ASSIGNMENT 2

1. Explain how email works in product recommendations.

Product recommendation is something needed for an online business to use as one of the internet marketing campaigns. In fact, product recommendation is widely used by many of the people working in the internet and they would love to use this type of technique to increase the fame of the business and increase the chance to getting an order from the people who visit the website of your own. Actually, product recommendation is a technique of introducing or recommending some products on the website of the online business owners. This means that they would try to recommend some useful products or interesting products to people visiting the website. However, some people would try to recommend different types of products together in a website.

For ecommerce companies with many products, structuring up-sells and cross-sells for optimal conversions can be very difficult. Product recommendations solve this problem by learning the behaviors of your site visitors on an individual and aggregate level. We automatically take this data and merchandise your site, matching behaviors and comparing intents of new visitors to thousands of shoppers who converted on your site. For returning visitors we display products based on their customer profiles, which are preferences our engine anonymously learns over time, including preferred categories, favorite brands, and even specific colors and sizes.

2. In implementing an email order confirmation system, you recognize that the primary purpose of the system is to acknowledge order receipts to customers. What are other benefits, some psychological, that comes with this type of customer contact?

Today‘s consumers need to cut through an increasing barrage of marketing emails, while simultaneously identifying those emails that are relevant, timely and meaningful for them. Personalised product recommendations represent a quick win in achieving this consumer goal—delivering fresh content that is generated ―on open‖ and reflective of recent behavior, click-through activity from earlier emails, product pricing changes, inventory shifts, etc. In the long-term, this relevance and timeliness helps to foster trust in the retailer and promotes increased customer lifetime value.

Consumers today expect tools that help them to find what they seek quickly to complete their shopping agenda. Personalisation offers retailers the opportunity to engage with consumers on a deeper level, keeping them onsite to complete transactions instead of jumping to a competitor‘s site. The use of personalisation on landing pages for SEO or search engine marketing campaigns exemplifies this level of active engagement. When a shopper lands on such a page, a personalisation system can show them not only the specific product they were searching for, but a range of alternatives and accessories they might not otherwise have been aware of. In particular, high quality personalised recommendations have become an effective means of navigating a retail site, on a par with its search and browse features. This not only reduces bounce rate, but also drives longer sessions and incremental sales, thereby reinforcing the retailer‘s competitive advantage with each individual sale.

The biggest long-term impact of a successful personalisation program is that shoppers develop a greater sense of trust in the merchant. They trust that the merchant will have the products they want to purchase and they will be easy to find. As a result, lifetime value of the customer goes up substantially. Behind lifetime value are several key contributing metrics, the most notable of which is frequency of shopping. Often order size increases as well, but that is not universal, as the shopper may buy more in the aggregate, but intersperse both large and small orders.

3. Does automated response and robot e-mail systems constitute a workable customer service program? Explain your answer including system sequence, workable versus responsive versus gratifying customer experience.

Yes, automated response and robot email systems constitute a workable customer service program. An auto responder is a scheduled sequence of emails sent out automatically in response to a signup. All members of your "newsletter" should first come though an auto responder sequence. This is because the auto responder provides a natural method of segmenting your audience and generating an initial sale. This will become more and more obvious to you over time as you begin to exploit the full power of the auto responder offer sequence. Auto responders sequences can be chained so when a sequence ends (either by running out of emails or shortcut by a purchase) a new sequence starts. Ideally, you should sequence several related product offers from small to large (preferably ending in a subscription product). Only when the product chain is exhausted should the name finally be added to the general "newsletter" list.

4. How big an impact does privacy have on internet behavior? Would the loss of privacy alter consumer behavior on the Internet? Explain your answer with e-mail as one of the main source of privacy intrusion

Privacy and its related variables are important determinants of customer behavior in the electronic market. When users attempt to protect their privacy, their behaviors can be classified as either active or passive. Accordingly, we categorize users' behavior as being (a) usage-oriented (passive) or (b) protection-oriented (active). This construct reflects a user's positive defensive behavior as they attempt to protect their privacy from intrusions such as spam, hacking, and so on. According to Cramer (2004), protection-oriented behavior may be manifested as other mechanisms, such as acting differently than one feels, or suppressing a disturbing idea. In the original Pew survey participants were asked if they "Requested to be removed from a mailing list", "Reported it to your e-mail provider," and "Reported it to a consumer or government agency" after experiencing spam. The user was deemed to have engaged in protection-oriented behavior (active behavior) if the response to one or more of the above questions was in the affirmative. The remaining respondents were considered as not having engaged in protection-oriented behavior. This provided us data for encoding the variable on a dichotomous scale.

Emails are an integral part of the Internet. They serve as communicators between friends world over. To me, emails are options similar to the idea of pen friending of the olden times. Emails travel along the network, take the right paths and reach the intended receiver. They help you stay in touch with close friends in this busy life of today. As, emails are so important for all the computer savvy people, email privacy has become an equally important concern. Email privacy issues emerge when it comes to sending plain text over the Internet

Today many consumers feel as if Wild West-like lawlessness is pervading cyberspace. Identity theft continues to be a threat, with e-mail phishing scams on the rise and key logging a growing menace. Marketers are hard at work assessing the impact of these cracks in Internet security, particularly their affect on retail e-commerce. Concerns over the security and privacy of personal information keeps many consumers from becoming online consumers and, whether the danger is real or imagined, it's a huge concern for online retailers.