eM+C teamed up with us to compile a new survey of 678 marketers. It revealed some compelling information on the kind of budget and time that went into online marketing in 2009 and what is budgeted for 2010.
The relatively low cost of internet marketing versus traditional avenues may have initially brought followers in a failing economy but the steady increase in budget was directly related to the ROI gained from these non-traditional channels.
Kudos to Chad White of Responsys for distilling a lot of really great concepts about “The Inbox of the Not-So-Distant Future” in his most recent article in MediaPost’s EmailInsider. As email marketers, we ultimately need to step into the shoes of our email recipients and understand all the ways in which they will interact with our email within their inbox. The quick synopsis of Chad’s article is:
1. Social media integration – share with your network becomes a key component in every email (and email marketers can segment lists to optimize for Gmail (Google Buzz) or Facebook’s Titan)
2. Mobile – SMS and Email converging has great benefits for things like mobile couponing for retailers
3. Video Lite – animated gifs to appear as a video – see eROI’s Dylan Boyd blog post on “VIV Blows it out with Animated GIFs”
4. Email Browsing – example of Sears using Gmail’s Enhanced Email: browsing module is decided and displayed at the time of open, not the time of send, which allows the information to be as current as possible. An email sent last month pulled today’s best-sellers from Sears.com.
5. Transactions -Email certification of a known trusted sender is especially important for e-commerce clients.
6. Email Management / Sentiment – ExactTarget’s Morgan Stewart wrote in a separate EmailInsider article about a “thumbs-up” button in the inbox to re-inforce positive sentiment in email instead of sledge-hammering the negative world of reporting spam as the only option.
If you dig a little deeper, there is a whole lot more innovation coming to the Future Inbox. Social tools are available to scrape profile info (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and dozens of other social media sites) and append that to your email lists to allow better personalization and segmenting. OpenID frameworks will allow information to be passed more freely between email and any online community through a single username/password that will inherently recognize you from your inbox. The future is near and email is innovating as fast or faster than most other industries. Get ready.
As I looked over my online marketing predictions from last year, what struck me was my tone of optimism in the face of doomsday articles swirling about for 2009. To some degree, 2009 has much to be optimistic about for online marketers. Finally, there is a broad agreement in organizations that the web is an important business and marketing medium, and a greater percentage of marketing dollars are going online (even though overall marketing budgets are flat or slightly down compared to 2008). On the flipside, online marketers are expected to do more with less resources than ever before.
While you may still have the title as Email Marketing Manager, you are likely expected to have some expertise and drive inbound marketing, marketing automation programs, coordinate integration with social media and potentially be the online community manager for your company, closely tie into your search engine marketing program, and all of this is on top of the strategy and implementation of your marketing plan for the year. It’s exhausting and the pressure is on – 2010 is about action and results – and the tension between marketing and sales is going to increase with the demand for quality leads that convert into real sales.
So, let’s cut to the chase and dig into what will happen in 2010. Here are my 11 Web + Email Marketing Predictions:
This year’s theme for our company appreciation party was put to a vote. After the votes were tallied the theme was shrouded in mystery until a team email was sent with the reveal in true eROI Rock star fashion. This year it was fated to be… Summer White Party! Using our new eROI Event system we created a totally themed event that the email linked to. Check out the process for creating The eROI Summer White Party.
The finished product, see how it was done below.
Alcoa presents (sorry, that’s the beginning of a TV commercial of “The Catch” in the 1982 NFL NFC Championship flashback when Dwight Clark levitated to grab a perfect pass from Joe Montana to lift the 49ers over the Cowboys). But, I digress. My mind faded to the dramatic music to Monday Night Football, but it’s now back on the prize – bragging rights to the Third Annual PAF Battle of the Bands at Someday Lounge in Old Town / Chinatown, Portland, Oregon where the creatives show their true colors after dark. If you want to take a look at videos from prior year’s Battle of the Band, now is your time to really soak in some entertaining video for 2008. It’s going to be almost impossible for eROI to win it for yet a third year in a row, but we’re going to bring our “A” Game. Check it (this is PAF’s main event email and all the info is below):
BATTLE OF THE BANDS
DATE:
Wednesday June 17, 2009
TIME:
6:00 pm
PLACE:
Someday Lounge
224 NW 5th Avenue
Portland, OR
COST:
$300 per band
Register your Band!
Contact Mike Terry at mterry@magnetoworks.com
Here is my twitter stream from this morning’s Portland Business Journal Power Breakfast event where Ziba Founder, Sohrab Vossoughi, inspired me from a creative and entrepreneurial standpoint. Sorry for the upside down notes, but you’ve got to start at the bottom and read up:
Kevin Tate, a buddy of mine, had an awesome analogy featured on the front page of the Oregonian today in the article “Tech entrepreneurs defy recession” by Mike Rogoway. Here’s the excerpt from the article with Kevin’s quote that really got me thinking from a different mindset:
“Portland fosters the creation of small, furry mammals rather than dinosaurs — the really big things,” said Kevin Tate, 35, CEO of StepChange Group, a social media advertising and marketing specialist in the Pearl District. The “dinosaur” model of big corporate campuses and regimented software development (think Microsoft — or even Google) is going by the wayside, Tate said, in favor of more informal and collaborative arrangements. Portland’s current high-tech foment positions the state well to capitalize when the recession ends, provided its technology entrepreneurs have the appetite to take it on. “What happens when things start coming back?” Tate asked. “Will the small, furry mammals evolve?”
