1. Online Marketing Scenario
© Ramakrishna Kongalla,
Assistant Professor
R'tist @ Tourism

2. Advantages and Barriers
Advantages
• Reaches a large audience inexpensively.
• Markets your mission with more marketing opportunities and more
marketing niches.
• Allows renewal/retention at a much lower cost.
• Increases new donors, retention and renewal rates, and loyalty.
• Makes renewals easier and more effective when you use your website
and email as tools for donor cultivation, relationship management,
and stewardship versus purely for solicitation.
• Increases accountability and donor confidence because you can offer
easy access to information about where funds are being spent.
• Gives immediate, personalized thank you messages online.
• Offers higher response rates than pure direct mail.
• Allows you to provide free public service information online in
exchange for email addresses that will help build your core audience.
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3. • Fosters community.
• Creates opportunities for affinity programs in which your
organization gets a portion of sales that originate from links on your
web page.
• Improves your capabilities for researching individual, foundation, and
corporate support such as who will give, how much, and to what?
• Offers new and more effective ways to cultivate donors, such as
email greetings and video.
• Reaches higher disposable income group compared to other
marketing methods.
• Publicizes traditional fundraising programs.
• Offers more fundraising choices, such as partnerships with e-
commerce sites, charity auctions, direct donations, selling web space
for advertising and corporate sponsorship, buying or trading web
space or links, and selling products and services.
• Attracts new and nontraditional volunteers and allows for volunteer
orientations and trainings.
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4. Barriers
• Cost of hardware, software, network
connections, consultants, staff time, and training
• Staff and volunteer resistance
• Unrealistic expectations
• Lots of competition online
• Computer glitches and other technological headaches
• Legal complexities since online fundraising is
relatively new
• Regulations and fees, both for charitable giving and
professional solicitation
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5. • Credit card laundering or “factoring” when an agent that’s not
authorized as a service reseller by a credit card company uses
its own merchant account to offer credit card services to others
• Unrelated business income tax when nonprofits partner with
for-profits in an online cause-related marketing venture
• Up-front time investment to research and consult with
attorneys, and accountants
• Potential unfamiliarity with the technology among donors
• Tax implications and possibility of alienating donors by pushing
commercial advertisements on them through corporate
sponsorships
• Tax implications of selling merchandise online
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6. Opportunities
• Opportunity 1: Mobile Advertising - Mobile phones have arrived in a huge
way, and present many exciting opportunities to reach consumers in
innovative ways.
• Opportunity 2: Social Network Advertising - Social networking sites now offer
highly targeted opportunities to connect with potential customers.
• Opportunity 3: Competition for Google - Google has achieved a de facto
monopoly on search and search advertising. Almost everyone would agree
that Google has revolutionized the search marketing business.
• Opportunity 4: Tablets - Tablet computers have enjoyed an explosive rise in
popularity since the launch of the Apple iPad in April of 2010. They have
added another option to the way the web is accessed.
• Opportunity5: HTML 5 - The upgrade to HTML, the workhorse of the
web, offers some powerful benefits. HTML 4 came out in the late 1990s.
Better graphics, Better geolocation, Off-line web applications
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7. Challenges
• Challenge 1: The Goldfish Phenomenon: Fractured Attention - Goldfish
are rumored to have a three-second attention span. Consumers and
potential consumers’ attention spans and ability to focus have been
degraded by the nature of surfing the web.
• Challenge 2: Global Competition - The web is a great leveler – we do
sometimes forget that the first and second ‘w’ in ‘www’stand for
world and wide, respectively.
• Challenge 3: Overcoming The “Meh” Factor - “Meh” factor - as in the
indifferent shrugging of the shoulders and open hands.
• Challenge 4: Low Conversion Rates - Many sites are still plagued by
low rates of successfully converting visitors to consumers.
• Challenge 5: The Field of Dreams Strategy - Field of Dreams was the
movie with the voice that whispered “build it and they will come.” Too
many organizations rely on the Field of Dreams marketing strategy,
building their site and thinking it will be enough to get people
engaged.
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8. Critical Success Factors of Internet Marketing
– 1) Cut away the dead weight and keep what works.
– 2) Quality Content is key
– 3) Promote Information Products like e-books
– 4) Be Patient, It Pays
– 5) Attracting the right customers
– 6) Delivering the content value
– 7) e-loyality
– 8) e-learning
– 9) Delivering the digital value
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9. Why Online marketing in India is yet to evolve?
• Internet marketing can boom only if…
– (1) there are a lot of online sales & service
opportunities and businesses; and
– (2) the Internet is the best proven channel out
there for marketing campaigns.
• In the case of India, both are not yet at their
best and the reasons are:
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10. 1. Governance, laws and regulations
– India is still not a very open economy although things have
been changing for good since the mid eighties. Our financial
and banking rules are not always the best conducive
environment for anyone to get started with a business –
online or offline. When it comes to online businesses, there
are even stricter money transaction rules.
– When it comes to law enforcement and protection against
cyber crime, though we have taken some initiatives, how
often an online criminal gets caught in this country?
– Widespread corruption is another big issue. Many people
don’t want to set up online shops to escape taxes and do
things unaccounted.
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11. 2. Cultural issues
– Indians are highly social and sociable people –
– online can prevent them from getting the best deals out there
from their favorite shops and shopkeepers (and their families)
that they know for generations. Also, this gives them
excellent F2F opportunity to do maximum negotiation and
receive other freebies.
– And festive offers in India during Diwali, Akshay Tritiya etc
are unbeatable and probably not feasible to provide such
discounts via online mechanisms at the kind of volume
involved.
– Further, if you know the shop people well, there is even zero
down payment option available for home appliance
purchases etc. This is definitely not possible in an online
scenario.
R'tist @ Tourism

