Outline marketing plan for Asuk Creative Limited a B2B provider of Internet services continue...

Objectives

The objectives are each built around the SMART criteria (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timed).

• Increase market share. ASUK Creative Limited currently holds 2 per cent (200 servers) of the UK dedicated server market (approx immediately 10,000 dedicated servers). ASUK should plan to increase this steadily to 16.7 per cent after four years. Since the market share has risen from 0 to 2 per cent in one year without increased marketing, this is a realistic target.
• Streamline ordering processes. The new web site called DediPower.com should incorporate online facilities for order processing, upgrades and support. The development of these features can continue over time but a fully featured site should be ready for launch.
• Increase brand awareness/brand building. By launching a new site, ASUK can take advantage of a fresh start but still use all the advantages of an established company. A brand image of power and quality, yet competitive prices should be established through intensive marketing and excellent CRM. The company plans to have a powerful brand name within six months of launching the site.
• 
• Create self-contained entity for possible initial public offering (IPO) or trade sale.
• ASUK can aim for an IPO within three years, being sold either to a competitor or to a diversifying larger company. The sell value is currently £300,000. A target should be set to have this at £1 5 million within three years.
• Expansion into international markets. The launch of DediPower means that foreign clients will become more accessible. The improved site will have support for international sales.
• Improve CRM and customer support. By improving these fundamentals, ASUK aims to sell additional products to its current clients. Currently, 25 per cent of clients have bought additional services, and the aim is to increase this to 55 per cent within a year.

Strategies by target markets

• Current customers. By rebranding, enforce customer loyalty and improve service level. Also provide an easier product upgrade path. Better support and customer self-service should also be provided.

• Domestic. Build brand as a high-quality service with lower-value pricing. Offer three core incentives to show confidence in the product: thirty-day money back guarantee, UK price matching initiative, no minimumcontract. ASUK will be the first company in the UK industry to offer all these incentives together in a genuine fashion.

• International. Key strengths to marketing include sustainability and experience. The product will be positioned in the market as a high-end service, offering good performance for companies that have interests across Europe.

The marketing mix

• Price. Although prices should be offered on a price match guarantee within the UK, they should be based around a product-line pricing strategy; that is, each customer can start with a basic product and build layers on top to create their custom product.
• Product. The product is to be sold individually, but a discount should be offered for multiple sales and/or prepayment packages. Customer loyalty could be rewarded with additional free services.
• Promotion. ASUK should base the promotion around an online marketing strategy, using online targeted banners and search engines, complemented by increased exposure on the major Web hosting guides. Publication to online and offline trade magazines of press releases and adverts will reinforce the respectability of the brand.

Evaluation and control

• Monitor market share and company growth rate. Frequently obtain market share statistics. An estimate can be made by obtaining the total number of dedicated in the market segment and calculating the percentage of them that ASUK holds.
• Occasional customer surveys to ensure support satisfaction is increasing. ASUK already has the facility to conduct customer surveys online. These should be conducted half-yearly to ensure that satisfaction objectives are met.

• Demographic analysis of buyers and potential buyers. To determine whether ASUK is penetrating all potential markets sufficiently, customer account details should be collated and analysed to produce maps of customer distribution.

E-NEWSLETTERS - DEFINING AND REFINING Part 1

Many web sites now have a prominently placed `Sign-up to our newsletter' box. But is this enough?

How many e-mail newsletters do you subscribe to? If you're anything like me, the number is well into double figures — and most weeks I will opt in to yet another. The trouble is, the more I subscribe to, the less likely I am to have time to look at them, so some are never opened. I think we all have a mental list of 'must read', 'maybe read' and 'only if I have time' e-newsletters. Typically, I don't unsubscribe, since I may have a chance one week to look at them.

Thus, for organizations to make their e-newsletters successful, they have to work really hard to get them into the 'must read' category of their subscribers. This is a big challenge because, in any sector, many companies have already seized the opportunity provided by e-mail newsletters to build relationships with potential customers and develop relationships with their existing customers. However, it is certainly possible — in the UK, consumer newsletters from online brands such as lastminute.com, dabs.com and Tesco.com get great open rates and deliver a substantial amount of business. Many business-to-business e-newsletters have also found the secret of success within their niche.

When devising an e-newsletter, there are many decisions that must to be made for it to be effective. This section is about the decisions you take as you plan the launch of an e-newsletter, and also decisions regarding how to gain subscribers and keep them. Use these lists of decisions to plan an e-newsletter or to improve on your current e-newsletter.

Decision 1 — organization objectives

The starting point for planning an e-newsletter has to be to examine (or re-examine) why you are publishing it. You will probably have a primary objective, such as boosting sales on a site through clickthrough, or building a brand by providing value to customers, but what about other objectives? The 5 Ss of Smith and Chaffey (2005), originally applied to a corporate web site, provide a good way to think about e-newsletter objectives:

Sell — grow sales (the e-newsletter often acts as both a customer acquisition tool and a retention tool)

Serve — add value (give customers extra benefits online, such as online exclusive offers or more in-depth information about your products or industry sector)

3. Speak — get closer to customers by creating a dialogue, asking questions through online research surveys, and learning about customers' preferences through tracking (that is, what type of content are people most interested in)

Save — save costs (of print and post); if you have a traditional offline e-newsletter, can you reduce print runs or extend its reach by using e-mail?

