Description

ABSTRACT

Internet marketing, or online marketing, refers to advertising and marketing efforts that use the Web and email to drive direct sales via electronic commerce, in addition to sales leads from Web sites or emails. Internet marketing and online advertising efforts are typically used in conjunction with traditional types of advertising like radio, television, newspapers and magazines. E-marketing in hospitality industry involves using Facebook hotels and conference centres to communicate with its customers and interact with them online

E-marketing uses various online advertisements to drive traffic to an advertiser’s website. Banner advertisements, pay per click (PPC), and targeted email lists are often methods used in Internet marketing to bring the most value to the advertiser. E-marketing is a growing business mainly because more and more people use the internet every day. Popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo have been able to capitalize on this new wave of advertising. Through this work, the prospect and challenges of the Internet technology on marketing activities of contemporary travel agencies was analyzed.

 CHAPTER ONE

1.1                                                        INTRODUCTION

Hospitality Industry is a large industry. It also is a fast growing sector in the economic. The hospitality industry is a multibillion dollar and growing enterprise. The hospitality industry can be divided into two main categories and that is, the Hospitality and the Tourism Industry. Hospitality industry is the oldest business in the history. Hospitality industry can be divided into two parts and that is entertainment areas like Hospitality means that the staff of the hotel will receive the guest in a good and a manner way because we have to give full respect to the guest because mostly guest will aspect satisfaction. Most of the guests will aspect a friendly and a safe atmosphere so that they will come back to the hotel if they satisfied with the service provided. Hospitality Industry is divided into many terms such as accommodation, transportation, food and beverage,

Accommodation is typically a lodging industry. The hotel rooms mostly provide bed, cupboard, small table, and modern facilities include such as, suite bathroom and air conditioning. Additional thing that are provide in the hotel room are, telephone, alarm clock, television, slippers, bathrobes, mini bar with food and soft drinks and facilities of making coffee or tea. If the hotel has more luxury facilities like example the facilities that are given to them are such as swimming pool, fitness centre, and child care. Example types of hotels that are. By using Facebook hotels and conference centres can directly communicate with its customers and interact with them online

The Hotel business profile or the page should be a central hub where the hotel promotes news, special offers, sending out messages to customers or generally conversing and providing customer support.

E-marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. E-marketing can be done to either sold lists or a current customer database. Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

Internet marketing can also be broken down into more specialized areas such as Web marketing, email marketing and social media marketing.  Web marketing includes e-commerce Web sites, affiliate marketing Web sites, promotional or informative Web sites, online advertising on search engines, and organic search engine results via search engine optimization (SEO).

E-marketing means using digital technologies to help sell your goods or services. These technologies are a valuable complement to traditional marketing methods whatever the size of your company or your business model.

The basics of marketing remain the same – creating a strategy to deliver the right messages to the right people. What has changed is the number of options you have. Though businesses will continue to make use of traditional marketing methods, such as advertising, direct mail and PR, e-marketing adds a whole new element to the marketing mix. Many businesses are producing great results with e-marketing and its flexible and cost-effective nature makes it particularly suitable for small businesses.

This guide describes how to develop an e-marketing plan and provides guidance on implementing that plan and monitoring its effectiveness in hospitality industries.

1.2                                          AIM/OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

Hospitality Industry is divided into many terms such as accommodation, transportation, food and beverage. Accommodation is typically a lodging industry. The hotel rooms mostly provide bed, cupboard, small table, and modern facilities include such as, suite bathroom and air conditioning. Additional thing that are provide in the hotel room are, telephone, alarm clock, television, slippers. The aim of this work is to discuss the use, prospect and challenges of e-marketing in hospitality industries.

1.3                                       SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

Reach

The nature of the internet means businesses now have a truly global reach. While traditional media costs limit this kind of reach to huge multinationals, e-marketing opens up new avenues for hospitality industry, on a much smaller budget, to access potential consumers from all over the world.

Interactivity

Whereas traditional marketing is largely about getting a brand’s message out there, e-Marketing facilitates conversations between companies and consumers. With a two-way communication channel, companies can feed off of the responses of their consumers, making them more dynamic and adaptive.

Immediacy

Internet marketing is able to, in ways never before imagined, provide an immediate impact.

Imagine you’re reading your favorite magazine. You see a double-page advert for some new product or service, maybe BMW’s latest luxury sedan or Apple’s latest iPod offering. With this kind of traditional media, it’s not that easy for you, the consumer, to take the step from hearing about a product to actual acquisition.