12. 3. Online shopping worries
– A lot of computer literate people are still hesitant to
consume online shopping facilities that are available
out there in India for the following reasons.
• Fear factor: A lot of people still do not believe things that are
not tangible. It’s perhaps more of a cultural issue
• Unreliable delivery mechanisms: In India, even the postal
service or the most expensive (and so-called safest) courier
companies may not be able to guarantee prompt delivery due
to multiple factors including theft, tracking issues and
corruption
• Credit card fraud and usage: Like in any other country, swiping
a card is not always safe. In India specific cases, there are
even scenarios where you have to provide your card number
to the customer care executive over the phone which is not
the right way it should work
R'tist @ Tourism

13. 4. Lack of technical infrastructure
– Broadband Internet access is still and expensive thing in
India if you take get one for your home computer and still
there are connection issues.
– The backbone of any reliable online service or sales is a
strong supply chain. Many times, the delivery of the
advertised service or product does not happen due to bad
supply chain management.
– Additional issues include the lack of supporting
infrastructure such as escrow services, legal advisory for
online businesses etc
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14. 5 Marketing philosophies & channels
– Due to the social aspects, the Internet is still not the best
marketing channel in India. Television, hoardings and
cinema ads are still way ahead of the Internet when it
comes to preferred marketing channels. This also results in
poor quality affiliate networks, online ad services and
everything else.
– Most of the affiliate networks in India do not provide a
good commission package to the affiliates making them less
attractive. Moreover, there are a lot of inconsistencies and
dishonesty prevailing with the networks as well. This has
further decelerated the affiliate marketing penetration in
India. The CPA (cost per action) model itself is not fully
available in most Indian business scenarios.
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15. Electronics for Online Marketing
• Dial-up
• 3G connections
• WiFi and WiMax
• Broadband - Internet
• Computer and components
• Mobile, I-pad
• Laptop, Palmtop
• LAN, Reuters, Servers
• Websites
• Homepages
• Portals
• Online gadgets
• Online Banners
• Internet Equipments
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16. Thank You…!!!
©Ramakrishna Kongalla
e-mail: artist.ramakrishna@gmail.com
R'tist @ Tourism