The traditional 4Ps of marketing include product, price, channel, and promotion. In the era of high competition, the service factor in transactions is becoming more and more important, and has become a means to improve performance and build competitiveness. Starbucks has formed a service experience and created brand value based on its products. In an era when customers pursue experience consumption, how can cross-border e-commerce use service marketing to win out from the situation of product homogeneity?
Service marketing refers to the economic activities in which enterprises arrange service marketing combinations based on market segmentation and according to the specific needs of individuals to output non-tangible products to customers, or have added value or benefits in the form of convenience, pleasure, time saving, comfort and health to meet the specific needs of each customer. Service marketing includes comprehensive elements such as product, price, channel, promotion, personnel, tangible display, and service process.
Service marketing can be understood from the following two aspects:
(1) “Service” is defined from the perspective of being different from tangible physical goods. Services are intangible, inseparable, have different quality, and cannot be stored. It is precisely these characteristics that make service marketing an important way for merchants and customers to establish relationships.
(2) Service marketing originates from the recognition of customer needs. The product-centered marketing model meets the physiological or safety needs of consumers. As corporate competition intensifies, consumers need specific or personalized services brought by such products, so that they can feel respected and realize their self-worth. Service marketing is an important way to meet consumers’ high-level needs.
Service marketing is becoming increasingly important in cross-border e-commerce marketing for the following reasons.
(1) The emergence of cross-border e-commerce has shortened the international supply chain, allowing China to maintain its price advantage based on its demographic dividend and achieve rapid growth over the past 20 years. With the disappearance of the demographic dividend and the transfer of industries, brand-oriented industrial upgrading has become inevitable. In the case of serious product homogeneity, shaping the differentiation of services has become the key to winning the competition.
(2) The development of cross-border e-commerce is accompanied by the penetration of the Internet worldwide. The Internet penetration rate in developed countries is generally higher than 80%, and there is limited room for further growth. The disappearance of the traffic dividend has transformed the traditional growth strategy of acquiring new traffic into tapping existing traffic. The importance of private domain operations is becoming increasingly prominent, and service marketing can allow companies to use existing customers to gain growth.
(3) From the perspective of cross-border e-commerce itself, the transaction process is long and the transaction risk is high. Customers can freely evaluate the products, and evaluation is an important factor in product ranking and customer conversion. Therefore, it is particularly important to do a good job of service marketing within a controllable range for the overall operation.
(4) With the advancement of technology, mass customized services have become possible, allowing merchants to meet the specific needs of each customer while also controlling the resulting complexity. It can be foreseen that in the field of cross-border e-commerce service marketing, the gap between companies that have made digital layouts and those that have not involved in this field will become larger and larger. The purpose of service is customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and to achieve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, service marketing must be a systematic project. Service focuses on key moments and process transparency to a large extent, creating an ultimate customer experience through interaction, proactive service and other methods. In cross-border e-commerce, service marketing is reflected in multiple scenarios. First, we will introduce service marketing in transaction fulfillment; second, we will introduce precision marketing strategies for old customers to maximize the customer life cycle value; and finally, we will introduce how to achieve the goal of improving customer loyalty through community operation, management and maintaining customer relationships.