Creating An E-Business Roadmap And Online Marketing Activities For A Gift E-Commerce Website

Detailed analysis of the online gifting company

Ebuisness is one of the fastest growing business strategies in most of the companies in today’s world. Online sales and marketing is widely used by the companies since it eases the business operations and makes it easier for the customers in the process of shopping.

One such website known as www.gift4you.com is all set to start its online sales portal from where customers can purchase gifts of all types and age groups and for all occasions. Customers need not travel to physical stores, they can directly place the orders, and the gifts can be delivered to the homes of the person intended to in gift-wraps. This report will accept the different aspects of designing such as plat form and also the associated advantages as well as disadvantages. A proper roadmap for the successful implementation of the platform for www.gifts4you.com will also be explained (Clemons et al., 2013).

Role of Twitter hashtags:

Hashtags can be used in social networking websites such as twitter as well as Facebook, which in turn makes it more visible to every other users. Using hashtags make a particular post or product more popular and users get to instantly connect to the features as well as the benefits of the post that has a hash tag with it (Zhu et al., 2014). The advantages of using hashtags with www.gift4you.com are discussed below in the following points:

• Including Hashtagsin the Twitter/Facebook posts related to www.gift4you.com will help the users to search for the site or a particular product sold in that site even better. It can also be used in the twitter bios as well as product descriptions (Chiu et al., 2014).
• Hashtags can be used to search for any particular content in twitter related to www.gifts4you.com. This helps in spreading further information about the website or even any special edition line of products (Chen et al., 2013).
• Real-time communications on a particular product available in www.gifts4you.com can also be initiated and the feedbacks from such conversations on social media can be used by the company to further improve the lines of products.

Figure 1: Screenshot of twitter hashtag for www.gifts4you.com (Source: As used by author using www.twitter.com).

Facebook groups helps in knowing about the customer feedbacks as well as their perception of the products they offer and can use the feedbacks for the further betterment and improvement of their products before selling on their website. Through a properly managed Facebook group for www.gifts4you.com, the company will be able to find its target audience by letting the users search for a particular product or line of products by just typing the keywords with which they can be searched in the website. Users can also search by typing in keywords or hashtags that other users might have used to post the pictures for the same product within the group (Tanjung & Dhewanto, 2014).

Figure 2: Screenshot of Facebook group for www.gifts4your.com (Source: As used by the author using www.facebook.com).

Figure 3: Screenshot of Facebook www.gifts4your.com group for Christmas offer (Source: As used by the author using www.facebook.com).

Before setting the campaign, it is first important to set the goal of the campaign. The goal of the ad words campaign is to market the products of www.gifts4you.com in Google and let the users now about the different products of offered by the online company. The goal of the campaign is to drive sales, improve the revenue from the online portal, and at the same time ensure to develop the brand name of the company and increase the customer database who frequently do online shopping.

It is also important to understand and define the campaign type and grow the network using the Google advertisements. Campaign type can determine where exactly the customers can get to see the advertisements of www.gifts4you.com in the internet such as on Facebook or on any other site etc. Search networks can also be created and it can be ensured that www.gifts4you.com advertisements appears even on search engine results. For instance, Search Network campaigns can be created for the online website which is mainly meant for the display network (or the Search Network containing Display Select) campaign. The steps for successfully implementing a Google ad campaign for www.gifts4you.com is explained below as:

1. After clicking on the AdWords account of www.gifts4you.com.

• If the campaign is already created click on Campaigns tab and go to the next step.
• Else, create the first campaign

1. Click on the button that says + Campaign.
2. The campaign type for www.gifts4you.com should then be selected from the menu that come up. The most suitable type of campaign will be “Search Network with Display Select” “Search Network only,” as well as “Display Network only”.

Role of Twitter hashtags

Some of the useful features of www.gifts4you.com are described below, which if properly implemented will boost the number of unpaid views of the website:

• The content of the website should be colorful and attractive and should have important information such as the company contact numbers and the detailed description of the products, etc.
• The website should be user friendly and the users should be able to easily navigate through the different webpages in the website (Starr & Minchella, 2016).
• The website should be fast and responsive.
• Links to other contents such as other webpages should be there in the website, which in turn makes it an even more interesting surfing experience for the customers.
• Metadata about www.gifts4you.com such as a brief description or a tagline describing the website should be used such as “Crafting your curiosity” etc. to increase visibility for the website even if it is unpaid (Srivastava & Pandey, 2013).
• Domain names should be helpful as well as useful for the customers and they keywords should be lucid for finding an exact product precisely on the website for the ease of the customers.