Nearly 9 years ago, 7 mainly tech start-up entrepreneurs co-founded a group called Starve Ups. We all survived the dot com implosion, but were influenced by really wanting to scale our companies for growth. Some Starve Ups companies have grown a little faster than others, but many contain a desire to do something world-changing with our companies through software, social good, amazing company culture or all of the above. I really like Kevin’s quote because it is accurate and represents a strong contingent in Portland’s software community, but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that our dream is to do something bigger and be more like a lion than a forgettable Chihuahua. So, how do we get there? Lack of capital is usually at the top of the list, but our biggest limitation is our mindset. Let’s grow game-changing, sustainable software businesses in Portland and tout Portland’s livability and balance as a BONUS, not a detriment to growth.
Comment below with your ideas of a more representative furry mammal for Portland.
If you’ve got a couple hours to spare, then you should read this whole 176 page report. If you only have 5 minutes, it’s worth skimming thru the online pages. Razorfish, one of the largest digital agencies in the world, did a phenomenal job with laying out the landscape of online for the first half of this year (I don’t think anyone can accurately predict what’s going to happen 6 months from now, but I am an optimist and think our industry will grow at a healthy clip in the second half).
Here’s the Big Online Report – Enjoy!
http://digitaloutlook.razorfish.com/publication/?i=13617
Let’s review my online predictions for 2009. OK, I admit it – the easy ones are not happening nearly as fast as I thought they would. Let’s just look at the first 3 of 10:
10. My Dad will use Twitter for first time and get hooked What’s up Dad? You are addicted to your Crackberry just like President Obama, all you need to do is download a great app called Twitterberry and you’ll be using Twitter in no time. 10 weeks into the year and still hasn’t come true. Side note: my older sister is using twitter (@3greenmoms) in the past few days to talk about her new company, 3greenmoms.
9. My Mom will get on Facebook and get addicted to chatting non-stop with family and friends Mom, C’mon – you are a chatterbox – the most social woman I know. Facebook is perfect for you. I thought you and my wife would be sharing all of your secrets about how I have food on my face half the time and wear really bad clothes on the weekends. I guess you’re not there yet. When we see you and Dad in a month, we’ll need to do something about this – Facebook is so mainstream now because it’s painfully addictive.
8. Skype and other easy video-creation apps will take off in ‘09 Done. My entire family on my side and my wife’s family all got video cameras / microphones to totally Skype-enable their laptops. It makes for super fun Sat or Sun mornings to check out missing teeth on the kids and other fun things to visualize. Nicely done.
Okay, I admit it – I am still more of a Twitter lurker than anything so far. I do occasionally throw a thought or 2 up but find it still a little difficult since I’m usually caught between 6 different things at any given time. One moment I could be grooving to some great new music while scanning the plethora of fantastic news and info beamed to me via Google Reader. Meanwhile, I’m likely having a conversation with one of my super hero Account Execs about a particular client/project situation and also thinking about the email I was in the middle of replying to before I began to think about how much I like this one song…
So then I turn to Twitter and gag. Gee, any of this is really worth a tweet, right? Then I get distracted by someone or something else that needs immediate attention. By the time I get back to Twitter the moment has passed and I’m on to 6 other things and the cycle starts all over again. Yikes! Therein lies my dilemma. I want to share these things but I don’t want to be one of the those folks suffering from “Twitterhea” either –you know who you are. Your constant blathering has to be a sign of some sort of neurosis.
In case you missed them, here is one post with all 10 eROI Online Marketing Predictions for 2009:
10. My Dad will use Twitter for first time and get hooked
9. My Mom will get on Facebook and get addicted to chatting non-stop with family and friends
8. Skype and other easy video-creation apps will take off in ‘09
7. Open-source, powerful tools like WordPress and Magento will become more like social apps and promote UGC (User-Generated Content)
5. Email is a whole lot more mobile today, but the formatting is still crap. You’ll see this improve dramatically in ‘09.
4. Social TV on your computer will become more popular than Regular TV among core online users.
2. CRM and Email Automation
1. The Economy will grow in ’09! Optimism will Conquer Fear.
2. CRM and Email Automation
–- In challenging economic times, all companies will adapt to become more sales and service focused through email triggers on their sites from Resource Centers, Product Purchase, Lead Capture, etc.
1. The Economy will grow in ’09! Optimism will Conquer Fear.
– As I mentioned in a previous blog post, fear is so 2008 (actually, I said “fear is so Bush,” but let’s not split hairs here). One of my colleagues who runs a public relations firm told me that much of the media simply will NOT publish any optimistic, success stories – they don’t sell. So, there is the reality that 2008 was a slightly (and let me emphasize ’slightly’) down year overall for the economy. Then, the AMPLIFIER effect of the media has greatly exacerbated the depression perception on the financial markets, consumers, home-buyers, and businesses. After 4 months of doom and gloom reporting, real humanizing success stories will begin selling again. I’m not predicting that the economy will come roaring back, but it will steadily rise throughout ‘09.
