Integrated Marketing Channel for E Commerce Business

Indian e commerce industry have sense the brightest future ahead. Lot of new online e commerce business models has been entered into an Internet forays, I don’t blame them but the waves seems like tsunami. Most of the online business models entrepreneur do not make their home work properly and dive in a foray with out analyzing type of revenue generation channel available online and offline for them. 

I wouldn't like to criticize their business ideas or haven't a question mark against their faith on business offerings. But they need to understand how to promote their business online for targeted ROI by the help of Integrated Marketing Channel. IMC includes the coordination and integration of all marketing communication tools, avenues, and sources into a seamless program in order to maximize the impact on end users at a minimal cost.

New dot com’s have been producing just number of clicks by PPC to convince their Venture Capitalist for more funding. Have they bother about ROI or they just want a instant buzz around their BABY BRAND, god knows better. I have researched on top 5 Indian e commerce sites and 5 new e commerce business models and their integrated marketing spending. 

 

The above analysis shows that, Indian e commerce business hardly bother about affiliate marketing, organic search and social media. Situation is more worse for new e commerce businesses. One of my best friend, has been managing more than 25 best e commerce paid search account. I was shocked when I come to know that  most of the e commerce business spends millions just for producing odd number of clicks. Most of the account manager fool around their organizations or entrepreneur’s do not want to analyze integrated marketing channel further more.

An Ideal integrated marketing channel for any e commerce business model applicable for Indian context should be like this one.

The balancing act between integrated marketing channel provide you the best conversion with maximum ROI. Online business entrepreneur in India must take Affiliate Marketing and Social Media Marketing Channel seriously. Being an online business entrepreneur you should need to analyze your online business model life cycle and applicable integrated marketing channel efficiently. 

Few day backs I have tried my best to explain the process of Affiliate Marketing Business Model in merchant prospective s.

Social Bookmarking and it's compititive advantages

Although the concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to 1996, the term social bookmarking is a relatively new and was first used in 2003 by Delicious web service. The term 'tagging' is also associated with social bookmarking. Using social bookmarking, users can search, save, manage, and organize web pages/websites for sharing or for remembering. With the rising number and growing popularity of online book marking services, social book marking is also called social book marketing. Over time, book marking services have proven to be excellent tools for online marketing. When combined with Search Engine Optimization, social book marking can be the key to success of online marketing campaigns.

Higher rankings by search engines facilitate brand awareness. The primary objective behind search engine optimization is thus, to ensure better rankings, and thus, social book marking has emerged as an effective tool for providing back links and getting higher traffic, which in turn help in securing better Search Engine Rankings. Bookmarks represent links through tagging. Unlike a hierarchical structure, tagging is done through a bottom-up method, which create many broad categories to fit in the links. As a result, the users can assert the metadata adding relevance to the links. This equates the marketing appeal as a 'word of mouth' campaign, in which friends and families validate the quality of the product/service.

Just like keywords tags and the links they are attached to are indexed simultaneously by search engines. As a result, content supplied by you adds the links with the appended keywords. Thus, along with getting links from websites with heavy traffic frequency, you also get links from websites that are relevant. Once you start getting links from big book marking websites, your website will automatically get indexed by the web spiders of all major search engines.

Apart from providing SEO benefits, social book marking can be a very good marketing tool in itself. Viral marketing campaigns can be very successful using these kinds of web services since the ranking of the bookmarked links depends on the ratings by the users. SEO firms tend to count on the well known users in order to get their assertions for the web pages/services included in book marking sites. Sometimes, this might pose some risk if the service/product receives negative reviews from the authoritative users. Moreover, there is a risk of getting branded as a spammer if the users find the submitted links to be irrelevant. All this makes optimization a tricky business!

In spite of some risks, the importance and benefits of online marketing through social book marking has proven to be phenomenal over the years.

Which Online Marketing Tactic Delivers Highest ROI?

A survey of over 1,200 Internet marketers conducted by MarketingSherpa and has found that pay-per-click (PPC) advertising tops the list when it comes to return on investment (ROI). Around 51 percent of marketers surveyed said paid search delivered a ‘great’ ROI.

Survey respondents voted email marketing as next best effective, with 44 percent describing email as having a great ROI. This was followed by search engine optimization (SEO) with 39 percent of marketers deeming it to have a great ROI.

Here’s the list of how those surveyed viewed a range of online marketing tactics:

• PPC - 51 percent said it delivered a great ROI, 8 percent said it delivered a poor ROI.
• Email marketing - 44 percent said great, 16 percent said poor
• SEO - 39 percent said great, 15 percent said poor
• Behavioral targeting - 32 percent said great, 18 percent said poor
• Affiliate marketing - 31 percent said great, 28 percent said poor
• Contextual targeting - 26 percent said great, 16 percent said poor
• Rich media ads - 23 percent said great, 27 percent said poor
• Contextual text ads - 32 percent said great, 17 percent said poor
• Banner ads - 13 percent said great, 34 percent said poor
• Emails to third party (rented) lists - 12 percent said great, 49 percent said poor
• Popups, pop-under - 9 percent said great, 67 percent said poor

MarketingSherpa also examined how much marketers spent on each tactic. Interestingly, they found that quite a few tactics rated as poor still attracted substantial funding. Marketers spent significantly more on banner advertising than email marketing… yet email marketing ranks significantly higher in terms of ROI. It will be interesting to see how this chart looks next year if, as many expect, marketers focus much more on measurable / direct response oriented online marketing tactics.

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Unidentical Twins : SEO isn't SEM

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Search engine marketing involves click costs. Search engine optimization works through free traffic. Those two facts are the basis of a popular myth: that it's easier to get good ROI through SEO than it is to get the same ROI through SEM.

There are many reasons why that myth isn't true. But today, we'll deal with just one difference: the landing page difference.

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In SEM, you decide the landing page your visitors see. In SEO, a search engine spider decides on the landing page visitors see. That's a difference in control, and that difference makes all the difference.
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Searchers, after all, are people with itchy back-button fingers. If they come to a site and don't think it's the best site for them, they'll return to the search engine results page - and click on your competitors' links - in a matter of seconds.
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But if your landing page is optimized for the keywords the searchers choose, and the ad copy the searchers see, then you're able to tell a new visitor, right away, that she's come to the right place. And no matter how amazing your site is, that's a message that visitors need to hear. Because people don't just want to see a good landing page, They want to see a relevant landing page.
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But only a good SEM firm can optimize your landing page. A search spider won't.
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In both SEO and SEM, you only hit ROI if your searchers convert. An SEM firm might require a higher initial investment than an SEO firm does (because SEM requires the management cost, plus the PPC cost; while SEO only costs the price of management alone) - but you're also likely to get better conversions through SEM, because you're likely to get better landing pages through SEM. And it's only conversions that will get you ROI.
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Are we saying that getting the best SEO possible isn't worthwhile? Absolutely not. Top-ranking organic results are like front-page newspaper stories: you may not be able to control everything your market sees, but it can still makes your brand look great. Plus, the more real estate you take up in the search engine results page, the better: if searchers don't click on your search ad, they can get to your site through the organic link.
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So good SEO is absolutely vital to strong internet marketing. But saying that SEO will get better ROI than SEM - because organic traffic is free - ignores the most important element of SEM: control. And it's control that makes all the difference between getting traffic, and getting traffic that converts.
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And that makes a huge difference when it comes to ROI.