REVIEW:One-to-One Web Marketing

Internet Business News, April 27, 2001

INTERNET BUSINESS NEWS-(C)1995-2001 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

Imagine if at every website we visited their were messages and promotions targeting our individual needs or if we received personalised e-mails instead of all that spam. Apart from the relief from being spared so much information (and probably ignoring it) we would probably be more likely to visit that website again and use the services of that particular company.

The essential aim of this book is to help the reader, assumed to be a manager or marketing expert in a company, learn how to create a loyal user base and gain a competitive advantage by understanding and meeting the needs of individuals who visit their website or receive their e-mail messages. The book is essentially a guide to the range of one-to-one marketing technologies and techniques that are available for building customer relationships in order to increase the return on a website and marketing investments.

Each chapter is an in-depth discussion of each of the one-to-one marketing applications that can be used on the web. The authors of the book focus on a customer-service-oriented approach to websites to explain how to use one-to-one web marketing technologies such as personalisation, e-mail, customer relationship management, data mining, advertising and promotion and web collaboration. This new, second edition, provides new checklists that help guide the reader through an evaluation of each one-to-one web marketing technology so that they can choose the best ones for their needs, templates and tools that assist the implementation of one-to-one web marketing and explains how different personalisation systems work and when to use them. In addition, the new edition examines community technologies such as chat, discussion lists and personalised e-mail.

The format of each chapter is more or less the same. For example there is a 'nuts and bolts' section in each of the chapters which explains the technology and how it all works, as well as a section on the benefits of that particular technology, how to apply the technology and on the future of that technology. At the end of each chapter there is an 'up next' section which is just a brief paragraph on what the reader will learn from the next chapter.

Featured in the book are real life examples of how others are successfully using the one-to-one web marketing technique, such as how a college uses personalisation to touch the lives of prospective applicants and students, how an online travel company helps customers find the best values and how a content site uses data analysis techniques to learn about the needs of its users. There are hundreds of web resources included in the book, such as top vendor and key information sources. There is also a companion CD-ROM and website that accompany the book offering further reading and templates/forms.

A good thing about this book is that there is no need to read it from cover to cover. The chapters are arranged to help the marketer take a website from initial relationship building to fully integrating one-to-one marketing across the entire enterprise. For example, if the reader is not yet using personalisation, e-mail marketing and targeted advertising, then they would need to explore the first few chapters. If the reader's website already uses these techniques they can move quickly through the first few chapters and concentrate more on the chapters dealing with community, data mining and customer relationship management.

CONCLUSION:This book succeeds in explaining how one-to-one web marketing works in a language suitable to the target audience. The information is flexible and should be reasonably easy to use in the real world.

Title:One-to-One Web Marketing Author:Cliff Allen, Deborah Kania, Beth Yaeckel Published by:John Wiley & Sons ISBN:0-471-40400-4 Price:USD39.99 Reviewer:Verity Graley

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