e-Marketing is still quite a controversial subject to talk about, since no one succeeded to unify various theories around it; however there is one thing upon which there is no doubt – that e-Marketing first appeared under form of various techniques deployed by pioneer companies selling their products via internet in early 90's.

The frenzy around these new marketing techniques created by e-tailers and supported by internet rapidly gave birth to a new dimension of what we knew as Marketing: e-Marketing (electronic Marketing).

There are many definitions to what e-Marketing is, simplest and shortest one being formulated by Mark Sceats: e-Marketing is Marketing that uses internet as manifestation media. A working definition is that coming from a group of CISCO specialists: e-Marketing is sum of all activities a business conducts through internet with purpose of finding, attracting, winning and retaining customers.

e-Marketing Strategy

The e-Marketing Strategy is normally based and built upon principles that govern traditional, offline Marketing – well-known 4 P's (Product – Price – Promotion – Positioning) that form classic Marketing mix. Add extra 3 P's (People – Processes – Proof) and you got whole extended Marketing mix.

Until here, there are no much aspects to differentiate e-Marketing from traditional Marketing performed offline: extended Marketing mix (4 3 P's) is built around concept of "transactional" and its elements perform transactional functions defined by exchange paradigm. What gives e-Marketing its uniqueness is a series of specific functions, relational functions, that can be synthesized in 2P 2C 3S formula: Personalization, Privacy, Customer Service, Community, Site, Security, Sales Promotion.

These 7 functions of e-Marketing stay at base of any e-Marketing strategy and they have a moderating character, unlike classic Marketing mix that comprises situational functions only. Moderating functions of e-Marketing have quality of moderate, operate upon all situational functions of mix (the classic 4 P's) and upon each other.

1. Personalization The fundamental concept of personalization as a part of e-Marketing mix lies in need of recognizing, identifying a certain customer in order to establish relations (establishing relations is a fundamental objective of Marketing). It is crucial to be able to identify our customers on individual level and gather all possible information about them, with purpose of knowing our market and be able to develop customized, personalized products and services.

For example, a cookie strategically placed on website visitor's computer can let us know vital information concerning access speed available: in consequence, if we know visitor is using a slow connection (eg. dial-up) we will offer a low-volume variation of our website, with reduced graphic content and no multimedia or flash applications. This will ease our customer's experience on our website and he will be prevented from leaving website on reason that it takes too long to load its pages.

Personalization can be applied to any component of Marketing mix; therefore, it is a moderating function.

2. Privacy Privacy is an element of mix very much connected to previous one – personalization. When we gather and store information about our customers and potential customers (therefore, when we perform personalization part of e-Marketing mix) a crucial issue arises: that of way this information will be used, and by whom. A major task to do when implementing an e-Marketing strategy is that of creating and developing a policy upon access procedures to collected information.

This is a duty and a must for any conscious marketer to consider all aspects of privacy, as long as data are collected and stored, data about individual persons.

Privacy is even more important when establishing e-Marketing mix since there are many regulations and legal aspects to be considered regarding collection and usage of such information.

3. Customer Service Customer service is one of necessary and required activities among support functions needed in transactional situations.

The marketing planning (concretized in marketing plan) is an essential organizational activity, considering hostile and complex competitive business environment. Our ability and skills to perform profitable sales are affected by hundreds of internal and external factors that interact in a difficult way to evaluate. A marketing manager must understand and build an image upon these variables and their interactions, and must take rational decisions.

Let us see what do we call a "marketing plan"? It is result of planning activity, a document that includes a review of organization's place in market, an analysis of STEP factors as well as a SWOT analysis. A complete plan would also formulate some presumptions on why we think past marketing strategy was successful or not. The next phase shall present objectives we set, together with strategies to achieve these objectives. In a logical sequence, we will further need to evaluate results and formulate alternative plans of action. A plan would consist in details of responsibilities, costs, sales prognosis and budgeting issues.

In end, we should not forget to specify how plan (or plans) will be controlled, by what means we will measure its results.

We will see how to build marketing plan, what is its structure: after we will see how to build traditional marketing plan, we will take a look at e-marketing plan and see how unique features of internet will require some changes in approach of writing a marketing plan.

But, before we continue, we must understand and accept that steps of marketing plan are universal. It is a logical approach of planning activity, no matter where we apply it. The differences you meet from a plan to another consist in degree of formality accorded to each phase, depending on size and nature of organization involved. For example, a small and not diversified company would adopt less formal procedures, because managers in these cases have more experience and functional knowledge than subordinates, and they are able to achieve direct control upon most factors. On other hand, in a company with diversified activity, it is less likely that top managers have functional information in a higher degree than subordinate managers. Therefore, planning process must be formulated to ensure a strict discipline for everyone involved in decisional chain.

II. The general marketing plan

The classical marketing plan would follow following scheme of 8 stages:

1. Declaring mission: this is planning stage when we establish organizational orientations and intentions, thus providing a sense of direction. In most cases, this is a general presentation of company's intentions and almost has a philosophic character.

2. Establishing current objectives: it is essential for organization to try to determine with preciseness objectives to be reached. These objectives, in order to be viable, must be SMART. SMART is an acronym and stands for "Specific", "Measurable", "Attainable", "Realistic" and "Timed". The objectives must also convey general organizational mission.

3. Gathering information: this stage is based on concept of marketing audit. After performing audit of macro-environment by analyzing STEP factors (social, technologic, economic and politic), we should turn focus upon immediate extern environment (the micro-environment) and analyze competitive environment, costs and market. Finally, we will conclude with SWOT analysis, by this way we will have a general view upon internal environment compared to external one. The SWOT analysis combine two perspectives, from inside and from outside, because Strengths and Weaknesses are internal issues of an organization, while Opportunities and Threads come from outside.

4. Re-formulating objectives: after close examination of data gathered in previous stage, sometimes it is needed to re-formulate initial objectives, in order to address all issues that might have come up from previous stage. The distance between initial objective and re-formulated objective will be covered by appropriate strategies. We must ensure re-formulated objective is SMART as well.

5. Establishing strategies: several strategies are to be formulated, in order to cover distance between what we want to achieve and what is possible to achieve, with resources at our disposal. As we would usually have several options, we should analyze them and chose one with more chances to achieve marketing objectives.