Before undertaking any marketing activities, in this case E-Marketing, you need to step back a bit and find out who your customers are and what they would like from you and also find out what your competitors are doing. The only way to do this is through market research. By researching your market thoroughly, you can avoid wasting time or money on promotion or marketing activities that may have little effect.

What browser does our average customer use? Does he browse on his phone or a big desktop PC back at home? How old is he? How much does he earn? Does he make his buying decisions purely on price or does he take other factors in to price? Does he use social networking sites or does he not see the point in them? These are the kinds of things that you need to know and you need to find out the answers rather than rather than assume or guess.

Online solutions such as http://www.quesionpro.com offer customisable surveys and provide the results and reports via email. They cost very little a month for the kind facilities most companies would need. Sites like these are the used by blue chip companies so are trusted by customers to be private and secure. Setting the surveys up is quite straight forward, simply setting the question and the type of answer that can be given, e.g. multi choice, yes/no, text, 1-5 etc.

Promoting the surveys and persuading customers to take part in them is the trickier part. Promotion is often done via a popup on the home page of your company’s website. This is often irritating to users. Other ways could be a banner on the home page, a special email or announcement through social networking sites. Offline promotion could also occur in store using a flyer giveaway. Some kind of incentive would probably be needed to get people to participate. A free gift, discount or entry in to a prize draw is the normal methods used.

Current Customer Database

Your current customer database will contain very useful information if you can find a method to analyze it. For instance, what percentage of your customers are male/female, how much do they spend on average, what days of the month are most orders placed, etc. All these, and other questions, could be answered directly from your existing database.

Competitor Analysis

Knowing what your competitors are doing is nearly as important as knowing what your customers need. What features are they offering on their websites, what is the content of their marketing emails, what other promotion do they do (blogs, social networking etc).You also need to look at their sites on a technical level, especially if their site is outperforming you. Also what is happening in the wider World of e-commerce? What do the biggest companies offer and what are they doing to promote their sites?

Reccomendations

1. Put together the information you’d like to find out about your customers. A sample questionnaire can be read here. Investigate the different online survey providers and their features and prices

2. Agree on a method of promotion of the survey and the costs involved

3. If it’s possible interrogate your current database to get customer information. If this is currently not possible either get your website company to provide this or get them to provide you with a copy of the database and you can write the queries yourselves. This database copy may also be useful in getting more followers on social networking sites.