CYBER MARKETING

Internet is perhaps the greatest technological revolution of the last few decades. It has touched almost everybody's life and affected our living in a wide variety of areas such as education, trade, entertainment, communication and management. In fact, by the end of September 2002 a total of 605 million people were estimated to be already online. Even at this level, the internet using population has not tapered. It continues to expand at phenomenal rates. The rapid growth of internet usage is fueled by an extremely wide and ever expanding range of applications. These applications, in turn, bring in even more users to its fold. This continuous positive loop, perhaps, explains the unusual rise of this technology and medium.
Marketing has been one of the most significant gainers from the internet revolution. Internet has been applied by marketers both as a medium as well as a product. Thus, marketing has deployed it for communication of information, distribution of some of its products and even for receiving payments from the customers.
Internet based marketing or cyber marketing, therefore, plays a vital role in the exchange process.
Cyber marketing has now become an indispensable segment of e-commerce
as well as the internet and World Wide Web related topics. Cyber marketing simply refers to a technique of attracting potential customers by advertising your products or services through such means as websites, emails, and banners.
 In other words, cyber marketing is a blend of internet technology and direct marketing principles that is adopted by business owners to find profitable customers and to interact with them in order to enhance their business activities, thereby ensuring improved ROI (Return on Investment.) A number of activities are involved in cyber marketing such as online marketing, fax direct marketing, canvassing, call center direct marketing, and mobile phone marketing via SMS (Short Message Service.)
Benefits derived from the adoption of cyber marketing techniques are immense. First of all, it enables to minimize business costs and helps you to reach a substantial number of customers and that too within minimal time frame. Another great benefit of cyber marketing is that it allows you to cost-effectively reach in any type market, let it be regional, national, and international.
Also, a significant benefit of cyber marketing is that it enables you to win profitable customers. Exceptionally low marketing costs, high profit margin, increased customer loyalty, round the clock services, and expansion in customer base are the other obvious benefits of cyber marketing. 

        CYBER MARKETING AND THE CONVENTIONAL MARKETING

Although cyber marketing comes with tremendous new the conceptual bases of conventional marketing need not be thrown away. The body of knowledge developed through the experiences and their theorization by marketers and the academicians are quite valuable. Moreover, they can also accommodate the new realities thrown open by the internet. Thus, for example, one can easily see the relevance of "marketing concept", "customer orientation", "market segmentation", "product positioning" and "market measurements" even in the internet era. Similarly the utility of marketing mix and all of its elements are very much present within cyber marketing. The formulation of each of the elements or the entire marketing mix may understandably be somewhat different froth the ones that might have been developed without the access to the internet. But, such differences are there even in any two different contexts of conventional marketing as well.
While cyber marketing can be seen within the larger and familiar conceptual framework of marketing it also shows considerable differences from the conventional marketing. These differences account for the major departures in the application of marketing and warrant specific attention to the study of cyber marketing. Some of these differences emerge from the special features of internet:
i) Inter connectivity: Internet is often defined as a network of networks. Most of the users find it useful to have their presence recorded on the internet. They also ensure to become accessible by others through internet. By doing this, they help the count of internet sites to grow exponentially. The search engines on the internet are to facilitate internet usage and streamline traffic on the internet. But, by playing these very roles they help in attracting even more traffic to the internet. The increase in bandwidths and speed of internet connectivity are like converting country roads into expressways. All these factors have made interconnections among consumers and marketers possible at the levels never seen before.
For customers the feature of inter-connectivity translates as access to a very large number of diverse markets, other information sources and fellow customers. This access is universal overcoming all kinds of geographical boundaries.
ii) Interactivity: Internet provides not just access to a large number of sites but also allows interface and interactivity among users. Internet can be seen as a virtual market on the web where the customers and marketers can most conveniently interact from their own locations and in a very cost effective way. This feature of internet provides a unique facility of interaction among a large number of customers themselves also through bulletin boards or chat facilities. The interactivity feature of internet allows the marketer to control the contents of materials that he would wish individual customers to access. This way cyber marketing gets its double edge in the market place. It allows the marketer to customize and focus even on individual customers in a
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mass market. On the other hand, the customers become empowered to scan much larger canvas of market and bargain for their purchasing power with a larger base of marketers. The customers can also create a large pool of knowledge by online sharing knowledge of their experience based knowledge among their peer customers. The inter activities gained by both marketers and customers have the potential of unleashing very high levels of energy in the marketplace restricted only by the creative limits of the market players.
iii) Involvement: The internet user is not a casual user of medium like the TV viewer or radio listener. His attention is solely directed to this medium and is more committed to its contents as he has reached to the particular screen through a process of conscious search and choice. The medium is audio visual and therefore more attention centric. This increased level of involvement helps the cyber marketer to address his efforts to more serious customers.
iv) Information: The sheer number of internet sites and the richness of content on each site have already made internet as the largest documented repository of information known to the mankind. Moreover, the information available on the internet is much better indexed than most of the alternatives sources of information. This has come as a highly leveraged resource for the cyber marketer.
The richness of information on internet has also made customers perceive it as a more serious and informative channel of communication. This helps the cyber marketer as a better quality tool of connecting with the customers.
Data based marketing, which had taken off even before the advent of internet, has really gone to greater heights through cyber marketing. On the other hand, because of the empowerment of customers through such rich information, database consuming has also found true meaning now.
v) Individualization: The advantage of mass customization is made possible through internet for both customers and the marketers. The customers can identify the optimum provider for his unique sets of needs. Customer can also arrange for updating himself in the precise area of his interest although from the most extensive sources of information possible.
The marketer can also store the historical data of customers and their behavior.These data can be then processed with the help of data mining and marketing decision tools. These data are utilized to provide solutions to the customers needs on an online and individual basis. The product can be configured exacting to the individual customer's needs at the price and with a payment mechanism most convenient to him. The information and the persuasive appeals can also be tailor made for the individual customer. He can be reminded or provided with additional services as per his specific requests and all these information can be utilized in the design of next round of offering to him. This kind of customization when offered on continuous basis becomes service to the customer of significant commercial value.
vi) Integrity: Interment provides tools to check the authenticity of the data and its providers. It can also go to great lengths for ensuring the privacy of its users. Both of these features result into greater faith among its users. Thus, customers get greater assurance about the transparency and reliability of the marketers' offers.

