This year’s 29% growth rate will slow to about 24% in 2011, and growth will continue steadily in the double-digits through 2014 as the market matures.
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Based on the quantity and quality of leads generated, companies said email was their best lead generation program, followed by live events, website registrations and webinars. The effectiveness of online channels, coupled with the fact that prospects indicate the web is the first place they look for more information, makes it natural for companies to be increasing their investments in web design, email marketing and search engine optimization.
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In a survey of shoppers in four states, nearly four in 10 told cross-channel commerce solutions provider CrossView they preferred to receive promotional messages from retailers by email. It was the most popular communications channel, with direct mail drawing about a quarter of respondents and text messaging coming in third with 18%. Just 9% of shoppers were interested in promotional messages on social media.
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CHART OF THE DAY: Craigslist’s Traffic Crashes Into eBay |
Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put out a massive report on Internet stocks today, and this chart showing eBay’s tanking traffic jumped out at us. Mahaney says, “these long-term very negative traffic trends point to the possibility of sustained eBay U.S. Marketplace underperformance going forward.” |
CHART OF THE DAY: Here’s What People Are Actually Doing With Their Cellphones |
Some 34% of cellphone owners polled this year send and receive email on their mobile devices, up about one-third from 25% last year. Some 38% “access the Internet,” also up from about 25% last year. |
Many social media marketers are eager to tie a hard number to the value of their efforts. To that end, firms have attempted to analyze the worth of fans and followers on social networking sites like Facebook.
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Digital consulting firm Syncapse and research company Hotspex have come up with an empirical formula that puts an average value of $136.38 on the Facebook fans of the site’s 20 biggest corporate brands. Most of that value comes from how much the fans will spend on the brand’s products, with additional dollars coming from customer loyalty, recommendations and earned media.
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The study found that people spent significantly more on products they were fans of, compared with consumers who were not fans. In the case of many of Facebook’s most popular food and beverage marketers, fan spending was more than double that of non-fans.
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The pattern of increased fan spending held across all of the top 20 brands on Facebook, with differences ranging from 51% for Oreo fans to 168% for fans of Nokia.
Read more at www.emarketer.com |
Social Media No. 1 Emerging Channel for Lead Gen |
| Tech marketers tap social for finding new customers |
 Facebook served 16% of all display ads in Q1 of this year, according to comScore, making it the largest online display ad publisher in the US—handily beating #2 Yahoo, reports ClickZ.
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Facebook’s growth is impressive whether compared to its Q4 numbers or Yahoo’s numbers. In Q1, Yahoo’s properties saw 132B impressions (12.1% of all online display ad impressions). In Q4, Facebook served about 115B impressions. In Q1 of this year, Facebook served a whopping 176B impressions: a 53% increase over its previous quarter. (Yahoo saw a slight decrease from Q4: down from 140B impressions, or 6%, and all other major ad players also saw declines.) |
According to Internet Retailer’s recent search engine marketing survey of 102 web-only retailers, chain retailers, catalogers and consumer brand manufacturers, 28.0% of merchants report more than 25% of their site traffic stems from paid search advertisements, while 51.5% say more than a quarter of their traffic comes from natural search. Search engine marketing is one of Internet retailing’s fundamentals, says the report. Web merchants keep pouring money into advertising on search results pages and on search engine optimization projects to move up in natural search results. |
In the past year: · 44.9% of merchants report that the conversion rate on pay-per-click search advertising went up · 16.3% say it went down · 38.8% say their conversion rate held steady · 47% report more than 25% of their web sales stem from search engine marketing · 44.6% increased their paid search budgets · 49% say they will increase it in the year ahead Shar VanBoskirk, Vice President and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says “Everything we see from the retail side indicates… considerable interest and investment in search related to… driving more online sales.” 37.7% of respondents spent more than 50% of their online marketing budget, 11.9% spent 61% to 75%, and 20.8% spent more than 75%, according to the Internet Retailer survey of IRNewsLink e-newsletter readers conducted with e-mail marketing and survey firm Vovici Corp. Read more at www.mediapost.com |
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Sherpa Chart: Testing Email Elements to Improve Campaign Effectiveness
