Crystal Ball Gazing (2009-2014)
December 13, 2009 at 1:48 pm
What better time to cast our minds into the future than coming to the end of the year? Forrester’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 – 2014 makes an interesting read. The US has always been a couple of years ahead of Ireland in online terms. That gap had been narrowing and anecdotal reports from Google Ireland were that the gap had narrowed to about 2 years. Recent economic conditions and the resulting freeze on investing in new and emerging technologies here has seen the gap widen again to about 3 years. However, with the focus on the “Smart Economy” who knows what changes that will bring?
204 US marketers were surveyed in March 2009 by market research company, Forrester, about their marketing plans from now until 2014. I’ve taken the time out to read and absorb the report. Here is my summary with own opinions included (of course!):
Wholesale shift in budget away from traditional to interactive
60% of marketing budgets are moving away from traditional advertising. Kimberly Clark Worldwide Huggies campaign bypassed TV completely to invest in digital media where new moms hang out. Expect to see more of this kind of thing.
What’s been hit?
What To Look Out For
Interactive marketing spend will reach $53 billion by 2014. Where’s this money going to be invested?
Search Dominates Spend
Accounts for 59% of online budgets. It’s expected to grow at 15% per annum to $32billion by 2014. It makes sense – 85% of online consumers search from their desktops at least once a week. If you’re marketing online, search is the first port of call for being found by a wide audience. Mobile search expected to increase – 11% have searched from their mobiles in the first three months of 2009 alone. The search market is growing through expanded keyword search strings. E-Consultancy noted in its Best Practice Guide for Search that as we become more used to search, we are searching using more and more keywords. So the supply of search is also growing.
Email Marketing Continues Healthy Growth
97% use or plan to use email marketing this year and this will continue to grow. Email is enjoying something of a renaissance as marketers grow lists with the promise of ‘green marketing’, as money is shifted away from direct marketing to email marketing, and as effectiveness is improved with linkages to other channels such as user generated ratings and reviews. Sovereign Bank in the US increased its email marketing spend from 10-15% in 2009, and completely skipped the DM piece in its student campaign.
Social Media Fixed Firmly in the Mix
Poster child social media shows the steepest growth of any channel (but remember it’s coming from a lower base) to 34%. Forecast spend on integrated campaigns and agency fees will top $3 billion by 2014. Social media is growing into an established part of the marketing mix – 64% of marketers already build social media apps and another 22% will by the end of 2009. When 42% of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favourite brands through social media applications, the demand is clearly there. It’s still early days yet for social media in terms of types, tools, metrics and benchmarks. Expect to see more engagement in the coming years and not just reach. Forrester foresees that portable identities will enable users to move their social profiles from site to site. So anyone engaged in that space is on to a winner.
Display Ads – Rich and PPC
Recession minded marketers prefer pay-per-click buy over impression-based ones (58% of budgets). Expect this trend to continue even after recession. But we’re still loving our rich media formats which are currently accounting for one-third of budgets; expect this to grow to 45% by 2014. (That means more of those annoying eircom ads where the ‘actors’ wave at us and annoyingly distract us as we browse).
Online Video
Pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll are sold in exactly the same way, so you’d expect the old television-centric agencies to shift their focus into online video anytime soon. With awareness and recall of nearly 300% being achieved by P&G for Charmin pre-roll ads, it would be strange not to see trad agencies dive into this space. The 2007 Forrester forecast predicted widespread adoption of online video and mobile marketing by the end of 2009. This hasn’t yet happened – largely due to the recession and resource-constrained marketers not wishing to trial untested media. But Forrester (2009) predict that online video will kick off big style in mid 2010 following by mobile marketing in early 2011 as marketers emerge from recession. Does that mean that the gap will widen ever more between US and Ireland if they come out of recession first and we lag even further due to the endemic nature our woes?
Mobile Marketing
Reminds me of Smithfield in Dublin – we’re still waiting for it to happen! Mobile marketing is one of the most anticipated, least adopted channels. Why? Complexity around metrics, marketers and carrier relationships, plus limited use of data by consumers have all put the skids on mobile to date and stifled adoption. When the recession is over and marketers are spending on newer channels again, Forrester expect mobile to take off.
Why? There will be increased use of data as devices improve, apps proliferate, and mobile operator competition brings data prices down. We’ll see more strategic apps and less of the gimicks that tend to crowd out the app store currently.
