Is Email Marketing Still Relevant?

In recent time there is a lot of talk about email marketing as dying art. The evident of social media have made many pundits to augur that email marketing would lose its place as a preferred online marketing tool. I still believe that email to in-house lists is the most effective forms of online advertising. I am in Digital marketing since last five years and I have used email marketing to in-house lists with open rate as good as 20%.


Here are some facts about Email Marketing:
1.Despite spam, almost 80 percent of consumers subscribe to receive messages from companies.
2.45 percent of U.S. email users think that "e-mail is a great way for companies to stay in touch
3.Most B2C and B2B marketers expect the impact of email marketing to increase in coming days.
4.U.S. Internet users spend 15 percent of total Internet time one mail.
5.Email has among the highest return on investment (ROI) index of all marketing channels.

Figure: Integration of web presence using email

Following are some of Advantages of email marketing:
1. It is Inexpensive: Email is far less expensive on a cost-per-contact basis than other advertising options, including banner ads, print advertising, and telemarketing.
2. Email Marketing Campaign Results are Measurable: Reports can be generated on the number of emails opened by your recipients (open-ups) and the number of times your embedded links were clicked (click-throughs).

Figure:Sample of Report

3. Email Has Wide Reach: Email is most widely reached medium of the internet. People access their mails on mobile as well, hence you can reach customer any where anytime.
4. Email Drives Web Site Traffic and Lead generation: Links in mail can drive traffic to website and embedded “call to actions” can help us in generating leads.
5. Email Strengthens Brand Recall: Regularly delivered email messages that contain properly titled subject lines and logos reinforce company and product awareness.

Asia:Consumer or Producer?

Asia is emerging as one of the favorite destination for outsourcing the digitalized form of marketing. The very nature of job in BPO/KPO made India as favorite destination of outsourcing and same would turn true for Digital Marketing as well. For new media marketing location of marketer doesn't matter and hence companies from first world may reduce their cost of marketing operation by efficiently utilizing labor arbitrage.

"But in amidst of all these  ho hoopla ,we forget that Asia is emerging as one of the biggest consumer of New Media as well".I hope following stats would add some value to my statement .

Image Source:www.transactioncompany.com

1.In mobile,  China will have 1.3 billion subscribers and 957 million mobile Web users by 2014.

~eMarketer

2Internet users in Asia Pacific spent more than 5.6 trillion minutes online in 2009, and bought $7 billion in virtual goods, according to the Asia Pacific Digital Marketing Handbook

3.Nearly half of all search activity (44.1 percent) across the region in September 2009 took place on Google; representing 17 billion searches. ~comScore

4.India's Internet population grew to 71 million, a year-on-year increase of 42 percent in 2009; 51 million of them are active users. ~Economic Times

5.Japan has around 21.8 million social network users. Around half of them actively manage their profiles, according to Universal McCann.

6.The Philippines has more than 10.6 million Facebook users and is ranked eighth in the world in terms of countries with highest number of using the social networking site, reports Inside Facebook.

Referefces:www.clickz.com,www.marketingsherpa.com

Rising threat of Internet Security and Privacy

Brian and Dharmesh coined a word “Digital Citizen” in their best seller book, “Inbound Marketing”. The Digital Citizen is a person who has good rapport with web and achieves a lot of personal and business objectives through World Wide Web. One of the very renowned Digital Citizen is Barack Obama.

Advertising Age named Barack Obama as Marketer of the Year for 2008, weeks before the Presidential Election. The honor was the result of a vote from marketers, agency heads and marketing services vendors attending the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference.

Some of the very renowned digital citizens from India are Mr. Shashi Tharoor, Mr. Lalit Modi and Ms. Barkha Dutt (I have started following 33% reservation rule, already).Jokes apart ,these people can influence the thinking of their followers .Now suppose, someone hacks the Twitter /Buzz account of these people. If you are one of digital citizen, you can guess the possible damage.

Good news is that Twitter and Google have started taking measures to protect your account and government is also serious about the threat. In last two days, I came across these two worth sharing news.

News1: Frenchman arrested, targeted Obama Twitter account, 25th March, 2010
An unemployed Frenchman has been arrested for targeting the Twitter accounts of US president Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears.

Read More

News 2: Gmail to alert users to suspicious activity, 24th March, 2010
Google launched a new feature in Gmail on Wednesday that will alert users when the system detects suspicious activity that might indicate the account has been compromised.

Read More:

Let us know about your thought on Internet Security and Privacy.Please comment .

LinkedIn Spamming: IDK and LION explained!

What is IDK?

Do you need an email address every time, when you invite someone on LinkedIn? If yes there is possibility that you are IDKed by some people. IDK is abbreviation of “I don’t know”. When you send an invite to a LinkedIn member they have the opportunity to say “I don’t know” to you. Suppose you are IDKed five times then there is a possibility that you can land up in LinkedIn’s blacklist. And it would hamper your cause of getting connected with the real connections if you don’t remember their email ID.

How to find out who said IDK to you?

• Go to your LinkedIn home page
• Expand the Inbox on the left if it isn’t expanded
• Click Invitations
• On the Invitations page, click Sent in the upper right to see the Invitations that you’ve sent
• Click Status just below it to sort by status
• Now you want to look for the status “Doesn’t Know”, but it will be in alphabetical order in the middle of the following:

o Accepted
o Bounced
o Doesn’t Know
o Replaced
o Sent

How you fix it?

1. Send an apology to LinkedIn’s customer service at cs@linkedin.com, and they will forgive you once for sure.
2. If you get the person’s who IDKed you, to invite you, LinkedIn supposedly removes them from your IDK count.

What is a LION?

LION is abbreviation on LinkedIn Open Networkers. So LIONs, in general, accept invites from anyone or at least will not give you the dreaded “I Don’t Know” as a response to your invitation. But be aware, I have seen some LION doing IDK to some people. Always visit the person’s profile before sending a request to him. If the person is important to have on your network, make your request letter very much compelling. Provide him/her a reason to associate with you. These are early days of social media and everyone is thing about quantity and not quality, but I can assure you things are going to change in near future.

Social media demands commitment! You can’t achieve results in a day !