Seven (7) Ps of e marketing

Product

In the internet, it’s important to show your product package on your website. If you are a retailer with an E-Commerce site, make sure you spend the money to show your products up close and in full detail. Spend time and money to design good images that portray products and make a great design on your site. Spend time, money, effort and resources to accurately describe your products and services so that when your customers come, they will find preciously what you sell online.

Price

Prices attract many online buyers to buy your products, make a price survey to your competitors, set price basing on known policies so that your customers will be satisfied with transparent prices.

Place

Make sure your products are available on 10 top positions of major search engines like – Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. If this is difficult then spend money to advertise in PPC and other advertising network targeting your primary customers.

Promotion

Promote your products in topical, industry and trade relevant sites. Using the right industry sites is the best choice as the web user becomes more and more specific with their bookmarks and areas of the Internet that want to visit over and over. Promote through coupons and affiliates networks.

People

The use of appropriate staffs, consultants and experts contributes a lot to effective and quality e marketing. Recruiting staffs with the right qualifications, skills and experience is an important part of e marketing competitive advantage. Consumers make judgments give positive ranking or negative perceptions for the service or products based on the type of employees involved in the service provision chains. Staff should have the appropriate interpersonal skills, aptitude, and service knowledge to provide the high quality service that consumers are expecting from them.

Process

Imagine you go to the supermarket and get the services within 5 minutes, what is the system put in place to ensure that you get the service so fast? At the same time imagine you go to the bank and you wait 3 hrs to get the service, what is the system in place that delay to that extent service provision. The process is part of customer satisfaction if that process fastens the provision of service and at the same time the process that delay the service provision might jeopardize the existence of customers to that bank. The introduction of ATM terminals might be one of the process to fasten the provision of service to bank customers. However, the ATM must work 24/7 and not periodically. The eventually introduction of credit cards and online payment may fasten in advance the bank service provision.

Physical Evidence

One of the very important aspects of e marketing mix is physical evidence of your product and services. Where is the service being delivered? Is it through email delivery, download or shipping? If you are a tour operator, do you have a physical office, vehicles for offering services? What is the condition of the vehicles or office? The website is part of physical evidence especially for electronic marketing because leads tend to visit your website and if the condition of your website is bad it will let you down likewise if the status of the website is good, tehn it will attract more customers to your business.

If you walk into a restaurant your expectations are of a clean, friendly environment. On an aircraft if you travel first class you expect enough room to be able to lie down!
Physical evidence is an essential ingredient of the service mix, consumers will make perceptions based on their sight of the service provision which will have an impact on the organizations perceptual plan of the service.