Forrester say that mobile maturity will see some efforts being made at introducing standards – but I don’t think so. We’ve had email for close to 15 years and are nowhere near standards amongst email clients (which is why I support the Email Standards Project and you should too!) – I don’t see the disparate mobile providers and handset manufacturers working together on standards as easily as Forrester expect. But I’d be happy to be wrong!
So What Does It All Mean For Us?
The main lessons I’m taking from this is to continue as we are. First step to promoting your business online is to invest in search and make sure that your business can be found by thge 85% who use search to look for your product. The report refers to US marketers investing more heavily in SEO as PPC gets expensive. I’ve been banging on this mantra for quite some time now. While PPC is great in the short-term, the click costs can be quite high – when you add up what you’re paying Google over a year or two, it makes more economic sense to invest in a listing on the left hand side.
Email marketing continues to bring great results. Whether it’s driving traffic to your site for a sale or promotion, or simply brand-building, keeping your business in front of their minds – it works! It’s been the most regular producing, low risk retention strategy for years. It makes sense as majority of people have emails. Emails are not dying out as had been predicted. In fact, we should soon be seeing the growth of the Social Inbox - fusing the best parts of our inbox as we now know it with control and immediacy of social media apps. Long live email marketing!
Early days for social media – my perception of it in Ireland is that 2009 was indeed a year in which many jumped on the bandwagon – or at least familiarised themselves enough to be ready to jump in 2010. But the message I’m sending time and time again is that social media is for life, not just for Christmas. We’ve all been to the seminars on the amazing results that can be achieved, some of us may understand that the creative costs aren’t that high compared to other media. But it’s the ongoing resourcing and dedicating of time to engage with the people we’ve tried so hard to reach – that’s the bit that costs money and that, sadly, is missing in many cases. Don’t just take my word for it. Seth Godin puts it like this:
Dating is a process. So is losing weight, being a public company and building a brand.
On the other hand, putting up a trade show booth is an event. So are going public and having surgery.
Events are easier to manage, pay for and get excited about. Processes build results for the long haul.
Tags: email marketing trends 2010, internet marketing trends 2010, social media trends 2010
Next Training Dates
December 3, 2009 at 8:43 am
Due to the general mayhem of work before Christmas, I’ve decided to put all the training courses off until after Christmas. Next training dates for Web Copywriting Training, Blogging Training, Internet Marketing Training, and the Social Media Widgets will be announced as soon as the training rooms are booked.
Tags: blogging training, internet marketing training ireland, social media training, web copywriting training
Beautiful Example of Email
November 19, 2009 at 8:45 am
This lovely specimen landed in my inbox yesterday. It’s a beautiful email – nice design, the right amount of content, a few little things I’d tidy up such as the ‘click here’ button but overall it’s nice to see a business that’s not got a huge budget doing something so right.
Tags: Nice Email
E-Tenders Fail
July 14, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Some time last year I signed up for the e-tenders email. I thought I might have a hope in hell of winning business from the public sector. I applied for a few, didn’t get them, but when I saw who got them, I decided it’s not worth my while – I don’t have a track record of delivering public sector projects, so no matter how good my work is (and how superior it is to some of the project winners), I can forget about it.
It is not possible to simply click and remove yourself from the e-tenders email.
What? A Government approved vehicle is breaking the law?
Shocking but true.
The email ends with an old school double line – no mention of unsubscribe button here:
A quick shimmy on over to the e-tenders website, and it’s a little opaque. You’d expect you could stop your email newsletter by clicking on Notice Alerts Service. That is the logical place where you would manage your subscriptions to alerts. But no. You have to click on your personal details, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and that’s where you can stop things being sent to you.
At first I didn’t get this, so I hit contact us, asked them to remove me, and got the ‘we will respond to this in one working day.” That gives them til Wed at 6pm. Let’s see if they live up to that promise.
In the meantime, here’s to another government website that doesn’t adhere to its own rules. Should we let our friends at the Data Protection Commissioners know? 
Tags: e-tenders fail, irish government websites, public sector tendering process
It Is Broke, So Let’s Fix It
June 25, 2009 at 9:23 am
I’m a proud supporter of the Email Standards Project; a project born out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients. Due to the lack of standards in email clients (ie. Outlook, Gmail, etc.) when we create email marketing templates we are very restricted with what we can do to make them render well in every client. The Email Standards Project is a community effort to improve the standards and make life easier on us and better for clients.
