October 2013 – Jenny Peng

e-Commerce Taking Over: Showrooms and Their Disappearing Visitors

As technology rapidly evolving, consumer’s life is changing in various aspects. Shops not only have to change their promotion strategy, they should also take a look into their product and distribution strategies. More and more consumers choose to shop on-line and the physically existing showrooms are loosing their consumers.

Popular internet shopping mall such as Amazon, Zappos, and eBay are gaining their popularity and rapidly taking over the market. A study shows 82% of of British consumers, 79% of Danish and Sweden consumers, and 77% of German consumers shop online regularly. The growing online shopping population is not only seen in EU, around 35% of Chinese consumers, 55% of Japanese consumers, and 60% of Korean consumers shop online regularly. This trend shows the opportunities for online stores but also the treat to the physically existing showrooms. The increase in online purchases has a negative relationship with in store purchases. The increase in e-Commerce result in decrease in sale in stores and leaving the costly showrooms less revenue generating. Internet these days provides an overall, informative, and cheap way to research which leads the consumers away from showrooms and stores. Statistics shows that 81% of consumers do their research online.

Technology innovations are generated by ideas, and ideas could be used to improve showroom performance too. Target’s new model of showroom plus online shopping provides a new showroom experience. It connected showroom with online shopping website to enrich the research experience while letting the consumers to enjoy the ease of shopping online. Even though this is just an experiment, the idea of driving the online shopping consumers back to the store through wi-fi coverage in store and in-store pick-up may actually improve showrooms’ performances.

http://www.mastercard.com/us/company/en/insights/pdfs/2008/Asia_Pacific_Online_Shop.pdf

http://www.columbian.com/news/2013/oct/19/new-target-market-retailer-trains-the-bulls-eye-on/

http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/retailers-will-seek-rent-reductions-to-battle-online-shopping-29672731.html

Marketing e-mail: a Gold-pass to Success or a Fine Ticket?

Marketing e-mail has it’s advantage over most of other marketing method because of its low cost and rich content. Moreover, companies can decide who the e-mail is sent to instead of passively waiting for people to notice their advertisements. Consumers’ other information is always gathered together with their e-mail and companies can make use of those information to decide who do they target to and what do they advertise. Marketing e-mail becomes more useful in the past decade along with the launching of smart phone and mobile internet. These e-mails, act similar as marketing texts, are pushed to every potential consumer no matter where they are and during what time of the day. As a large proportion of the millennials uses mobile internet, companies can push more of their trendy and hi tec product through e-mails. The millenniasl tend to be less considerate while making purchase decisions, and usually have high demand on non-necessity goods.

However, marketing e-mails do not have a great image to consumers as they do to the firms. Most marketing e-mails seem annoying and are marked as junk by the consumers. The real purpose of sending out marketing e-mails is lost and not only the costs are not recoverable, there might be extra fine on these e-mails if they appear overly annoying.

Companies need to figure out ways that their e-mail can actually attract people’s attention such as more attractive and straightforward headings. Here are some tips for sending effective marketing emails:

Tips to Email Marketing

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2298008/tips-for-targeting-millennials-with-mobile-email-marketing-for-the-holidays

http://www.bizreport.com/2013/10/australian-firm-pays-a-high-price-for-spam-emails.html