Coles Website Audit Report - Digital Marketing Strategy Evaluation

This report conducts a comprehensive website audit of Coles, an Australian supermarket chain. It identifies the website's purpose as a B2C platform aimed at online shopping and customer relationship building through discount offers and loyalty programs. The target market includes brand loyalists, price-sensitive customers, and working professionals. The report analyzes consumer behavior issues, such as distractions and lack of cash-on-delivery options. It emphasizes the importance of internet marketing and e-CRM for building customer relationships, including sales force automation, customer service, and campaign management. The website is evaluated based on interactivity, ease of navigation, attractiveness, and traffic generation, with a conclusion highlighting the significance of a strong online presence for Coles. The report references various sources to support its findings, including industry reports and academic research.

Web Site Audit- Coles

Table of Content
Brief Introduction............................................................................................................................................................ 3
Website Model and Its Purpose................................................................................................................................. 4
Target Market and Consumer Behaviour Issues................................................................................................. 6
Importance of using internet for Relationship Marketing and CRM...........................................................7
Using e-CRM to build relationship....................................................................................................................... 7
Web analysis and Evaluation...................................................................................................................................... 8
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................................................... 9
References........................................................................................................................................................................ 10

Brief Introduction
(Source: Coles, 2018)
Coles is an Australian Supermarket, retail and consumer services chain which is
headquartered in Melbourne, the company is controlled and owned by its Parent
company Wesfarmers. Coles, along with Woolworths have dominated the Australian
retail industry (Coles, Piterou & Sentic, 2018). Coles have a good online presence which
is specially designed to cater to its online audience. The purpose of the report here is to
identify the purpose of the site and understand its web business model. Additionally,
the report will also provide information on the target market and identify any customer
issues. A brief overview of the dynamic forces in the industry will be provided along
with the careful evaluation of the website. A lot of focus will be given on evaluating the
level of interactivity, ease of navigation, attractiveness of the site, traffic building, CRM
development and the effectiveness of Coles online branding.

Website Model and Its Purpose
(Source: Coles, 2018)
The image here depicts the first page which gets displayed when a user logs in to
https://www.coles.com.au/#. Looking carefully at the website, one can see the tabs on
the header which are related to catalogues and specials, shopping online, location and
hours and corporate responsibility.
(Source: Coles, 2018)

The figure above shows the end section of Cole’s website, and it provides
information to stakeholders or the customers related to information about Coles,
customer service options, job opening at Coles and other businesses of Coles. Thus, the
lower section provides a lot of information which the customer can use to increase their
knowledge on Coles.
(Source: Coles, 2018)
This is the page a user gets diverted to on clicking on the shop online tab of
Cole’s website. As one can say, on the extreme left hand side is a long list of items a
customer can pick from, and in the right there is information on the bill, feedback,
contact and others. Thus, the online page of Coles does not only look neat in appearance,
it gives a lot of choice to the consumers.
The web business model of Coles is a B2C platform, wherein it provides
customer an option of shopping online in their comforting environment, additionally;
this business strategy is in sync with the growth of online marketing and online
shopping. Coles through its website wants to influence the online buyers and by virtue
of its discount and loyalty cards build a strong relationship with them (Armstrong et. al.,
2014). Additionally, the site also provides customer with a lot of information related to
store locator, offers, location and hours and also tips to make delicious recipes by
renowned chefs. Thus, the website is useful, creative, easy to navigate, value driven and
informative.

Target Market and Consumer Behaviour Issues
Looking at the website and understanding the digital landscape, the target market of
Coles online can be seen as:
 Brand Loyalists- These are the category of people who are big time brand
loyalists of Coles, Coles here want to convert these brand loyalist into online
customers. This would increase their web presence and also help in spreading a
positive word of mouth.
 Not brand Loyal-Due to high substitute of product and competition the
customers have many options. Thus, Coles through its website and its online
marketing and branding activities wants to encourage the not brand loyal to try
out Coles product and services (Devlin, 2018).
 Most Profitable- Another set of customer is the most profitable, the objective of
Coles here is to deepen relationships with them.
These are the major target audience of Coles online, most of these people are
working professionals and business executives. These are the people who do not
have time to go to the store and shop, thus Coles solves their problem by giving them
an option of shopping online.
One of the frequent problems which occur with most of the target audience is
getting distracted with ads or other pop-ups while shopping on the website. This
distraction takes them away from the parent website and they start shopping for
some other thing. Another possible issue with this target audience is that some of
the people are not comfortable sharing their credit card information online, and
Coles does not have an option on Cash on Delivery, which leads to loss of revenue for
Coles (Yablonsky, 2018).
Importance of using internet for Relationship Marketing and CRM
Retail can be seen as a crowded space owing to intense competitions, less
product differentiation and price wars, thus comes internet marketing to the rescue in
order to build strong relationships with customers or potential customers. Coles can
build its relationship with its buyers through internet by providing them a seamless

