Easy Jet( Airline company) e-marketing strategies Essay

Founded in the year 1995 Easy Jet has been a very fast growing company. In the year 1998 they sold their first seat through the internet and as of now almost 98% seats are sold online. This has made Easy Jet one of the foremost in the internet retailing. One of the foremost reasons the company went online is because it wanted to reduce and distribute costs. According to EasyJet.com (2008.a), the concept overview gives a overview of their e-marketing strategy, they are as follows:  · Reduction and distribution of costs which includes setting up their booking centres and manual labour.  · No tickets during travel. An email containing the booking reference itself is enough to board a plane. The further reduces tasks and costs of issuing, distribution, processing and reconciliation of tickets for every year.  · All operations are paperless thereby making the internet all the more useful for other businesses such as management and administration purposes. Mc Govern.G (2004) mentions that the e-marketing strategy needs to be logical must have substance and needs to have a lot of textual matter. In general it has to â€Å"be useful†. The main reason for its success is eCommerce and the way it has been used as a part of their business plan. The main reason for Easy Jet’s e-strategy was that the company wanted to â€Å"scale down its call centre operation† and sell most of their tickets online (2001). The use of the website has made their flights even cheaper when compared to their competitors. EasyJet.com (2008.b), gives an overview of the different ways that the internet is being used and how the customers are being benefited,  · Customers who book online receive discounts for each leg of the journey.  · They make it a point to put up all cheap flights online.  · Customers can search flights by fares and also view cheap flights that are available over two weeks.  · Customers can make their bookings online. Make any flight transfers, name changes and can request duplicate confirmations by email.  · Customers can also reschedule their flight bookings.  · The website also offers online check in for its passengers.  · The customer also has the option of selecting Speeding boarding which will enable the passenger to board the flight before all the other passengers.  · There are exclusive promotions for customers who are booking online. E-strategy is aimed at selective targeting of customer groups for promotions. According to Chaffey.D (2007) e-marketing strategy includes  · Segmentation and Targeting. Online customers are from different demographic locations, their needs and even behaviours are different. So the same e-strategy needs to be able to mould itself to specific requirements of the customer.  · Differentiation and Positioning. It is also important that the online product gives appropriate value for money. Competitors will have different value propositions and Easy Jet will have to be able to meet. Based on this some of the recommendations are as follows,  · The customer base needs to be expanded, by giving the customer more promotional benefits of online booking.  · E-marketing should not be seen as the sole marketing strategy but must be integrated as a part of the bigger marketing plan for the company.  · Enhance the experience of online booking by offering benefits, advantages and promotions.  · Make online booking a priority not a necessity. As they will have to retain the customer base of internet users as well as non-users.  · Need to start tie ups with other airlines so that they can expand into other countries.  · Their strategy needs to be able to handle and adopt to competition of airlines and new business models strategies of other companies which may or may not include e-strategy.  · The service of handling customer complaints and feedbacks should be effectively managed. So that feedbacks are positive and the complaints received are as minimal as possible.  · They should also have a plan in place if inflation occurs and if prices of products are affected. They need to be prepared with alternatives and substitutes.  · Change in political regulations and governments policies should have no or else minimal effect on the functioning of Easy Jet and its low prices.  · Easy Jet also needs to be environment friendly on and off air.  · They need to introduce their booking services by taking the technology of the internet to areas that do not have the facility. There are various kinds of e-tools that can be used on the internet. Some of the e-tools used by Easy Jet are listed below,  ·Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Websites so that customers can surf through the pages and book, cancel or transfer flights.  ·Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   E-commerce to enable bookings online. There are other tools that are not being used by Easy Jet and these are listed as follows,  ·Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Email. So that customers can have their on personal Easy Jet email id for a more personals online service.  ·Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   No chat and messenger service. A customer support executive can be online to help and guide the customer through the process of making transactions or else to assist in answering queries.  ·Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Communities and forums. These can help the customers to interact with other customers thereby enabling the company to understand and evaluate its services and customer satisfaction ratio.  ·Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The website can also include videos and sound clips to help customers who are physically disabled to still be able to use the internet to make bookings. Dr Chaffey.D (2008) suggests that there needs to be some core framework for assessment and that should include the product details, price competencies, introduce e-commerce transactions across different sites and promotions. This will then keep the customer in the virtual world as happy as in the real world.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Easy Jet has a very has a very good future ahead but only if it can take up on some recommendations to better itself in the long run.