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…

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:

1. Email, Search, AND Social (the 3rd staple of online marketing)
In an online marketing survey study that we did with eM+C in December’09 on 2009 trends (which will be published in mid-January 2010), we asked online marketers which online marketing channels they used.  By far, email, search, and social were clearly the 3 most used channels.  Within the social media channel, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs were the areas that marketers spend the most time and energy into building.  This trend will only increase in 2010 to the point where Email Marketing and Search Marketing will be joined by Social Marketing as the 3 pillars that make up the backbone of online marketing.

2. Location, Geo-Based Apps
Mobile, mobile, mobile. Yes, mobile has reached critical mass. Marketers have noticed. At eROI, we’re being asked to launch mobile-friendly websites and for our client’s primary site, integrate feeds for location-based social media tools.  Additionally, there are several apps that take advantage of broadcasting your location to friends -  like Foursquare, BrightKite, and even a little Portland start-up named Shizzow that are basically like Geography-based Twitter.  The purpose is to get your friends or business associates to meet up through happy accidents of learning you are nearby and stumbling upon a quick informal meetup.  In our voyeuristic times, these apps take transparency and over-sharing to the next level.  And, of course, email alerts are the backbone of this channel so you know when your friends are nearby.  With smart phones automatically detecting your location, this new channel of geo-based mobile apps is incredibly intuitive and its uses will take off in 2010 (pet companies rolling out mobile apps to find nearest dog park or doggie daycare; coffee shops and retailers promoting mobile coupons when you are within 100 feet of the store; the uses are endless and our addiction to our mobile devices and their community of apps grows deeper).

3. Real-time web
Twitter started this trend (and Facebook and Friendfeed quickly caught on) and now the demand is there from consumers to constantly want to know what the collective human consciousness is around any and every topic.  People want to know what is happening NOW and what people are thinking/feeling/perceiving/eating/breathing/doing NOW.  Marketers will adapt and drive this trend even stronger in 2010 by creating ways for people to rate, review, and comment through their mobile phone or laptop on what they are thinking/feeling/perceiving/eating/breathing/doing and those apps will be searchable and able to be filtered so others can gain insight from what’s happening now.

4. Advanced collaboration, online community
To many companies, collaboration tools for internal communication or to create branded online communities for customers were expensive and time-intensive to get off the ground.  Now, Google steps in with a free tool Google Wave that isn’t perfect by any stretch, but is a great start to prove the value of collaboration and idea-sharing within companies.  As far as external communities where customers share insights, tips+tricks, examples, and resources with other customers, there will always be some extra effort put into strategy and user-design to make sure this is thought-out and customized to your brand.  There are some great open source tools like BuddyPress and other enterprise tools like Kickapps, Jive Software, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint.

5. Integration of database apps (OpenID standard)
Email Marketers have seen the advantage of smart integrations between their email marketing application and their CRM (Salesforce.com is most common), social tools (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and publishing RSS to Email), ecommerce apps, and other database apps. This is a big push for us at eROI in 2010.

From a web user perspective, open platforms like Facebook Connect and Twitter allow me to seemlessly scrape my profile info and my friends profiles and connections into new applications (cool client examples to check out are Moonit and Wacom).  In 2010, you’ll see more web applications and online communities really start using OpenID as a standard to port your profile information and have 1 single username/password across the web.  There is such information overload that users are going to demand standards like OpenID to keep it as simple as possible.

6. Email Campaigns: Doing the Unexpected
Email design best practices are great – they tell us all the components we need in a successful campaign – subject line, email pre-header, header, main body, footer, call to action, offer, concise copy with relevant messaging, landing page, lead capture, optimized auto-responders based on subscriber behavior, and the list continues.  However, following the book on everything, including a prescripted design, can make your email predictable and email recipients take notice.  eROI’s Dylan Boyd points out a few unexpected email design strategies and tactics:
Animated GIFs? You Bet.
The Test: Vertical vs. Horizontal Email

7. Analytics: Measure Everything Every Second
Marketers have always dreamed of one marketing dashboard that pulls tracking from all marketing channels (email, search, social, events, referrals, etc) and systems (CRM, marketing automation, POS, financials) into one screen – never going to happen – there is just too much to measure and specialized tools for each medium do a much better job than all-in-one dashboards.  The clear emerging leader in tracking and analyzing social media metrics is Radian6.  It will be fascinating to see how marketers will tie all their tracking data together from these many disparate applications.

8. Information Overload: Content Filters
Based on human behavior since the dawn of time, we’ve always been most influenced with our activities, our buying decisions, and our own worldview by what our friends and family suggest.  In today’s world, this is more tangible than ever – our friends become our filter for most content we consume on the web (Facebook Connect integrated into more and more web services is a perfect example of this).  News aggregators like Google News and MyYahoo will need to integrate friend content filters like Facebook Connect to stay relevant.

9. Augmented Reality
“Beam me up, Scotty.” As Kevin Arthur points out in his iMedia Connection article ‘Techie Toy or Targeted Tool’: “Augmented reality is essentially combining the real world with digitally created images. The technology gives users the ability to control their environment using sound and compelling visuals.  AR brings “tactile” imaginary element to the interactive experience.”  Augmented reality (AR) is really cool technology – it allows brands like Topps bring its physical playing cards alive in 3D interactivity with users. AR allows people to project 3D presentations from their smart phones. AR allows physical products come to life in retail stores increasing sales conversions at point of sale.  It’s the stuff of the future, which is why I think it’s going to take a couple years for people to adopt this technology.  It has a whole lot more value and user scenarios beyond the limited value of Second Life’s virtual world, and AR will be the talk of marketing conferences in 2010 (it just won’t be widely adopted until later).

10. Keep your monitor, Recycle your TV box
What’s the point of your TV box when you can watch most of your favorite TV programs, sports, and films online on Hulu, ESPN, Netflix, and others.  Simply, hook up your laptop or old computer with a wireless Internet connection to a killer flat-screen monitor and you’ve now got a Smart TV to go along with your Smart phone all the while taking advantage of the kinda-smart, real-time web where online video is becoming standard and more engaging then ever before.

11. Anti-ADD; Deep Thinking App
All of us have done some planning (business plan, marketing plan, 2010 marketing calendar) for 2010 over the past couple months, and it makes you very aware of all the distractions that we have throughout the course of the day, the hour, the minute, the second.  Our most effective planning sessions were out of the office, without laptops, in a simple room with a whiteboard and marker.  Even as I write this article, I have new emails pop-up in the bottom right-corner of my screen, tweets from Tweetdeck in the top right of my screen, and I turned my Google Chat off for a little focus.  Fortunately, I have an outline to work from that I actually wrote with pen on paper – so old-school.  For managers and executives (and everyone really), there must be an application that shuts out all other applications, emits soothing white-noise and allows us to really think so we aren’t constantly distracted and reacting.  More of us place a greater value on this “thinking time” for parts of our day as we live and thrive in this increasingly ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) world that we are perpetuating.  Thank you Deep-Thinking App of 2010 – you are my friend.

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.

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.

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.

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.