An analysis of the effectiveness of websites as a promotional tool of agrotourism enterprises in northern Greece

Abstract

Every enterprise has the need of advertisement, since neither the one that has the best product nor the best service can be sure that customers will buy it. without prompting. The promotion of enterprises may be done with several forms (brochures, advertisements in the press): one of them is through the internet. This dissertation was an attempt to record the number of agrotourism enterprises that choose the internet for advertisement, then focused on measuring the adequacy of their design and finally evaluated the way of responding to specific client requests. For the first phase of this evaluation five criteria were used; content of information, interaction, communication, design & usefulness, and security. Each criterion consisted of a number of different issues. Each issue scored 10 points and depending on the number of issues available to each criterion, websites were categorized in low, medium or high level of content. For the second phase, an e-mail was sent to the enterprises as from a potential customer and was evaluated in three categories: time to respond, response to questions and overall style of answer. Finally, the results of the second section were compared with a selected Italian enterprise which responded to the specific email. The results of the analysis showed that approximately half of the enterprises use the internet as a marketing tool. Most of the enterprises have medium level of content and the 55% responded to the e-mail generally in 2-3 days, replying mostly from 5 to 8 questions with overall style of answer, most of the times, neutral. The Italian reply was far better than the Greek replies with time to respond in 2 hours, answered all the questions and with overall style of answer; being polite and with willingness to help.