E-Marketing: Seven Criterias

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Communication

Communication refers to dialogue between the company and its customers. One-way communication usually happen when information exchange from company to user through broadcast. Two-way communication refers to interactive communication between company and user (Mohammed, Fisher, Jaworski and Paddison, 2003).

Broadcast communication can pass through various channel, include mass mailings, e-mail newsletter, FAQs and social media site. Based on these indicators, Flora tea did none communication with customers. Although Flora tea has a Facebook page (Social Media) but the last updated in November 2014. I suggest that Flora tea has to send e-mail newsletter to our registered users, posting FAQs function to frequently answer about the site, products, or services and broadcast event on the social media. For example, toeflgoanywhere.org has good using social media to provide useful information to their public, FAQs function on their website and send e-mail newsletter (Appendix 5).

Interactive communication can pass message through e-commerce dialogue, customer service and user input. Flora tea has provide a “contact us” section on the upper of webpage, helping customer to connection us by phone or email. However, Flora tea could provide e-commerce dialogue on Facebook page that interactive with customer, easy get important feedback. And the live online dialogue for customer service on Flora tea website. Trademe insurance would be a good example as they provide live online dialogue in order to deal with specific problem from their potential customers (Appendix).

Connection

Connection refers to the degree of which a given site is able to link to others sites through a hyperlink, hypertext jump, and highlighted text.

The five dimension of connection includes Links to Sites, Home site Background, Outsourced Content, Percentage of Home site Content and Pathway of Connection. In Flora tea homepage, they used the video as outsourced content to introduce their product; it derived from vimeo.com, but user remains on the home site while watching that video. In the Flora tea Facebook page, they have put various floratea.co.nz links to lead consumer achieve home site, and there are several links to B&G Magazine and TV3NEWS website that provide some useful information from third party to customer. Flora tea could try drive more link to website from third party, because its means that Flora tea website provided useful content and high quality product.

Commerce

The commerce function is used to design trading feature of a website, it include elements that registration, shopping cart, security, one-click shopping, delivery options and order tracking etc.

Flora tea has achieved most of elements in the website, I suggests that Flora tea could upload the one-click shopping function to minimum the shopping process in order to increase conversion rate. Amazon is good example for using one-click function increasing the conversion rate successful (Appendix 6). Also check the authentication technologies and encryption regularly is another important factor for preventing transactions.

- Establish Trust

With the development of electronic commerce, there is also the progress of network shopping. Online trust is one of the important elements which affect the online shopping. The online customer experience is the most relevant factors to building trust, hence we can do the campaign plan based on the customer experience hirachery. Basically, it includes three stages which are functionality, intimacy and evangelism.

Functionality

The first stage of customer experience is functionality, the goal is clearly to make visitors feel the site works well. It requires some characteristics such as usability, speed, security and reliability.

Usability: Flora tea website already show the strong trust signal to their visitors, because I saw the professional photography of product, high-quality design with use the same value propositions, similar calls to action and same design elements (green color, similar product image) made a consistent visual perception of website, good page structure with ease of using navigation bar on the upper of website, and use the trust symbol (fine food awards 2014) located on the top of website.

Reliability: Flora tea has did the good job for good grammar and spelling check, as a high-quality website is not likely to include a large number of errors. However, Flora tea should pay more attention on fresh content and quantity content. For example, the last update on Facebook in November 2014, regular updates information of a website are a positive signal to build trust with visitor. Also there are only some basic product information available on website, Flora tea could provide some article of flower tea and promotion message to make quantity content.

Speed: Every visitors want to see the content almost immediately, short load times will achieve the low bounce rate from landing page, so Flora tea could try to hosting product images off-site, compressing image or dedicated hosting.

Security: Using transport layer security to prevent eavesdropping from third parties.

Intimacy

The goal of intimacy stage is to tell visitors that “They are understand me”. It could be discuss on the four dimensions, which is customization, communication, consistency and trustworthiness.

Consistency: Flora tea should provide the consistent experience across all areas of site, such as from the banner advertisement to homepage, then product page and shopping cart.

Trustworthiness: Flora tea should improving the effective e-mail response, FAQs or live chat function such trustful customer service.

Communication: Flora tea try hard to interaction with their customers by social media (Facebook, Instagram etc.) and regular send new promotion, event or new product by e-mail.

Customization: It is not very useful for Flora tea website. It could be provide A/B version of website or different structure for computer and mobile to increase user experience.

Evangelism

This is last stage of the experience hierarchy. In this stage, customers feel part of community, it’s already build brand loyalty and emotional. Flora tea have to create an area for customer express their opinion. There are focus on the customer give