Stages of Internet Consumer Behavior
- Awareness: content or products can be obtained via the internet.
- Search Behavior: Goal oriented- user has an objective, such as task completion or pre-purchase deliberation. Experiential- not task oriented but are guided by the process itself, such as building an information bank, opinion leadership and recreation.
- Task Completion: Content/Information Acquisition, Purchase, Abandonment. One successful outcome of the consumer behavior process as acquiring info, whereas in the physical world, we define it only as purchase. In the internet environment, it is wise to define a single purchase only as an intermediate step. A successful outcome from the marketer’s perspective is not achieved until the user becomes a repeat user or, better, a loyal customer. Abandonment of virtual shopping carts is an aspect of online purchasing activities that has received considerable attention. Two reasons that recur in research on cart abandonment is difficulty in using the website and shipping and handling costs.
- Repeat Visit: Occasional; Frequent
- Use/Consumption Behavior: Consumption of info does not destroy the info in question as consumption of a physical product does. On the internet, useful info is often shared with a group of friends, or colleagues, thereby increasing its value.
- Loyalty: Is most often measured by repeat purchases in the physical world, we can add frequent visitors to the site in internet space as a behavioral measure of loyalty.
Internet User Segments
Demographic: Teens spend much more of their internet time communicating with peers through instant messaging, blogs, and social networking sites. They see email as a way to communicate with adults. They play games, get news, make purchases, and get health info, they are heavy consumers of music and related merchandise. Seniors- less than one third of people older than 65 have ever gone online. Health info is popular among them.
Digital Divide- the manifestation of the gap in technology access between the rich and poor. The Dept. of Commerce did tracking studies of the demographic characteristics that described access, or lack thereof to the internet. Chief variables tended to be age, income, education and rural/urban residence. As internet has gone mainstream and prices for technology have decreased, the income gap in internet access has tended to disappear. Most people who want access to the internet can get it in most developed nations. The real gap now is between those who have broadband access and those who do not.
Internet Consumer Data
Customer interactions data like response to an email campaign, although not unique to the web, has achieved great importance there and can be collected by the enterprise or by the supplier of the service (eg. an email marketing supplier). All data must be incorporated into the central database or data warehouse if marketing programs are to be successful, this provides a “360 degree view of the customer.”
Online data capture is the natural evolution of the database marketing practiced by direct marketers. It has been expanded and modified by the capabilities of the web. The marketer’s need for information about consumer behavior on the internet be completely satisfied by publicly available data. This causes marketers to turn to their own data collection, either by means of online marketing research or by online capture of data about consumer use of the internet and of the marketer’s own web site and the capture of data generated by transactions and by customer interactions with the enterprise. (online data capture is data generated by transactions and customer interactions with the enterprise.)
Online marketing research is comparatively quick and low in cost. The speed and quality of data preparation and analytics can also be greatly improved. The quality of results can also be enhanced by the use of techniques unique to the web, such as computerized product renderings ans the use of streaming media to present promotional material.
