Our Current Use of Internet Technology and Recommendations for the Future - Term Paper Example

Our Current Use of Internet Technology and Recommendations for the Future. The Internet Technology is a phenomenon that has swept the whole world off its feet. It has changed, to a very large extent, the way business is being done all over the world. Businesses have being transformed just by exploiting the advantage the Internet offers. About a decade ago, the Internet was not in existence, but now huge amount of money is being spent on the Internet. This has made running a business on the Internet a must for any company seeking to be relevant in the scheme of events. In years to come, there will be two types of businesses; those on the Internet and those out of business (Bill Gates, 2001). Knowing fully well that this company, Dixons, is a retail company dealing in electronics, the Internet has greatly helped us in running our business. There are so many ways the Internet has helped our business, but I will talking about how it has helped the marketing department of this organization. Before adopting the Internet, millions of pounds are spent on marketing the company's products and services. Some of these spending could be justified while others were just unnecessary. The forms of advertising adopted were: direct sales, yellow pages advertising, newspaper and magazine advertising as well. Television adverts were also part of the marketing strategies adopted by the organization. Though these strategies worked, they still had their limitations and were consuming so much from the company's purse. The Internet has reduced these limitations and has also cut down the cost of marketing ever since we have been using it. By running our business on the Internet, the cost of advertising has greatly reduced. The cost of running a direct sale campaign is very alarming. Materials have to be printed, packaged in an envelope and then sent to their respective destinations. The Internet has eliminated all these expensive processes and replaced them with relatively inexpensive strategies. One of the marketing strategies we are adopting now, which is very inexpensive, is Email marketing. It is a know fact that millions of people now have email addresses and the fastest and most inexpensive means to reach them is through their emails. This strategy has totally replaced the direct sales marketing method at a very positive margin. There are neither printing costs nor any postage stamp to be bought. It has a higher response rate that the direct sales method. The effectiveness of this method is based on the fact of reselling to those who have bought from us, the existing customers. It is conventional wisdom in the high street retail trade that it cost ten times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one (Bruce Durie, 2001). Whenever we make a sale, we get the email addresses of the new customer. We get in touch with them on a regular basis and then recommend some other products that may be complementary to what they have bought earlier. This has also afforded us to build relationships with the customers. When we recommend new products to them, they gladly patronize us because of the relationship we have with them. Another online promotional strategy the marketing department is using is banner advertising. The way this is done is that we have our graphics designers design banners that we can place on other people's website for a nominal fee. This is a very simple and inexpensive marketing strategy. There are several high-traffic websites who are willing to give a space on their web pages in order to generate revenue. What we do is that we find out these websites and contact their owners to find out what it will take to place our banner on their websites. We find out that the cost these webmasters charge is very cheap. The opportunity they offer all is great. For a little cost, we are able to expose our products to hundreds of thousands of people every month. This has also generated a lot of traffic to our website and has helped so much with the sales being generated. This form of advertising has greatly reduced cost and also bringing in a lot in term of sales. It has also given us a lot of leverage and has afforded us the opportunity to reach people we couldn't have been able to reach normally. In using banner advertisement, we have taken this to another level. Since this form of advertising has greatly reduced cost by eliminating anything like mailing, we have been researching into how we can take it further so that it can be of great advantage to us. After so much studying and research, we discovered that there are programmes where we can exchange our banners with others in our field of interest at little or no cost. This is called banner exchange. In banner exchange, two or more site owners agree to display their banners or logos on each other's website. When we display their ads on ours, they also display ours on their own websites too. This is a win-win situation for the parties. We get traffic from their websites and they get from ours too. In this type of advertising, the little cost that may be involved, is if we join banner exchange programmes on the Internet. There are several websites that are set up for this purpose. So we just pay the site owner(s) to place our banners in their exchange so that other site owners in our field can pick them up and display on their sites. Another marketing method the Internet has afforded us the opportunity of exploiting is affiliate marketing or what people also refer to as referral marketing. This method to a large extent has also helped in the sales expansion of our products. What we did is that we set up an affiliate programme where people who have purchased from us are allowed to become our resellers. They are allowed to have access to our affiliate sign up page and after completing their registration, they are given personal links to advertise. So many people have joined this programme and they are sending us thousands of people every month. This method is also cost effective because all the money we would have used on advertising will be saved. It is the resellers that are now advertising for us thereby saving us a lot of money. Another important thing about this mode of marketing is that nobody get paid until sales are made. If they refer people and they don't buy from us, we don't have to pay them anything. So this is also a money saver. We seem to have a lot to do on the Internet these days. As it can be seen, it has brought us a lot of advantages and we have experienced an unprecedented growth over the years we have been making use of it for our businesses. The reach we have now is even unprecedented. We wouldn't have achieved this if not for the Internet. People from all over the world now have access to our products and they can order from any part of the world. We are not of the belief that we have fully utilized all the advantages that the Internet has to offer us. We are