Email marketing is another very useful ways of marketing the website through which numerous users will get to know the different products offered in the website. However, it is not an easy task to promote business through emails and www.gifts4you.com should give away something free of cost to the customers in return for collecting their email addresses. For instance, the company should come up with informative eBooks and newsletters for the customers it is targeting to send the promotional emails about its own products. It might also have to come up with innovative business strategies such as free gifts for first time responders to online email notifications which might attract more customers in turn. Free reports as well as samples of products sold by the company has to be first prepared for shipment to the customers before beginning the campoa0ign of email marketing of the products. Once that is done, www.gift4you.com can look forward to develop a drip-fed campaign through systems like Aweber, Constant Contact, Mailchimp as well as Get Response (Shen & Bissell, 2013). The company should not immediately target to increase its revenues and only sell to the customers. Instead, it should first build a healthy relationship with the consumers and then looks forward to sell and market its products to the customer through the email newsletters (Flanagin et al., 2014).

Figure 4: Email marketing strategy for www.gifts4you.com (Source: As used by the author)

Some of the recommendations to improve the overall user experience of the website are explained below:

– Use of more white space: 

More use of white space keeps will make the website simple and presentable for the users. It will give a neat and professional appearance of www.gifts4you.com.

– Website speed optimization in the future: 

The speed of the website should also be optimized in the future to ensure faster surfing experience for the users. Often slow loading of pages is a major source of customer frustration and they do not have much time to wait too. It has been seen that slow operations causes more than 20% of the website bounce (Sevin, 2013).

– Use of bullet points:

Key information on the different categories of gifts for different age groups and different occasions should be properly segmented using bullet points for proper understanding of the users, so that they do not have to randomly search for any particular item of their choice.

– Calls to action:

Attractive calls to action or keywords that can help the customer easily locate a particular product using specified words should also be incorporated. Appropriate images should be wisely incorporated in the website for representing the products as and when necessary in the future (Goh et al., 2013).

The different stages of the lifecycle of the development of the website are described below in the following points:

Figure5: Stages of website development (Source: As used by the author).

The raw data as well as the requirement of the future changes and development of www.gifts4you.com has to be first collected and analyzed and the possibility and the expected outcome of implanting the changes will have to be studied (Plants, 2013).

Role of Facebook group

(Schniederjans, Cao & Triche, 2013). 

The requirements derived from the first stage are carefully studies and then a list of requirements as well as deliverable are defined in order to successfully carry out the change in the website.

This is the stage of the overall planning of the change that has to be incorporated within the website and the logical workflow and distribution of the specific responsibilities among the different teams involved in the entire process.

Once the design documents are received and the changes successfully designed and incorporated in the website it is then finally implemented and the change is communicated to the other employees of he organization (Niranjanamurthy et al., 2013).

One the changes of the website has been successfully coded by the developers the phase of the testing begins and the bugs that were preexisting in the websites are removed. The new and improved website is tested by using real-time scenarios to see if the performance of the website has further improved and batter address the needs of the customers (Hansson, Wrangmo & Søilen, 2013).

Vision of the company:

  The company aims to have a proper online website for its business operations that can facilitate the company to increase its sales figures as well as reach out to the customers who do not have the option to visit physical gift retail shops. The vision of the company is to expand its business on a larger scale by making use of the ecommerce platform.

Ecommerce has multiple advantages in www.gifts4you.com since it can have the provision of selling products that are not available in retail shops thereby improving customer convenience and satisfaction. The company also aims to provide these products at a very reasonable rate for the customer and options like free delivery for specific lines of products (Nikhita et al., 2014). Discounts and seasonal discounts will also be available when the customers shop from the website and free promotional codes and discount vouchers will be available for first time shoppers. These advantages of ecommerce will help the company grow even more in the future.

The main objectives of the website is to provide innovative gifting ideas to users of all age groups and for different occasions. They also want to expand their business and make online shopping even more easy for the customers by incorporating a very user-friendly website and making products available on the website, which are difficult to find in brick and mortar physical retail gift stores. The values that the company wishes to offer is that it should be able to provide gifts for all age groups at innovative prices so that the customers are satisfied with the products they purchase. In addition, they wish to communicate to the customer that the products are mainly manufactured with ecofriendly raw material aiming towards the benefit of the environment as well.

The timing of incorporating the website is extremely important since it should be launched at a time when none of its other competitors in the market is implementing such plan. Ebusiness is a growing form of business all across the world and if the website can be launched at a time when there is more advancements in the technology, wherein almost all people have their own smartphones or computers, implementing this ebusiness solution will prove to be even more beneficial to the customers than ever.