There’s a big push on right now – and we’re looking at you Microsoft!
Microsoft has just confirmed that it intends to use the cripplied Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.
- This means for the next 5 years, we will have to continue to use tables for layouts on email designs.
- We’ll continue to be afraid to use CSS like float and position and background images are still a big no no.
- That’s not even considering the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.
For many people out there in corporate-land, Outlook IS email. It would make life so much better if Microsoft took the big step of addressing the problems that are inherent in Word rendering. If you’ve ever tried to copy and paste text from a Word doc into, say, WordPress and you see dodgy looking code… that’s the good ole Word rendering killing the beauty of your work.
Utilising The Power of Twitter
Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft has announced they want to hear your feedback on this decision. Let them hear it! It’s time for the email marketing and design community to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.
20,000 individuals sent a message to Microsoft since yesterday via Twitter. You can see all those lovely smiling faces here. This has forced Microsoft to respond – kudos for the speed of response, but a little sour in my opinion by trying to diss the Email Standards Project as “not representing a sanctioned standard or industry consensus in this area.”
If you are involved with email template design – either as a designer, client, or indeed recipient, please take the time out to add your voice to the throng. If Apple and Yahoo are happy to work on standards, why not Microsoft? If MS came to the table, it would be a huge benefit to everyone in the community.
Tags: Email Marketing, Email Marketing Ireland, Email Standards Project, Microsoft Outlook 2010
Update on KLM Spam Email
April 28, 2009 at 9:17 am
I contacted the Data Protection Commissioners to find out more about the status of my spam email complaint about KLM. They wrote to KLM on 3 April and again on 20 April. They have also written to the Privacy Office of KLM which is based in Holland.
[All these letters - it's very exciting... in a postal kind of way]
To date KLM has been ignoring them. But now they’ve been onto the Dutch equivalent of the Data Protection Commissioners – and there’s an all Europe-wide APB out for them… No, actually they have provided more contact details for our guys to follow up on.
We’ll wait and see if big corporate KLM chooses to engage or ignore.
Tags: Data Protection Commissioners, KLM Spam Email
Do You Respond Well To Sex?
April 21, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Recently I ran a little test. I was sending a mail out to a group who all knew me the same amount. No-one knew me more than others. Given that the list size was large enough and the conditions were similar, I thought it was a good opportunity to run a test about how well we respond to seeing pics of men or women flashed in front of us.
The content of the email was a series of training offers, aimed at a business audience. Two versions of the email were produced one with a zany man image and one with a zany woman image:
The list was split.
- Half of the list were given the ‘correct’ picture, ie. a woman was presented with a picture of a woman. A man was presented with a picture of a man.
- The other half of the list were shown the ‘wrong’ picture, ie. women were presented with the image of the man, and vice versa.
The results were interesting although what I expected:
The click rates were the most marked. Click rates were highest when you display the ‘correct’ picture to the sample. This proves the point that people like to see people online, and it would appear they like to see people like themselves. Women would appear to be a little more tolerant when shown an image not like them. Men don’t like it at all! Or else they simply detested the lady in the striped top in the sample.
The effect of the image wouldn’t have had such an impact on the open rates as not everyone uses preview panels, so many would open the email based on subject line and sender alone.
For anyone who clicked on this post based on title alone, sorry if you’re disappointed!
Tags: email marketing testing, People like to see people
Update on KLM Complaint
April 6, 2009 at 10:31 am
It’s taken a bit of to-ing and fro-ing in order to get the Data Protection Commissioners to:
(a) accept that mine was an official complaint – and hence one demanding action on their part
(b) use my name and not call me “To Whom It May Concern”
Now that we’ve got that established, I received a reply on Friday from one Alan O’Grady which put my mind at rest a bit (the using their full legal powers bit):
But why do the need 10-12 weeks to respond?
That’s 3 months; a short jail term. In that time, at the rate that KLM is spamming me, I’ll have received around 12 more emails from them. That’s not acceptable.
The next line in the Data Protection Commissioner’s email reveals their true intention:
My experience from the other episode with the Golden Spiders spamming me is that this line means the offending (large) company who is doing the spamming can get away with saying they are sorry and possibly giving a donation to a charity to make us all feel better. In my experience, despite not really being satisfied with this, I accepted – and then I still had to push the Data Protection Commissioners to make the Golden Spiders pay.