When I was a financial analyst for Intel supporting their Sales and Marketing Group, the theme for one annual worldwide sales conference was “Believe it and Achieve it!” Yes, it is a cheesy theme, but there is merit to it. Believing in your success is so much more productive to build your company whereas fear is like acid and it eats away all productivity. The second ingredient to bringing the economy back is hard work. It’s doing more with less. In the recent past at eROI, as soon as we won several new projects, we would hire more employees. Now, we are putting more programs in place to retain and reward our rockstar employees and working with contractors in high-demand and high-growth times throughout the year. Since Labor Day, I am personally putting in 30% more hours (65 hrs/wk vs. 50 hrs/wk) in nearly every aspect of the job of CEO, CFO, strategic planning, sales, marketing, PR, blogging, client outreach, networking, high-level product development, and employee management. I’ve always prided myself on a work-life balance, but that will have to wait a bit until all signs show a strong recovery. While 2009 may not be a life balance year, I predict it will be a strong economic growth year overall for the U.S. economy, but especially in the online marketing industry.
4. Social TV on your computer will become more popular than Regular TV among core online users.
One example of this is a partnership between two startups – SplashCast Media and Hulu.com. The two companies are innovating and creating a whole new experience of Social TV for re-runs of my favorite shows – 30 Rock, The Office, and others shown below. Tech entrepreneurs have been espousing the advent of Interactive TV for 15 years, but Social TV is so much cooler – it feels like hundreds of your friends are watching the same TV show at the same time, commenting on it, IMing, and doing so in text, voice, or video comments.
3. Advanced site search is becoming so natural and intuitive – marketers will prioritize this as an easy implementation with huge ROI for their site.
Search applies to more than just Google. In the business world, we want to be as productive as humanly possible and find a needle in a haystack within milliseconds – this is becoming possible within your own website or web applications with intuitive site search.
6. Email campaigns and customer life-cycle email triggers will integrate seamlessly into social networking sites and tools.
–Yes, this functionality has already started to happen within a few Email Service Providers (ESP), but it will become much more prevalent. We have started to see the easy use of ShareThis or AddThis type of technology in some ESPs but we will start to see true use of the integration into Facebook, Twitter and other micro-blogging systems as the year progresses. What will make any of this impactful to your email campaigns will be IF the consumer adopts using it. It is the new FTF (Forward to Friend) of the social age and may be seen as less intrusive as a medium than forwarding an email to someone. The benefit of this: 1. It will permeate more than just 1 person and can be seen by others following or “Friends” of that person you send it to in their update stream. 2. It has some SEO lift with content being placed into the social media stream of consciousness that sticks past the inbox and gets deeper into the web. This means that you should be more cognizant of the terms, links and key words you are using in your copy as this can only help you organically. And yet at the same time it can also attach content like Google AdWords and other keyword relevant ad servers against your content.
5. Email is a whole lot more mobile today, but the formatting is still crap. You’ll see this improve dramatically in ‘09.
–10% of social network users are already using mobile as the main way that they are accessing and updating content. This ties into the email use as well on mobile devices. They go hand in hand in uptick. And we are also seeing data plans for mobile web going to unlimited status of use in plans while mobile carriers are still sticking to the old notion of minutes of airtime as a billing method. To me this means that more people will use the mobile web more than voice as a way to control costs.
8. Skype and other easy video-creation apps will take off in ‘09
– I know Skype has been around a little while and it has been incredibly easy and cheap for people with MacBooks or other laptops with built-in cameras and microphones to video conference with their families or business colleagues for a couple years, but Macs only have a tiny market share and PCs are finally getting the picture with affordable add-ons to older machines or built-in cameras/mics in new machines. The Logitech laptop camera was the most popular gift for Christmas among my wife’s extended family this year.
Ok – so this prediction is pretty predictable. Video sites like Hulu.com have won awards and gained massive popularity in 2008, but new applications like Ontier, SplashCast, and others will take video sites to the next level. Hardware has also become so much more affordable to produce decent quality video – besides video being built into most digital cameras, the big game-changer in ‘08 was the Flip camera which will become even more prevalent in ‘09 and drive even more user-generated video and social video.
7. Open-source, powerful tools like WordPress and Magento will become more like social apps and promote UGC (User-Generated Content)
– Last year’s predictions mentioned white-label collaboration software platforms like KickApps, Clearspace, and Ning. Each of these apps gained significant traction in ‘08, but open-source platforms like WordPress’s BuddyPress will gain market share in ‘09. WordPress has already become the standard for blog software and is being used by more web developers as a solid content management system for websites. It only makes sense to extend WordPress into the social networking realm as BuddyPress will do when it launches in ‘09. Additionally, one open-source e-commerce application called Magento which has risen to the top for its stability, feature-set, and ability to customize each interface. Magento already has social networking capabilities like UGC customer reviews, but they will have more developments in integration of social platforms including e-commerce widgets, etc.
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