E-Marketing: Seven Criterias

Part A: General Appraisal

1. 7 Criteria

Context

The context is used to design the look-and-feel of a screen-to-face customer interface. A good context design make visitor to retain eyes longer on website and easy to follow navigation. Normally, website can be divided into three types: functionality, aesthetically and hybrid site that combines both aesthetic and functional dimensions. The functionality website tends to contain much more information than can be usefully presented to screen-to-face customer interface. And aesthetically website tends to use colors, graphics, photographs, font choices and other visually oriented feature to captured customer.

Based on the above, we can see that the Flora tea homepage is tend to be aesthetically website. Their website design like artwork. Flora tea has emphasized a green color scheme for its site. Various green tones are used to product, content and navigation, with the elegance associated with the Flora tea brand. And the red color used to price, promotion and call to action help visitor easy find out those information. Because red color is most attention people compare other colors (ColorCombos, n.d.). The design elements on the Flora tea website encourage visitors to slow down and contemplate each product with great visually appealing.

However, I still found the issues of Flora tea website from personal experience. For example, Flora tea has used of Macromedia Flash show the product on the upper part of page, its success attract my attention, but Flora tea did not used of Macromedia Flash technology as a navigation tool, since it demands of a bold aesthetic choice more interaction from the visitor than simple HTML links. In addition, the proportion of Flash occupies half of webpage, I have to scroll down webpages to find the product I need. These factors impact on performance, usability and experience of webpage.

“www.apple.co.nz” is a successful aesthetically website. Their webmaster made the proportion of each parts are reasonable, we can see the whole page when we browse their site (Appendix 1). Also when we click the Macromedia Flash would lead us link to consistency product page. It would be useful example for Flora tea figure out context of website.

Content

Content refers to any digital information includes audio, video, images and text. The content can be considers into four dimensions, includes offering mix, appeal mix, multimedia mix and content type.

The offering mix of the site include product, information and services these three elements.

Flora tea focuses primarily on product images with high level visually appealing, but also provides information about the product and “about the tea” section, which detail the feature of product, how to enjoy the tea and information of Flora tea’s Awards 2011-2014. Using “find food awards 2014” as trust symbol is another elements to build consumer trust. However, Flora tea lack of services support, they did not provided live chat functional for dealing with consumer’s problem. For example, on trademeinsurance.co.nz webpage, webmaster provided the live chat section for dealing with consumer question (Appendix 2). This is effectively way to prevent potential consumer lost.

Flora tea did really good job on the multimedia mix part, they provided high quality product photographs and video as its main way of presenting products.

The most serious issue is that the pretty thin appeal mix, Flora tea hard to focus on emotionally resonant ties to the product or brand as their product not famous right now. They should pay more attentions on the functional aspect of the offering, including low price, voucher and free taste such promotion. Flora tea could display the promotion by pop-up windows, such as overstock.com is used pop-up windows of promotion when visitor browse their site (Appendix 3). Improving Flora tea appeal mix would lead increasing

The content type of Flora tea has been defined as commerce sites, so the reference content, product photographs, and information of discounts does not require frequent updates.

Community

Community is a group of people who have the similar interest. They can post the attractive content and develop relationship between members in the community. A good community provide a platform help company give customers a reason to visit the site, and customer increase traffic and a larger customer base for company. For example, Amazon.com successful build their community by providing reader feedback area and star-rating system (Appendix 4). Their visitor to feel profoundly attached to the site, because they know that their feedbacks are important advice by the company and other visitors. The good reputation of community can lower marketing costs, service costs and customer-acquisition costs, visitor got useful opinion from other people before purchasing.

However, Flora tea has provided Facebook page for build their community. Customers could comment and share own opinion on Facebook page, but it doesn’t build an effectively community for Flora tea until now. Flora tea could try to provide a Chat room only available for our communities using privately, message broad help integrated their comment and a holistic approach that include CSR and other CSR responsibility describe on the Facebook page.

Customize

The customization function is used to better achieve user needs. This function is divided into two parts, the first part called personalization which customize website by the user. And the second part called tailoring which customize website by the film.

Personalization

The user could set their preference in context selection, content selection and personalization tools on many website. For example, Amazon.com allows user to do the content selection based interest when their already login. Hence, the website could match the content selection next time when the user returning. However, Flora tea website has limited set of personalization functions, because they have only one category product (tea). Flora tea could provide A/B version of website for context selection, such as different size of product image, different color of CTA or different types of navigation.

Tailoring

Many sites have the ability to customize website version on past user behaviour and behaviour of other users with similar preferences, in order to better address specific users’ habits, interests and needs. For example, Amazon.com provides recommendations product to specific user based on his past purchase, “wish list” or “My Store”. I still believe that Tailoring function is not useful for Flora tea, they may only provide recommendation to specific user what flavour is his preference based on his past purchase.