Over 80 percent of these MSMEs prefer .com domain names as their online destination. Micro, small as well as medium sized businesses find online media relevant for their business. This is true especially for MSMEs that engage in Travel/ Trade and Logistics, IT/ITES, BFSI and Education businesses.
The report further finds that amongst various online tools, micro and small enterprises rank websites highest in relevance. There are about 1.35 million small and micro enterprises that own websites and that number is likely to grow 3 times its size to about 4 million by 2020.
The key step towards creating a branded online presence is to register a domain name and the report describes the awareness and preference levels of various domains available in India. Clearly, .com domain not only has the highest top of mind recall (81 percent), but also, is the most preferred top-level domain (82 percent) for small, medium and micro enterprises in the country. The main reason for this is that .com domain names are universally used, trustworthy and easy to remember.
The report also highlights the adoption of social media, particularly amongst Micro (<10 employees) and medium sized (11-100 employees) organizations. However, as organization size increases (101 – 500 employee, 13 per cent), there seems to be lower relevance attached to social media.
This is probably because as an organization scales up, it becomes important to have a single branded destination such as a website to get discovered, which is integrated with various social media channels, which are useful for engagement.
The report elaborates on both current and future adoption rates across industry verticals for websites and online media. Retail vertical ranks lowest in adoption of online media. Of the 9 verticals, Retail, which comprises 20 per cent of the MSME universe, has only 4 percent adoption of website, whereas IT/ITES vertical which comprises 8 percent of the MSME universe tops the adoption of website with 36 percent.
MSMEs from retail and healthcare verticals, which show lower adoption of website in their business, cite several reasons like lack of tech savvy amongst their customers, their perception of relevance of websites only for larger organizations, the myth that their business does not need a website and lack of adoption by their peers. The table below provides interesting insight for non-adoption.
700,000 branded emails and this number is likely to grow by around 20% in a year’s time to 830,000 users. While IT/ITES, Education and Travel / Trade and Logistics lead the pack of corporate email id adopters, adoption in near future will be driven by Manufacturing, Healthcare and Retail verticals.
Manufacturing, BFSI and Retail are amongst the key verticals that will witness a faster adoption of websites by MSMEs in the near future. Website adoption rates in these verticals are lower as compared to other verticals. MSMEs engaged in IT/ITES, will see a relatively lower rate of adoption of website because there is high adoption there already.
The research finds that most MSMEs feel that having an online presence can help in enhancing the professional image of their organization in front of their client. Hence, the next time new business cards are printed, they are likely to have a .com domain name.