However, it is not as easy you think to enhance your business profitability via cyber marketing techniques. In other words, in order to employ this marketing technique, it is important that business owners and other people engaged in the internet field such as eCommerce and marketing professionals must possess adequate skills.
Cyber marketing includes
- E-Business technology
- E-Business Communication
- E-Business Distribution Systems
- E-Business Value Strategies
- E-Business Strategy
- E-Business Management
- Individual as well as the diffusion of innovations
- How to gather and use information
- The Political, Legal, and Ethical Environment

THE NATURE OF CYBER MARKETING  

           Customer profiling, segmentation and targeting: Cyber marketing has the capability of viewing existing customers data through a wide variety of angles and compare the efficacy of each of these views. Various data mining tools available today are employed to do this job. They mainly utilize the processes of sorting, clustering and association seeking among the consumer characteristics. The history of the customer behavior in terms of past transactions and internet viewing generate rich data for this purpose automatically. Such data are often supplemented with the offline data collected through alternative sources.

The customer segments created with such methodologies can have the advantage of being more dynamic (because they can be created through online databases), more insightful (because of the use of more powerful clustering and association seeking techniques) and customers themselves selecting into a segment

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The segmentation process in cyber marketing can be extended to real micro segmentation and even to the segments of single customers each. Each customer is individually identifiable and reachable at their personal addresses here. Therefore, the process of micro segmentation can be extended to its logical limit of mass customization of marketing. In fact, the recent growth in the area of customer relationship management within marketing has been possible mainly due to the availability of these cyber marketing tools.

ii) Product planning: In the markets today there are several products which maybe. called as digitized products. The products whose main contents are information fall in this category. Financial products, software, books, audio and video products are examples of products which are already available in digitized forms or are very easily amenable to be converted into. These digitized products can directly be displayed, presented and even delivered through internet. Even those products which are more physical do have digitisable components. The digitisable components of such products can take the advantage of mounting on the cyber marketing platform directly.

Another interesting product related possibility through cyber marketing is regarding product customization. Marketers can also bring in the product optimization tools which can simultaneously look at the customers needs and the marketers objectives and achieve them. Thus, for example, the marketer can estimate the profit abilities at the various levels of customization and offer that level of customization which satisfies his own objectives the best.

iii) Branding: Products on the internet can benefit as much as any other product from proper branding, The rapid proliferation of internet based products gathers a very large clutter of brands in least amount of time. In such situations the power of brand identity becomes even more indispensable.

iv) Pricing decisions: The fact that customers can compare much larger range of offers and their prices has suggested that cyber marketing exerts downward pressure on prices in the marketplace. Internet provides a large array of data about the different products prices and corresponding sets of features. These information assist customers to more easily sort out less valuable features of the product from the more valuable ones today. They can also evaluate the real worths of products when the market is flooded with a complex array of products with varying features. The customers can also utilise the wisdom of fellow customers for this purpose. In all, internet tends to make a wiser customer out of the ordinary.

Even widely dispersed and otherwise unknown to each other customers can also pool their purchasing power on internet. This purchasing power can help them to resort to "reverse auction" and secure best possible price deals from the marketers.

While customers get the benefit of better price information and bargaining, cyber marketer can also see opportunities in it. First of all, the seller can apply price discrimination much more fiercely and dynamically because the seller can now deal with each customer more on one to one basis. The seller can also optimize on price and profit realization using the customer related data and the internal data about items such as inventory levels, incremental costs and competitive strategy followed. It also allows the marketer to better concentrate on the life time price realization from a customer rather than just the benefit through immediate transaction.

Another significant advantage offered by cyber marketing is about the ease and speed of price collection from the customers. The electronic money transfers from the customers to marketers can take away considerable pain of collections and accounting.

v) Advertising and Sales Promotions: Like products and prices, customization of advertising and promotion are very much possible in cyber marketing. Besides customization, the customer is contacted when he is giving full attention to the computer screen. In fact, when a customer views any site he has done so after deliberate and conscious effort and choice. This increases his commitment to the message that he is viewing on the internet.

WHICH HELPS TO UNDERSTAND
- How to gain the attention of audience through an effective website
- How to use gathered information to discover new knowledge
- How to enhance the value of your business using management systems
- How to organize E-Business strategies to compete with your rivals
- How to employ different data to gain competitive benefits

        LIMITATION

  Internet marketing requires customers to use newer technologies rather than traditional media. Low-speed Internet connections are another barrier: If companies build large or overly-complicated websites, individuals connected to the Internet via dial-up connections or mobile devices may experience significant delays in content delivery.From the buyer's perspective, the inability of shoppers to touch, smell, taste or "try on" tangible goods before making an online purchase can be limiting. However, there is an industry standard for e-commerce vendors to reassure customers by having liberal return policies as well as providing in-store pick-up services. A survey of 410 marketing executives listed the following barriers to entry for large companies looking to market online: insufficient ability to measure impact, lack of internal capability, and difficulty convincing senior management.

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