Personalization, Community Building, or Direct e-mail?

I'm trying to analyze the benefits and disadvantages of these e-marketing tools: personalization, community building, and direct e-mail.

1. Personalization : delivering individualized content through web pages or e-mail.

Benefits:

- premium services: personalization will be your competitive value as an e-marketing tool since you will treat your customer exclusively and hit right on their needs.

- better information: personlization will lead you to provide the better and usefull information to your customer.

Disadvantages:

cost: personalization of web content or e-mail is much more expensive than developing static content and also will take more time to personalized.

2. Community Building : build a customer-to-customer interaction delivered via e-mail groups, web-based discussion forums or chat.

Benefits:

- efficient: reach many specific customers by one time.

- pool of information: most people feel more comfortable by telling their thoughts to their community rather than to the company, so we may get many feedbacks from the community.

Disadvantages:

- fast delivery of bad story: once you make a mistake, the story will be fast delivered to your customer. And to make it worst, it will influence your customer.

3. Direct e-mail : a format for email-based campaigns in which standalone advertisements are sent to a targeted list of recipients. 

Benefits:

- efficient: You can target people more accurately. You can buy mailing lists that will tell you about the households you can mail your brochures, postcards and direct mail pieces to. And if i do compare with the community building, i think direct e-mail is more efficient since most people will prefer to check their mail than keeping track on the community, especially if they're busy.

Disadvantages:

- negative perception: usualy considered as spam, which is annoying.

- need permission rom customer whether they would like to receive your e-mail or not.

Since these e-marketing tools have their own benefits and disadvantages, hope this information will help you to decide a suitable balance to be applied on your company/business ^^

Higher Procurement Costs, Hit Profitability!

To gain more profit, we should pay attention on the procurement process besides focus on gaining sales or raising price. When the procurement costs seem unchangeable, it's time to analyze the process inside and optimize it.

Procurement

A restaurant, X, is a well-known restaurant. Here are the flow of its procurement process:

The supervisor do daily check on the ingredients needed. If there are some ingredients less than standard quota, then the supervisor will send the purchase order (PO) to the supplier by fax. After that, the supervisor will call the supplier to make sure that they receive the PO, check the availability of the ingredients requested, and ask the delivery date.

Based on the PO, the supplier will deliver the ingredients to the X. The original copy of the PO will be used by the supplier to claim the money to head office. Meanwhile, the copy of the PO is kept by the supervisor.

E-Procurement

The process could be optimize by using e-procurement - the electornic integration and management of all procurement activities including purchase request, authorization, ordering, delivery and payment between a purchaser and a supplier.

A restaurant supply chain from beginning to end must be focused on delivering customer satisfaction and increasing the restaurant profitability. Every restaurant has extensive inventories to track, an increasing number of products/ingredients to manage, quality standards to maintain and often numerous suppliers to negotiate with in order to remain profitable and ensure the availability of each ingredients. 

For this reason, it is imperative that every link in the restaurant supply chain be managed. There are significant financial benefits to managing them well. The e-procurement system provides restaurant organizations the opportunity to automate all aspects of their value chain, such as product sales, ingredient forecasting, suggested food ordering, contract auditing, demand planning, collaborative purchasing, and etc. The e-procurement system can automate and integrate your existing supplier network.

For example, for Restaurant X, if they use the e-procurement system, the supervisor do not need to request every single day. They just need to confirm the quota and supplier, and then the supplier will automatically deliver the ingredients needed if the stock less than the quota. Furthermore, the system will also make the payment system easier.

Possible problems

The average restaurant company today spends nearly half of every dollar earned on food and beverage products and services. With increasing competition and market saturation, executives are looking to optimize for efficiency and capture unrealized return - the supply chain is the first place to start. However, before you can simply cut costs, you have to know where they are being created. Top line procurement cuts or compromises can have significant consequences to operations and customer services. 

If the benefits of automation are so clear, why are so many supply chain initiatives unsuccessful? The reason is that effective supply chain automation is not an isolated application. It has to be effectively connected to the operational systems and users not only inside your organization but between your partners and suppliers as well, regardless of technology platform or sophistication.

Hunting Strategy Definition of E-Business

Berawal dari iseng-iseng baca sinopsis buku-buku, jadi nemu banyak toko buku online (ternyata :p). but..setelah do comparison baik itu dari segi tampilan webnya yang enak diliat, fitur bayarnya, harga bukunya, and the most important thing is bukunya lengkap :) akhirnya terpilihlah www.bukukita.com.

Dari hasil baca-baca ternyata banyak juga yang suka beli buku secara online, lebih gampang dan convenience, selain itu juga harganya lebih murah dibanding beli di toko offline ternama (assumption: u know what i mean :p). Gimana sih strategy definitions-nya? Karena dari banyak orang yang mau develop e-commerce ataupun e-business, cuma sedikit
yang bisa survive dan berkembang.

Berikut ini alternative decisions-nya:
1. E-business channel priorities
Right-channelling: an approach to encourage customers to adopt the appropriate channel. Right-channelling involves devising a contact strategy and tactics, support by technology to reach the right person at the right time, using the right communications channel with a relevant offer, product, or message.

Right-channelling of www.bukukita.com: Encourage customers to buy through online channels by reduced 'internet prices' compared to offline channels and explaining proposition of more choice, more convenience.

