direct marketing paper Essays - Consumer Behaviour, E-commerce

DIRECT MARKETING PAPER Introduction With today?s market economy weak from the latest recession, it is important that every company utilizes a comprehensive direct marketing strategy. Direct marketing is about communicating a message to a specific prospect or customer. The success of that communication is measured by sales of the product. There are several elements to direct marketing that a company can use. Some of these elements are mail, e-mail, catalogs and telemarketing. One way a marketer reaches their customer is online. In today?s world most consumers browse the internet shopping for items they want to purchase. Consumers may not necessarily purchase an item online. According to the web site thirty million penguins http://users.rcn.com/gui/marketing.html, ?Put yourself in your customer's shoes. Your first problem is inertia. Only 11% of Webbies shop on the Web?. With numbers that low it?s very hard to effectively market a product on the web. Most companies have had great success using the web to market their product. Let?s look at music and see which marketing strategy best works, using online or traditional retail store for a market segment under 30 years old. Purchasing online music has become simple for the average computer user. Several online stores like Rhapsody and itunes allows customer to purchase songs and download them to their mp3 player or ipod. The advantage to purchasing music online is that you never have to leave your home and downloading songs may take only a few minutes before you can listen. The disadvantage to buying internet music is the monthly fee to access their site and download songs. On top of the monthly fee online music stores will charge a fee per song usually $.99 cents. The benefit of buying from the comfort of your home can cost you much more. The other option to buying music online is purchasing in a traditional retail store. With the easy availability of online shopping it is getting harder to bring in consumers into store to purchase music. A non-direct strategy to get consumers to buy music in stores is to co-locate music with other product. Companies such as Best Buy sell electronics and in the center of their stores are the music isles. In the stores, while browsing the isles, consumers may elect to purchase an individual song or an entire CD (compact disc) of an Artist or group. The advantage of this strategy is that you get the consumer to purchase multiple items such as CD players along with music. Using a direct marketing strategy (online) is the most popular with the 30 and under segment. According to the website www.esemc.com/artscienceofmarketingonline.pdf, it says that ?The online channel can be targeted and it is measurable, no matter what the business or brand goal. A company?s website, for example, like any retail store, must facilitate affinity and relationship building as well as deliver on sales goals, be they long or short term, direct or indirect. Any successful online execution requires both the ART of big, creative ideas and strategies and the SCIENCE of segmentation, analysis and targeting?. Using online marketing by music producers will reach the largest demographics of 30 and under adults. In this paper we have discussed online marketing to traditional marketing in regards to buying music. There are advantages and disadvantages to shopping online or at the retail store. For the thirty under crowd, online shopping is the most widely used. References www.esemc.com/artscienceofmarketingonline.pdf http://www.users.rcn.com/gui/marketing.html