Google ad words campaign for www.gifts4you.com

The target audience for the company is mainly teenagers who tend to follow the latest fashion as well as gifting trends of the markets, idle homemakers and homemakers who often tend to send across gifts to their friends or relatives on special occasions. Even old people can be the target audience of the company since much of the older class of people are quite technology friendly in today’s world and they do have faire bit of knowledge of basic internet surfing and online shopping using ecommerce websites. They often do shop online for their grandchildren on special occasions like their birthdays etc. Innovative gift items available online in www.gifts4you.com can attract any people in general for the vast range of products they have but the company should specifically target these people for better chances of response (Storto 2013).

Some of the ethical issues associated to the ebusiness model for www.gifts4you.com are given below:

• Personal information of the customers such a debit card/credit card information are often automatically captured by the systems whenever they do any kind of online shopping. This information are stored by the databases. This is not correct ethically.
• Often since the customers only get to see the pictures of the products that are shown in the website, they do not get to test the product physically before buying them. The ecommerce companies have reported taken advantage of such scenarios and sent defective products to the customers or the same product with a different color which is different from the one ordered by the customers. Such discrepancies are also ethically incorrect.

The security risks are explained below:

• There are hackers all around who used advanced hacking tools to steal the confidential data of the organization as well as the website.
• Virus infections through emails as well as Trojan attacks, clicks on malicious links can find their ways www.gifts4you.com (Huang & Benyoucef, 2013).

• Personal information are also captured by the ecommerce websites, which can be misused by the hackers and the intruders.

The main reasons for incorporating an ebusiness strategy is that the company aims to cater to a wider range of audience and want to reach out to the customers who cannot travel physically to the retail shops to do shopping. www.gifts4you.com aims to provide innovative gifting ideas much of which is also often available in the open internet. Therefore, by the incorporation of e business in the company customers will have the option of selecting and comparing the ideas and therefore help them further in online shopping. This in turn will help the company to increase its customer database as well as generate more sales and expand its business avenues (Kim, Sung & Kang, 2014).

The ideal structure that should be followed by www.gifts4you.com is explained below in the following sequence:

• A proper marketing team that should know how to effectively create the traffic and users of the website. They determine the results based on the number of clicks on the website advertisements available online.
• A proper IT team that should have the resources for web development and ensure the speed as well as reliability of the website.
• The sales and operations team that should ensure customer satisfaction and post-sales support.
• They should be responsible for developing multiple channels of sales (Li & Kannan, 2014).
• A team of merchandising experts to effectively promote the products using the advantages of ecommerce marketing.
• A chief executing officer responsible for deciding budgets as well as resources and taking other important decisions for www.gifts4you.com.

Internet has been able to help the company immensely since most of the users across the world are technology friendly and they know the basic operations of devices such as smnartphones and computers. Through internet multiple promotional and marketing campaigns for the products of the website has been done using Google ads campaign as well as social media such as Facebook and twitter which has also been able to widely promote www.gifts4you.com (Hasan, Morris & Probets, 2013).

The steps of developing a cost and revenue model for the company is described below:

• Firstly, the revenue model approach should be selected based on the suitability as well as the requirements of www.gifts4you.com. It should address the needs of the company in terms of generating more sales as well as meeting the customer requirements at the same time (Hung & Hsu, 2013).
• The model should be able to communicate the core values of the website to all its customers. The customer should be able to feel a sense of logical justification for every purchase they make from the website.
• Identification of potential investors is again an important aspect of the model. The stakeholders should also be informed about the budgets and the overall expected business results of the company.
• The revenue model should be flexible for future changes and such provisions should always be there for the company.
• The variables parameters such as increase in price with increase in demand of a particular product should be identified.

The target audience has to be defined while integrating the two strategies since the target audience for retail outlets is quite different from that of the online www.gifts4you.com website. Therefore, for a proper alignment of the two strategies it is important to know the exact category of users who will be using the website and accordingly designing the website for their suitability.

In the physical outlets customers often tend to bargain with the shopkeepers whereas in the online website customers will not have that option. Therefore, a risk remains wherein if the prices are not suitable for the customers or if the products are overpriced, the customers will have no other choice but refusing to shop. This in turn can bring down the sales figure of the company. Therefore, the company should carefully set the pricing of the products so that the customers also feel a sense of justification for the amount they pay for purchasing a product from www.gifts4you.com (Hopmans et al., 2014).

Website enhancement strategy to increase unpaid views of content

Conclusion:

Therefore, it can be concluded from the above paragraphs that there are multiple aspects of ebusiness integration within www.gifts4you.com that the company should take into consideration before implementing any new strategy. It should aim to improve employee job satisfaction as well as addressing to the customer concerns in a better way at the same time. The website should aim to provide the basic features such as improved surfing experience as well as niche marketing, which would be immensely helpful for the customers.

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