Reference: Gerrikagoitia, J.K., Castander, I., Rebón, F., Alzua-Sorzabal, A. (2015). New trends of intelligent E-marketing based on web mining for e-shops in Procedia social and behavioral sciences, 175, 75-83

Main idea: Developing e-marketing strategies into the web environment to better answer consumers’ needs.

Summary:

Over the past decade, internet use has experienced a rise in the numbers of users worldwide and has made life easier for people who do not have much free time on their hands, so more and more people are accepting the fact that it helps in information search as well as purchasing products online. Electronic commerce is now one essential competitive advantage for companies to be available at any time, at any place to cater to customer’s needs and satisfaction and create a sort of engagement and relationships with its online visitors and customers. However, it won’t be sufficient to just be present online but also, companies need to always be attentive to the implementation of their marketing strategies used online and alter them and adapt whenever necessary.  It doesn’t matter if the e-shop/ e-store was present on the web or social media platforms or in some cases both, it is necessary to give in time and effort in order to keep up with what customers want and when they want it.

In this paper, e-marketing is defined as the “concentration of all the efforts in the sense of adapting and developing marketing strategies into the web environment. E-marketing involves all stages of work regarding a website, such as: the conception, the project itself, the adaption of the content, the development, the maintenance, the analytic measuring and the advertisement”.  Moreover, “consumer decision journey” is a key word highlighted throughout this article which mainly tackles the importance of companies gathering information about their customer and use data mining tools to track the customers’ preference, buying behavior, buying patterns which will give them the ability to know more about what their customers want and look for, and maybe suggest products or services that might interest the customer.

In this paper, a survey was conducted on 86 e-shops which are small to medium enterprises (SME) in Spain to test the necessity of these SMEs to become active users of web mining solutions. Moreover, after gathering the results, it showed that most of the companies have not yet integrated the use of data mining tools in a professional way, but have resorted to the use of outsourcing their hosting of their websites to other, and even if they did use the analytical tools themselves, they didn’t really make good use and take advantage of what the data mining tools can do to their relationships with their customers. It is highly suggested that companies know the importance of the data gathering tools they are using, and be aware that the process of the sales based on the e-commerce must be in accordance to what the customers want, and for this reason it is important to make good use of the data gathered from customers to ensure that they are getting what they search for, what they desire and what they might want in the future.