• Can e-business help my company to attain its strategic objectives?
• What are my e-business opportunities?
• How will they affect my bottom line?
• Which technologies and architectures should I choose?
• What skills will I need and how much can I do myself?
• What should I do first, and why? How do I get started?

• E-Commerce Selling products to customers and managing orders through the cycle of inquiry, ordering, validation, payment, scheduling, shipment, and delivery
• Customer Relationship Management. Managing customer interaction and providing personalized service that creates long-term, mutually-beneficial customer/vendor relationships
• Supply Chain Management. Responding to customer demand with increased speed and customization by more efficiently managing relationships with suppliers and distributors
• Knowledge Management. Enabling more effective decision-making by internal and external customers by capturing, categorizing, and disseminating information.

•   Alignment. Build common understanding of e-business opportunities and threats in the industry·        Assessment. Analyse the network of business relation-ships that define your business to identify e-business opportunities
• Commitment. Define the e-business strategic vision and roadmap of specific solutions; build the business case
• Mobilisation. Identify potential issues & obstacles and develop your mobilization plan

• Customer intimacy

Customer closeness or intimacy is independent of the Internet for E-Retailer. It refers to the E-Retailer’s ability to be closer to customers in the sense of understanding and therefore anticipating their needs, interests, and expectations. The E-Retailer’s value proposition is build around the E-Retailer’s understanding of customers; therefore, getting closer to them increases the success of E-Retailer’s proposition. Customer closeness can be enhanced or completed through the innovative use of Internet capabilities. Customer closeness can build loyalty and brand equity as well. The Internet can be used to get closer with all members of the E-Retailer’s organization: customer, business partners, and even employees. The E-Retailer can get more direct customer feedback through reader respond card or e-mail.·

• Mass customization and virtual products

With the Internet technologies, the E-Retailer can leverage the concept of mass customisation. Mass customisation, personalisation and virtual products are those products that generate information tailored to individual customers. The E-Retailer should want to create personalized messages to reflect new products, services of particular interest to the customer. In this way, The E-Retailer can use the Internet to extend their relationship with customers. Making it easy for others to do business with the E-Retailer.

E-Retailer’s goal is making it easy for customers and partners to do business with the E-Retailer’s organization. Quick delivery and response.

• Attracting new customers and partners with wider market reach.

The E-Retailer can use the Internet to reach wider customer base, as well as to target niche customer groups. Because the size of the overall market is so large, the niche size is often significant.

• Getting more from less: Increasing return on assets and individuals.

Communications, distributions, rent, advertising, marketing, customer support, and sales all represent major business expenses. The Internet, however, provides an alternative to the traditional channels of performing these functions while significantly reducing expenses for the E-Retailer.

• Reducing time to market.
  The Internet allows the E-Retailer to come quickly to market.

• Customer acquisition and loyalty.

One purpose in developing an innovative E-Retailer Web site is as soon as possible get the target group familiar with the services the E-Retailer provide and has that customer incorporate, the better is the E-Retailer’s chances for keeping that customer. Once the customer has been acquired, the goal migrates to achieving his loyalty.
Beyond innovation, loyalty increases when customers’ needs, concerns, and preferences are integrated directly into the product planning process.

• Revenue-generating opportunities

The E-Retailer could see that for some segments of the population, trends seem to indicate that the Internet will be a preferred channel of distribution, one with attractive revenue-generating opportunities. Indications show that Internet users are more likely to actually buy a fund than those who call in by phone.

• How does E-Retailer use emails to market their businesses on the Internet?·      How important is such email marketing for E-Retailers?·      How effective is email marketing in branding, building relationship and selling products or services?
• What are the effective email marketing strategies? How to develop own email marketing strategies?

• Email mailing lists are popular among web businesses. More than 68% surveyed said their web businesses have at least one email mailing list·      Most mailing lists are small in numbers. About 70% web marketers said their email mailing lists have less than 1000 subscribers·      Generating revenue (7%) and branding (7%) are not the primary purposes of maintaining an email mailing list. The top three primary purposes are: promoting products/services (32%), building community (23%) and communication (21%)
• 89% of the email mailing lists have op-in policy while 84% have op-out policy
• Email newsletter is more effective in building customer relationship. With an 1 to 5 scale rating, (where 1 means «very ineffective» and 5 means «very effective» ), the average ratings are: building customer relationship (3.8), building a community (3.6), promoting products/services (3.5), branding (3.5) and generating revenues (2.8)
• About 57% of the responses said that email marketing is important or very important to their web businesses. However at the same time, about 64% thought they did not devote enough efforts to develop and execute their email marketing strategies
• To publish the email newsletters frequently, to communicate with the subscribers and to meet readers’ needs are the key drivers to develop a successful email mailing list.