eROI Days Email Agency

It is hard these days not to notice the amount of people on the streets, in their cars, riding buses and even enjoying a meal while navigating through a mobile device.  What does this mean for marketing? The amount of time consumers are spending on mobile devices is increasing day by day. What have marketers done to tap into the new, dynamic phase of mobile marketing and how does social media fit in?

eROI decided to find out by conducting a study of over 500 marketers to see what their current attitudes were towards mobile marketing and social media trends.

Get a brief on our study from ClickZ

Our study was geared towards learning:

• The interest in mobile marketing to marketers, if any.
• The importance of mobile marketing and social media to the marketer.
• How the marketer is integrating the media and how much research is being done to optimize it.

The study was successful and informative if not a bit surprising. If 91% of the US population uses a mobile device, what are the marketers really doing to access those consumers? Get the full study here…

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:

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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.

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.

It’s that time of the year again.  If you want to see what my predictions were last year, check them out here.  One of the topics that is dominating the hearts and minds of most of us over the past 3 months is the economy. I wanted to think outside of the context of a stilted economy and talk about all the things that could be possible in the online marketing world based on emerging trends and technology.  So here goes:

10. My Dad will use Twitter for first time and get hooked
— Most of us in the online marketing industry have been using Twitter for a year or more, but it hasn’t been commonly used outside the technical demographic. That will change in ’09. Twitter has reached the tipping point where this new communication channel is promoted and used throughout traditional and online media. Twitter is being promoted as another channel on NPR, NY Times, and hundreds of other media companies. Thousands of Corporations have set up corporate twitter profiles and manage them daily (automatically through RSS feeds like the eROI Twitter profile or manually through Twitter.com).

But, let’s talk about my Dad for a second. He’s turning 66 in two weeks. Like many 60-something business execs, he is pretty addicted to his Blackberry. True to the culture of his age group, I’ll often get 1000 word manifesto emails that he typed out with his thumbs over the course of an hour on his Blackberry. However, I see less and less long emails sent from his Blackberry and my Dad is adopting a quicker version of things on his Blackberry. I think some of his younger partners or employees will introduce him to TwitterBerry and he will enjoy the benefit of keeping updates on close business colleagues and friends. Then, he’ll start to use TweetDeck on his laptop and soon he’ll be hooked. Maybe, he’ll turn into a Binge Tweeter like me.

9. My Mom will get on Facebook and get addicted to chatting non-stop with family and friends
— Facebook is becoming the essential social web app for all demographics. Over the holiday break, I’ve been lounging online (something I never have time to really do in the productivity of the work week) – playing around with Facebook and it’s amazing how much social value it has as more and more friends join your network. My wife created her profile on Facebook a month ago and is already far surpassing me with her use of it – chatting with her girlfriends, uploading and sharing photos, videos, commenting on other photos. She hasn’t gotten into a lot of Facebook apps, but that will happen next week, I’m sure. Men, let’s face it. Women are far better communicators than we are. Case in point – play Taboo, Cranium, or any communication-based board game where it is women vs. men and women will win every single time. Therefore, women like my wife and my Mom thrive in the Facebook environment. In fact, I predict that my wife introduces my Mom into Facebook and then there will be no more secrets. Game over.