With e-Marketing, it’s easy to make that step as simple as possible, meaning that within a few short clicks you could have booked a test drive or ordered the iPod. And all of this can happen regardless of normal office hours. Effectively, Internet marketing makes business hours 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for every week of the year.

By closing the gap between providing information and eliciting a consumer reaction, the consumer’s buying cycle is speeded up and advertising spend can go much further in creating immediate leads.

Global reach – a website can reach anyone in the world who has internet access. This allows you to find new markets and compete globally for only a small investment while travelling or lodging in a hotel.

Lower cost – a properly planned and effectively targeted e-marketing campaign can reach the right customers at a much lower cost than traditional marketing methods.

Track able, measurable results – marketing by email makes it easier to establish how effective your campaign has been. You can obtain detailed information about customers’ responses to your advertising.

24-hour marketing – with a website your customers can find out about your products even if your office is closed.

Personalization – if your customer database is linked to your website, then whenever someone visits the site, you can greet them with targeted offers. The more they buy from you, the more you can refine your customer profile and market effectively to them.

One-to-one marketing – e-marketing lets you reach people who want to know about your products and services instantly. For example, many people take mobile phones and PDAs wherever they go. Combine this with the personalized aspect of e-marketing, and you can create very powerful, targeted campaigns.

More interesting campaigns – e-marketing lets you create interactive campaigns using music, graphics and videos. You could send your customers a game or a quiz – whatever you think will interest them.

Better conversion rate – if you have a website, then your customers are only ever a few clicks away from completing a purchase. Unlike other media which require people to get up and make a phone call, post a letter or go to a shop, e-marketing is seamless.

1.4                                             PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

This paper attempts to identify the emerging themes that can shed light on E-marketing issues and challenges being faced by global hospitality organizations.

1.5                                                SCOPE OF THE STUDY

Internet marketing allows the marketer to reach consumers in hospitality industry in a wide range of ways and enables them to offer a wide range of products and services. eMarketing includes, among other things, information management, public relations, customer service and sales. With the range of new technologies becoming available all the time, this scope can only grow.

1.6                                        PROBLEMS OF E-MARKETING

Privacy

The use of online advertising has implications on the privacy and anonymity of users. Hosting the banner images on its servers and using third-party cookies, the advertising company is able to track the browsing of users across these two sites.

Third-party cookies can be blocked by most browsers to increase privacy and reduce tracking by advertising and tracking companies without negatively affecting the user’s Web experience. Many advertising operators have an opt-out option to behavioral advertising, with a generic cookie in the browser stopping behavioral advertising.

Malware

There is also a class of advertising methods which are considered unethical and may even be illegal. These include external applications which alter system settings (such as a browser’s home page), spawn pop-ups, and insert advertisements into non-affiliated webpages. Such applications are usually labelled as spyware or adware.

They may mask their questionable activities by performing a simple service, such as displaying the weather or providing a search bar. These programs are designed to dupe the user, acting effectively as Trojan horses. These applications are commonly designed so as to be difficult to remove or uninstall. The ever-increasing audience of online users, many of whom are not computer-savvy, frequently lack the knowledge and technical ability to protect themselves from these programs.

1.7                               LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

• Slow internet connections can cause difficulties. If the companies build too complex or too large websites, it will take too long for users to check them or download them and they will get bored eventually.
• The e-commerce doesn’t allow the user “to touch” the merchandise before purchasing it. Because of this, some salesmen are starting to guarantee the possibility of returning the product. In Germany, where a law that regulates e-commerce and guarantees the customers the total refund of the money exists since 2000, the electronic commerce is very popular.
• Other factor is the payment: many users still don’t trust in the electronic methods of paying and give up buying online because of this.
• One of the major disadvantages may be the lack of trust of the users because of the constant virtual promotions that appear to be frauds. This is an aspect that deteriorates the image and reputation of quality and honest companies.
• Other disadvantage is the cash on delivery system, since it doesn’t guarantee the 100% purchase of the product. This is also the case of thousands of users that dedicate themselves to daily mock big companies by ordering on the internet using false identities.
• One of the other challenges that Internet marketers face (as does the general public) is that many internet products are outright scams or promoted with deception making it difficult to know which one is worth buying. This is especially the case with products that are supposed to train or aid Internet marketers in making money. While the quality of products has improved in the past few years, ethics are often still missing in online marketing. Many so-called money making products are “empty boxes” in which there is essentially nothing there, yet a buyer is to make money by reselling this empty box to others. Pyramid schemes are also still prevalent.
• The consumer is unable to physically feel or try on the product which can be a limitation for certain goods. However a survey of consumers of cosmetics products shows that email marketing can be used to interest a consumer in visiting a store to try a product or to speak with sales representatives; from here a purchase decision can be made
• The marketer will not be able to use personal interaction to influence the audience as the marketing is completely based on the advertisement and the information that the advertisement might lead to (websites, blogs and other channels).