2. Organizational restructuring and capabilities
This point is not relevant to be elaborated since www.bukukita.com did not confirm whether there is any offline store of them. But if a company has offline business and considering to go online, there are some choices, such as: in-house division (integration), joint venture, strategic partnership, or spin-off (separation).

3. Business, service and revenue models
Besides the sales of the books, www.bukukita.com sell advertising space to earn some money.

4. Marketplace restructuring
This point should be considered if you reviewing new business and revenue models. There are two options: disintermediation and reintermediation. These options can be reviewed from both a buy-side and a sell-side perspective.

5. Market and product development strategies
Strategies to grow sales volume:
a. Market penetration: customer loyalty improvement - points reward to member, special price (discount) for particular books.
b. Market development: www.bukukita.com has already covered all over Indonesia, but the delivery cost is different to each area. To gain more market outside Jakarta or may be overseas, www.bukukita.com should considering of building strong and powerful distribution system.
c. Product development: these alternatives could be considered: changing payment models (bundling price of some books), increasing product range.
d. Diversification of products offered (related or unrelated businesses), or collaboration with suppliers or intermediaries.

6. Positioning and differentiation strategies
www.bukukita.com's motto: Toko Buku Online Terdepan dan Terpercaya. And to pursue that, they keep adding new publisher to complete their books offered to customers, and also deliver the books on time.

So, what do you prefer?

A Small Retailer Company vs. A Website

For a big company, maybe website is a common thing nowaday. But how about a small retailer company? To compete with others this day, i kindly suggest you - the owner of small retailer company, to start thinking of your company's website. You can just use your website as online information about your company, includes your products. But i suggest you to build an online store of your company.

Online Store

If you have a product you want to sell then you'll need to setup a shopping cart on the website. Most web hosts provide shopping cart solutions you can buy and install, but you still need a method to collect payments.

If you don't want to go through the hassle of applying for a merchant account to accept credit cards yourself, you can always use other methods, including the traditional ways, such as transfer to your bank account or maybe COD (Cash on Delivery). COD: A transaction in which goods are paid for in full in cash or by certified check immediately when they are received by the buyer. 

Management Issues

There are several management issues to be concerned if you would like to build a website. You're probably wondering things like...

1) What are technical aspects to be concerned? for example: 

- which type of e-business applications do you develop?

- which technologies do you use?

- how do you secure data?

2) Do I/my current staff have the necessary skills?

3) How much will this cost?

4) What about copyright laws?

5) Do I have to pay taxes on money I make?

I think the management issues will be automatically more complicated by the growth of your website later on. What i share is about the basic things only, to guide you or provide you a checklist before making decision to create your company's wesite.

The Stages : Step-by-Step Guide to Create Your Own Website

1. Get Your Domain Name

The first thing you need to do before anything else is to get yourself a domain name. A domain name is the name you want to give to your website. For example, the domain name of the website is "domainname.com". To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. Getting a name does not get you a website or anything like that. It's just a name. It's sort of like registering a business name in the brick-and-mortar world; having that business name does not mean that you also have the shop premises to go with the name.

2. Choose a Web Host and Sign Up for an Account

A web host is basically a company that has many computers connected to the Internet. When you place your web pages on their computers, everyone in the world will be able to connect to it and view them. You will need to sign up for an account with a web host so that your website has a home. If getting a domain name is analogous to getting a business name in the brick-and-mortar world, getting a web hosting account is analogous to renting office premises for your business.

3. Designing your Web Pages

Once you have your domain name and web host, your next step will be to design the web site itself. If you are using a third party web designer to do it for you, you can probably skip this step.

4. Testing Your Website

Although I list this step separately, this should be done throughout your web design cycle. I list it separately to give it a little more prominence, since too few new webmasters actually perform this step adequately. In additional, you should test your website built by third party web designer.

5. Collecting Credit Card Information, Making Money

If you are selling products or services, you will need some way to collect credit card information. You should read up on How to Accept Credit Cards on Your Website. Or guide your customer to do other ways of payment method.

6. Getting Your Site Noticed

When your site is ready, you will need to submit your site to the search engines, particularly Google. You can find the Google submission page by clicking on the "About Google" link on Google, and then locating the "Submit your content to Google" link on the page that appears.  However, submitting your site to Google alone is, quite frankly, a pointless endeavour. If there are no other links to your site on the web, Google will be appear most reluctant to index your site and show results that include your pages. If there are many other links to your site, you don't even have to bother to submit it to Google - it will find your site by itself.

Online Shopping Behaviors

Personally, I'm not a fan of creating online shopping websites, especially if you're new to building a website. That's not to say online stores can't be successful. Just make sure you understand what you're getting into :p Just sharing anyway...

• When most people shop online, they go directly to their favorite retail store websites (Target.com, OldNavy.com, Macys.com, etc.) and then browse.
  
• Not many people type in generic items in Google (red socks, for example) and search through "no name" online stores to find what they're looking for.
  

So, if you want to create a store to sell generic items that can be found at more popular retail stores, you are going to have to fight to compete with all the major retailers. And unless you have a lot of money to invest in advertising, this can be a very tough way to make money online. There are many people over the years who say they want to build a site like Amazon.com. Not a good idea for someone new to website building and internet marketing. You should create unique website, maybe in the business process itself, the design, the products, or anything else to compete in internet.

Hope this article usefull for you ^^