Consumers Perspectives on Digital Marketing Features

Abstract: The aim of this study is to investigate the consumers’ perspective on the importance of various digital marketing features, particularly in the pandemic period which boosted e-commerce and digital services. In this sense, this paper addresses at first the digital and social media tools utilization in the framework of the new digital world of communications. Consumer Behavior in the Covid-19 era follows, presenting the impact of covid-19 in consumer’s way of living and thinking in respect to their on-line shopping daily habits. In this sense, in view of the company’s website importance in their consumers’ searching and purchasing process, literature review is completed with the description of the various design principles with special references to the virtual and augmented Reality tools, for which interest in the past few years has risen considerably.

In order to verify the theoretical insights, an empirical research was conducted through a structured questionnaire answered by 328 consumers in Greece. Main results reveal that key features of a site are products' photos and ease of accessibility in information and transactions, while a low proportion of the sample is positive in the potential adoption of VR tools. In addition, delays on deliveries have a negative impact on e-commerce and digital marketing in overall and this becomes even worse as frequency of on-line purchases by the customers increase.

The conclusions and recommendations drawn in the present study are expected to provide some useful insights for the successful digital marketing redesign towards increasing company’s products/services attractiveness.

Key words: digital marketing, site attractiveness, virtual reality, digital marketing features, delivery time

JEL code: M31