So in light of this, I am going to reply to Mr O’Grady today and ask him to confirm in writing for me that if it does go to this settlement, that he will confirm that any settlement will be received within 14 days and will not necessitate me having to spend more of my time chasing it up.
Already I’m weary.
A question: I am one person complaining about the KLM emails. If we were a group of 10 or 20 or 50 individuals making a similar complaint, would the Data Protection Commissioners
(a) take the same amount of time? (12 weeks)
(b) still go for an amicable resolution?
If yes to the latter, then I think that’s wrong. If a large group of people are sufficiently angry to make a complaint, why does the offender get treated in exactly the same way?
Tags: Data Protection Commissioners, KLM Email Spam
KLM’s Email Marketing
March 31, 2009 at 12:47 pm
It really annoys me when the big guys with the large budgets blatantly break the law, especially when it comes to email marketing. Airlines are particularly bad. Today’s Law Breaking Emailing Airline is KLM.
Story So Far
- I recently entered a competition to win a prize to somewhere fabulous with KLM. I did not tick the box to receive email offers from them, and I remember thinking at the time whether I was in with a hope in hell of winning. Question: do you think marketers will ever give a prize out to someone who hasn’t taken the action that they wanted?
- Since then I have received 3 emails from KLM Ireland since Feb 27. None of these emails give me the ability to unsubscribe. That is against the law. It’s also pretty basic. Why would you want to market to people who do not want to receive things from you? You’re also wrecking your own stats.
What Can I Do?
- How do I get my name off their list?
- Is it going to be like the case with Easy Jet France when I booked a flight with them in 2003 and they are still sending me emails in French – ones which I need to login to their site with a user name and password to get off?
- I’d be tempted to take this one to the Data Protection Commissioners again. After all, KLM is a giant corporate that is deliberately flouting the law. But when I look at the registration of the email address being used to send this piece of spam, I find that it’s KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in Schipol. Will our intrepid Data Protection Commissioners have the will to take it up with someone outside of our little emerald jurisdiction?
If you have any suggestions on how I might get my name off this list in an obstrusive fashion, I’d love to know.
Bottom of KLM Spam Email, no opt-out:
Bottom of Aer Lingus Email, with opt-out:
aer lingus does it right
Tags: KLM Spam Email
RTE Asks Us What We Think
March 18, 2009 at 12:21 pm
I dislike RTE because:
- Presenters way past their sell-by dates get paid exorbitant amounts to annoy us. Same presenters wouldn’t be employable outside of the state broadcaster. And why is Lucy Kennedy everywhere? I don’t know anyone who finds her amusing or even talented.
- The website uses Windows Players for video content. Mac users are unable to access. This flagrant ignorance really annoys me.
- They don’t take risks like UK channels do. I’m not talking ground-breaking risks, but just mild ones like actually allowing 20-somethings write comedy rather than 40 year old men who know nothing but just happen to be on the Montrose payroll (The English Class, Leave it to Mrs O’Brien, The Big Bow Wow anyone?)
But giving credit where it’s due, RTE is finally doing something that should be applauded. Acknowledging that ‘television is changing’ they put out a call 5 months ago for film makers to put forward new and creative ideas for drama. The finalists are now over on the Storyland part of the site and we the people of Ireland can vote for the ones we’d like to see produced into a second episode.
Amazingly, the videos can be viewed by all! They play as Flash videos. Now why can’t the good people behind Storyland have a word with their colleagues over on the main site?
You’ve got until 5pm on Monday 30 March to cast your vote. Go now.
I don’t want to sound like a whinger here, but the few I’ve looked at all look crap.
- Happy Slapper is just 29 seconds long and doesn’t reveal enough
- The intro to Pub World is too long, it took about 2 minutes (out of 4) before anything actually happened. Lots of overacting man looking surprised in pub before that.
- Chez Spuds‘ description reads well, but I stopped it after 10 seconds as it looks like another attempt at humour not working
- Same for Rental Boys. I like the concept, but unfortunately it’s another bad example of stereotypes.
I applaud RTE for this ground-breaking attempt at user generated content. But it’s just not doing it for me.
PS – I don’t hate all of RTE’s stuff. Last year’s drama ‘Raw’ was worth staying in for. Excellent stuff.
Tags: RTE Storyland