interface or experience on the website. Internet shopping becomes more fun, when the
images displayed on the pages are exact copy of the products thus keeping the
confidence of the customer intact (Hutchins & Rodriguez, 2018). Additionally, Coles can
benefit from this internet marketing by making customer privy to a lot of discount
offers, information on products, limited period sales and more so. Also, the seamless
integration of offline and online store is much of a relationship builder, making internet
marketing extremely useful for Coles (Bookman et. al., 2018).
Using e-CRM to build relationship
Electronic customer relationship management is a platform which is used by lot of large
and mid-sized corporation for primarily four purposes:
 Sales force automation
 Customer service management
 Managing the sales process
 Campaign management
 Evaluation and analysis
 Relationship building (Sultan, Wong & Sigala, 2018).
Coles get a lot of traffic on its website, some of them are first time buyers, some are
repeated and some gets diverted by some link on the website. Coles, captures the
information of each and every customer which is on its customer and creates an
individual profile or the record on its CRM. The CRM collects data on the person, his
profile, internet behaviour, transaction data, feedback, contact report and others. Coles
uses this information to not only retarget or remarket the products to the customer, but
also to build a relationship with them. The information on the CRM can be used to
create a customized shopping list for the customers, or to suggest them products on the
basis of their transaction history (Jie & Gengatharen, 2018). Thus, helping customers by
its online presence and building relationship with them. Some other benefits of E-CRM
can be summarized as:
 Customer development
 Ability to manage the mailing list.
 Data mining

 Personalization and customization of content
 Customer feedback and grievance handling (Burns et. al., 2018).
E-CRM is a wonder tool which helps in the process of customer extension, selection,
retention and acquisition. These are the major activities of relationship marketing
which is ably supported and controlled by the E-CRM tool used by Coles such as Zoho,
Oracle, Sales force.
Web analysis and Evaluation
Level of interactivity
Level of interactivity is the dialog which happens between a human and a computer
program, chat bot or an actual person. AN interactive site is one which allows for the
interaction of the customer with the content of the website. Coles have an option of
contact or feedback but it does not have a live chat support system on its website.
However, the content is highly engaging and information for the consumers. Thus, it can
be said that the level of interactivity on the website is medium to high (Paulson, Luo &
James, 2018).
Ease of Navigation
Ease of navigation can be understood as the ease the customer experiences while
navigating for an information or product on the website. Coles website, which is in red
and white background has bold tabs, both in header and footer, This ensures that
customer can easily look for the information he is looking to find on the website.
Additionally, the tabs also provide drop down list of option to further make navigation
easier. Thus, the ease of navigation on the website is most definitely high (Caboni &
Bruni, 2018).
Attractiveness of the site
Some of the variables which are behind the attractiveness of the website are; Design
and colour, Pictures and Graphics, Usability and consistency to provide information.
Based on all these factors it can be said that Coles website is remarkably attractive. It
does not have cluttered content, all the images are in high resolution, the design and

graphics are trendy and colourful, making the overall look and feel of website to be
fantastic.
Website Traffic
Creating an online presence is one thing, and getting sufficient traffic is another major
thing at hand. Coles like any other online company uses a variety of channels to push or
increase the traffic on its website. For instance, the company uses Facebook to promote
its product and services with a click; likewise it does the same in the form of affiliate
marketing, digital promotions, online marketing, and twitter marketing and creating
online campaigns to divert the traffic on the website, thus increasing the online
footprint of the company. Further to it, if the website has a good page score, its online
ranking on search engine shoots up, thereby further helping in increasing traffic on the
website (Chakrabortty & Jose, 2018).
Conclusion
Globally, the internet penetration stands at 53%, however in Australia the figure
stands at 80%. The figure is absolutely remarkable and implies a strong need to have a
good online presence with website optimization, SEO, SEM, Meta tags and other features
to improve the web presence of the brand. Coles, which is an Australian organization
has a good presence on the web and it aces in terms of its digital marketing skill.

References
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Coles.(2018). Shop Online. Retrieved from
https://shop.coles.com.au/a/a-national/everything/browse?
cid=alwayson_link_Coles.com.au_homepage-meganavdropdown_shop-online

Devlin, J. P. (2018). Going Digital: New Technology, New Relationship. In From Analogue
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