e-Marketing

The Website As A Marketing Tool

A website can be created to fulfill many different functions, supporting communication, sales and other kinds of customer interaction, such as (Carrera, 2009):

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  Institutional communication: It’s a website used by almost every company aimed at presenting the company and what it can do. It also works as a business card and an online communication tool;

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  Selling products and services: the website can also enable e-commerce by creating an online shop which sells products and services using different means of payment.

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  Other types of customer interaction: the website can also permit other types of customer interaction such as technical and commercial support.

Online registry of customers into a database gives firms the chance to know the history of interactions with customers, which can be very useful in understanding customer behavior and defining the customer’s profile, both individually and by customer segment. Whether they are creating a site for business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), or both, companies should build it based on their customers’ needs and not on what they want to sell. Some firms even have different websites for different kinds of customers.

This enables the use of one-to-one marketing techniques that allow individual marketing actions according to a customer’s shopping behavior or search for information in the company’s website.