Kleline, and Inconet with Global Sign.
While a major credit card issuer, CSC has teamed with Moscanet for providing a new way of secure payments in Lebanon.
Another positive development has occurred on the Web itself. Some firms managed to break from the monotony and dullness that characterized Arab sites and carved a niche of selling goods to a large base of Lebanese expatriates, such as sweets manufacturer Hallab. In the financial industry, customers of the Arab Finance Corporation trade on-line.
Despite these bright spots, the market is stagnant and has not reached an international level of maturity. Most sites are dull, slow and difficult to manipulate. I tried to buy a book on-line from a local site. I only had a choice of the latest available publications (about six books) and waited for what felt like a decade for the necessary page to open. It was much easier to go to the bookshop, buy the book and come back before the page finished downloading.
So there is huge room for technological improvements to make the Internet faster and the connection more efficient.
But a fair bit of investment is needed to upgrade system speed, create sophisticated sites and conduct large-scale marketing campaigns to familiarize the consumer and merchant with the new medium, especially the business-to-business side.
The probability that such investments can be made through the small firms that form the market is tiny. Their small sizes limit their access to finance and the amount of salaries they can pay specialists capable of taking the e-business a step up. (Majzoub R., downloaded from http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
V. Conclusion
Individuals will be able to process documents and pay their bills using the government?s network.
Mohammed Amin of the Ministry of Economy and Trade made the announcement and several conceded that at present there are obstacles in the path to the future – incomplete telecommunications infrastructure, non-existent e-commerce legislation and a lack of consumer awareness. ?Electronic commerce and its various services represent an easy and inexpensive opportunity for Lebanese businesses to compete on the regional and global markets,? said al Amin, director-general at the ministry.
?The public and private sectors are both responsible for the development of e-commerce in Lebanon,? said Amin. ?The Lebanese government intends to play an active role in this area.?