5. Sizzle — extend the brand online; a newsletter keeps the brand at 'front-of-mind' and helps reinforce brand values, and added value can also be delivered by the e-newsletter in informing and entertaining customers.

All the newsletter design decisions we discuss below should, of course, also be controlled by the main objectives of the e-newsletter.

Decision 2 — measuring success

When thinking about the objectives, consider how you will judge the success of your newsletter.

The following metrics are commonly used to assess the effectiveness of e-newsletters through time:

• open rates (for HTML e-newsletters)
• clickthroughs to more detailed content or promotions
• number of unsubscribes
• number of new subscribers.

While it is easy to automate collection of these metrics, think about whether they really relate to the goals in Decision 1. Think also about whether the automated measures give you the full story. Some companies also conduct surveys to determine softer measures related to how the customer perceives the newsletter and how it impacts on the brand. This is also covered in Decision 19 — tracking and assessing satisfaction.

Building Brand Awareness

Powerful companies with large promotional budgets are reinforcing their competitive advantage through strong advertising offline as well as online. In 1998, the rage cost of building a national online brand was about $5-10 million. In 000, it cost $50-100 million, a tenfold increase. In 1999, 40 per cent of web-development budget was going on towards marketing, with more than 80 per of all television commercials in the USA featuring a Web address and 30 cent promoting an individual Web site (Lindstrom, 1999). Excessive spending brand-building without compensating revenues can be blamed for the down- of many dotcoms. Many of those that survive have incurred significant cost. According to Haigh 00), AOL has so far spent $2 billion on building its brand identity and Yahoo! 00 million.

Web site promotion is becoming more sophisticated, but there is always the danger of targeting the wrong audience, which was estimated to be the case in many as 70 per cent of 1999 campaigns. This has led to a quest for a more effective way. Some companies have been quite creative. For example, Orange Technologies, during the launch of a special youth product, offered to repaint its customers' cars free of charge. The only condition was that Orange would choose the colour. (Guess which one!) After just one day, 24 cars had been painted, at the cost to Orange of $4,200. Even giants like Yahoo! have resorted to creative, inexpensive offline promotions. Chauffeurs holding signs at airports to pick up 'Mr Yahoo!' have actually been corporate promotions (Lindstrom 1999). Gimmicks like this resulted in extensive free publicity for such companies in the media in the early days of the Internet. Small companies have found it hard to compete with these levels of expenditure, and hence need to be particularly creative in order to maximize the value of small promotional budgets. Many advertisers have adopted the now widespread use of banner advertisements as branding tools rather than transactional tools. 'There is absolutely a branding opportunity for advertisers on the Web,' says Jim Nail, senior analyst at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Heim, 2001). A good example is the Visa credit card company (ww w.visa.com), which in the past has blanketed the Web with banner advertisements. The consistency of the Visa brand has been likened to a reader consistently seeing the same advertisement on the back of a magazine. This in effect is helping Visa to solidify its brand image. Nevertheless, research undertaken by Dahlen (2001) on banner effectiveness has found that there are major differences between the performances of banner advertisements for familiar and unfamiliar brands. Unfamiliar brands initially perform badly, with very low click-through rates, but with repeated exposures the response rate increases. Familiar brands initially attract interest but customers quickly get bored with their campaigns, and response rates fall. Moreover, major differences were found between novice and expert Internet users with regard to their relative susceptibility to Web advertising. Dahlen therefore recommends that unfamiliar brand banner advertisements should have long-term goals, allowing multiple advertising exposures. For familiar brands, on the other hand, there should not be a long-term goal, as the advertisements quickly 'wear out'.

BRAND CONVERGENCE

Creating a strong brand both online and offline involves far more than the 'look and feel' of the Web home page, the logo or the new brochure. The very essence of a strong brand philosophy is the way in which the staff serves customers - a key part of creating brand convergence. Whether the customers are surfing the Web site or using the service offline, the organization must ensure consistency of all 'customer touch points' to create a single, comprehensive and memorable brand. This involves significant management and staff training, motivation and constant follow-up. Striking the right balance between online and offline delivery systems to satisfy and deepen customers' relationships and maintain the uniqueness of the brand has to be the key to success. A convergent brand strategy has to address some or all of the following issues:

• Which are the channels that the customers find best suited for delivery of each service: a branch, telephone or online?
• Are the marketing strategic plans adequate to support integrated delivery through all the channels?
• Are the staff motivated and appropriately trained? Remember, a `convergent brand' will have an impact on all areas of the organization.

Ensuring integration of high-touch/high-tech delivery channels, creating consistent, differentiated brand and maintaining acceptable operating costs customer will be essential for survival. Offering customers relevant services building a strong brand image in this way are seen as vital for the future of industries such as banking (Weber and Seibert 2001).