Security concerns

Information security is important both to companies and consumers that participate in online business. Many consumers are hesitant to purchase items over the Internet because they do not believe that their personal information will remain private. Some companies that purchase customer information offer the option for individuals to have their information removed from their promotional redistribution, also known as opting out.

However, many customers are unaware if and when their information is being shared, and are unable to stop the transfer of their information between companies if such activity occurs. Additionally, companies holding private information are vulnerable to data attacks and leaks. Internet browsing privacy is a related consumer concern. Web sites routinely capture browsing and search history which can be used to provide targeted advertising. Privacy policies can provide transparency to these practices. Spyware prevention software can also be used to shield the consumer.

Another consumer e-commerce concern is whether or not they will receive exactly what they purchase. Online merchants have attempted to address this concern by investing in and building strong consumer brands (e.g., Amazon.com, eBay, and Overstock.com), and by using merchant and feedback rating systems and e-commerce bonding solutions. All these solutions attempt to assure consumers that their transactions will be free of problems because the merchants can be trusted to provide reliable products and services. Additionally, several major online payment mechanisms (credit cards, PayPal, Google Checkout, etc.) have provided back-end buyer protection systems to address problems if they occur.

Ethics

Online advertising encompasses a range of types of advertising, some of which are deployed ethically and some are not. Some websites use large numbers of advertisements, including flashing banners that distract the user, and some have misleading images designed to look like error messages from the operating system, rather than advertisements. Websites that unethically use online advertising for revenue frequently do not monitor what advertisements on their website link to, allowing advertisements to lead to sites with malicious software or audience-inappropriate material.

The ethical propriety of advertisers that use web searches for competitors’ brands to trigger their own ads has been questioned.

Some argue that website operators who ethically use online advertising typically use a small number of advertisements that are not intended to distract or irritate the user, and do not detract from the design and layout of their websites. Many website owners deal directly with companies that want to place ads, meaning that the website linked to by the advertisement is legitimate.

The use of technologies like Adobe Flash in online advertising has led to some users disabling it in their browsers, or using browser plug-ins like Adblock or NoScript. Many sites use centralized advertising services whose advertisement may be blocked as a side effect of security and privacy measures, because the services require JavaScript and cross-site requests to function, while such features are often not necessary to use the sites and are a potential source of vulnerabilities.

Some companies perform customer engagement studies in online marketing to insure consumer satisfaction, through the use of online compliance centers, building and deploying fraud detection tools, while inspecting websites and publishers to insure website pages offer the highest degree of information security and compliance with Can Spam Requirements.

Internet marketing scams

In May 2012, The Verge writer Joseph L. Flatley reported that the terms “Internet marketing” and “Internet marketer” have been co-opted by a loose association of confidence artists running online get-rich-quick schemes.

Usage trends

Technological advancements in the telecommunications industry have dramatically affected online advertising techniques. Many firms are embracing a paradigm that is shifting the focus of advertising methodology from traditional text and image advertisements to those containing more recent technologies like JavaScript and Adobe Flash.

As a result, advertisers can more effectively engage and connect their audience with their campaigns that seek to shape consumer attitudes and feelings towards specific products and services. Some new trends for internet marketing are inbound marketing, mobile marketing and improved usage of analytics. Inbound marketing refers to content and design, is the information and display relevant and attractive enough to entice your audience.

Mobile marketing is huge, with over 75% of the world having access to a mobile devices, it’s imperative that companies go mobile. Analytic improvement can now discover sentiment to forecast emerging trends in the industry, giving companies the knowledge they need to determine best strategies for increasing sales.

Effects on industries

The number of banks offering the ability to perform banking tasks over the internet has increased. Online banking appeals to customers because it is often faster and considered more convenient than visiting bank branches.

Advertising industry

In addition to the major effect internet marketing has had on the technology industry, the effect on the advertising industry itself has been profound. In just a few years, online advertising has grown to be worth tens of billions of dollars annually.