still working hard to maximize all these potentials the Internet has in stock for anybody running a business on it. It is part of our future plan to position ourselves as one of the leading website online. If there is actually anything that we are not doing now, it is our plan to do that in the nearest future. We have not being making use of the search engine for now. A search on any of the engines for a term that is related to our market does not bring up our website in even the top 30 listings. This is something we are going to work on so that we can appear on the top listings in all the major search engines. The power of the search engines cannot be overlooked in anyway. It is also our desire to look into every other forms of advertising that we have not being exploiting for now. One of those is links exchange. Most websites we have online are exploiting this form of advertisement because it is a mean of bringing in free traffic. The idea is that we place our website link on other websites that are related to what we are doing but are not in direct competition with us. There are also several links directory we can place our links on for a small amount of money. When this is done, it can also improve our search engine rankings. Our link campaign will be very robust because we will want to have them on all the major websites we can have them on. We are also looking into working out a lot of joint venturing in years to come. Joint Venture marketing is another way people get free exposure for their website. We intend to work with so many people in a win-win situation. This may involve us paying our partners, but it is definitely going to follow the pay-per-performance model. We are also looking at other promotional strategies that we will be implementing later. We want to exploit the advantage that Google offers. Google is by far the largest searching network on the Internet today. There are so many opportunities that this website offers that we have not taken advantage of. All these will be looked into in the nearest future and I am sure they will contribute greatly to the progress of this company in terms of growth and increased revenue. Whatever has an advantage also has its bad side. The same applies to the Internet. There are so many people who have used the Internet to wreck havocs on others. One major source of concern is identity theft. Paypal, an online payment gateway, said this problem affects consumers at home, at work, in the shopping mall or online. (Paypal Safety Guide, pg7). This is crime whereby people obtain other people's information to obtain credit of whatever form for themselves. So many companies have received complaints of people being wrongfully charged for purchases they have never made, ours is not an exception. Sales that are being generated from some parts of Africa are mostly not genuine. The buyers would have obtained the credit card information of somebody using any means and decide to use it to purchase something online. Some of these type of orders get successful because the buyer knows all the details that are required for the purchase to be accepted. This is a global issue that we are looking at the best ways to solve. One of the solutions we have thought of is the need to be sure of where an order is going before shipping. When goods are bought from countries that are notorious for online crimes, the best thing to do, is to delay shipping and get in touch with the buyer to notify him of our inability to ship to the location. If the buyer wants the product to be shipped to him, then he needs to make payment at the point of delivery. This will surely scare him away if the purchase is not genuine, but if otherwise, the owner will not mind paying on delivery. Another source of great concern is email phishing. According to Mr. Mark Fielding, THE Irish Small & Medium Enterprises Association (ISME) Chief executive, "In the past number of weeks numerous companies have received invoices from companies, purportedly based in Switzerland and Spain, seeking payment for entry in an international directory of which the company management was not aware." (Irish Examiner) This is a scam is perpetrated mostly during the spring and summer months by fraudsters, who use the holiday period, knowing that senior management may be out of the office leaving more junior staff to take decisions. The best solution to this is that we should check all incoming invoices carefully, especially those from abroad or unknown suppliers. We should also be able to check carefully all invoices for small print and all signatories within the company will be fully briefed. Another great threat that Internet users are facing is the ability of some people to intercept transactions conducted over the Internet. This is really a great danger because it makes the information sent by customers not to be secured or confidential. Since the Internet consists of numerous computers that are networked together, it is poses a great threat because this people know how everything works on the Internet and they are able to intercept all the messages that are being transmitted. The threat of hackers is what everybody transmitting businesses online have to face. Though several measures have been taken to curb this dastard act, the hackers have not relented in their effort to bring businesses on their knees. The best way to solve this problem is the use of encryption and authentication technology. This will make messages being sent over the Internet to be encoded in a way that nobody can intercept and even understand what is being said or done. When this technology is used, the threat of intercepting other people's messages will be reduced. So many people have decided not to send in their information across the internet because of this risk and if well taken care of; it will bring back their trust. Other risks of e-business include copyright infringement, defamation, unintentionally transmitting viruses and breach of privacy (Chapman, 2001). It is very important that no infringement issue is generated by any website. Whenever something is gotten from another source, care should be taken to state the source so that the owner does not come slapping a law suit on the owner of the website. References Chapman, Tripp (2001), Mitigating the Legal Risks of EBusiness. [Online] Available: http://www.chapmantripp.com/resource_library/published_article.aspid=702 [Accessed: 3rd April 2006]. Durie, Bruce (2001), e-business: How to make money running a business on the internet (Kuala Lumpur: Golden Book Centre) Gates, Bill (1999), Business @ the Speed of Thought'. ( New York:The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.) Irish Examiner (2006), ISME issues scams warning. [Online] Available: http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/2006/03/22/story515786379.asp [Accessed: 3rd April 2006]. Paypal. "Ecommerce Safety Guide." [Online] Available: https://www.paypal.com/en_US/pdf/PayPal_Safety.pdf [Accessed: 17 March 2006] Read More