SMS is a good way to keep in touch with friends in western countries, but when it comes to making business e-mail is the preferred way to go according to a the study "ExactTarget 2008 Channel Preference Survey".

The survey reveals that nearly two out of three of Internet users prefers e-mail in order to write to colleagues, SMS hanging far behind.

Morgan Stewart, director of research and strategy at ExactTarget, said in a statement that "there is a clear trend within younger demographics toward communication via text messaging and social networks, but those preferred personal communication channels were not necessarily also preferred channels for marketing".

Asked to judge the acceptability of various channels for marketing purposes on a scale of 1 to 5, respondents gave direct mail an average score of 3.9, followed by e-mail at 3.7. All other channels averaged under 3. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had made a purchase because of a marketing message received through e-mail.

The ExactTarget results agreed with a recent survey of Internet users in North America by Habeas and Ipsos. About two-thirds of respondents to that survey said they preferred e-mail when dealing with businesses, and about as many said they expected to continue to prefer e-mail in five years.

Read an interesting summary of the study at eMarketer.com.

We can not ignore the role that social networks have taken as a professional marketing tool.

Social networks allow organizations to work quickly and efficiently between them. These applications make easy the interaction between professionals who share subjects of common interest. You can use the advantages of traditional communication with the communication of Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis…).

The key is the agility. Social networks allow more open relationships between the different business areas. So organizations should take advantage of these characteristics quickly to react changes in their environment.

This new reality is completely integrated into the market. Corporate communication should not ignore this model of interaction that promises a great future for business.

Do not forget this point when you offer your customers services with more added value. Think in the ability of collaboration that has been opened through social networks.

Very often we attach too many files in our emails without asking us if it was really necessary. In many occasions, the same information could be included in the message body or some other way shared by sender and receiver by clicking on a link inserted in the statement.

Although the possibility to attach a document in the email means a great advantage as a vehicle of information, also have a distinct disadvantage: their poor vision in a PDA, introducing virus into computers, making the e-mail as spam in server destination…

If it is really necessary to add an attachment, it is desirable to warn the recipient in the subject or in the body of the message about what is sent, so he decides whether or not opens the email

While operators in Europe and the US are struggling to get customers to switch over to 3G devices to make better use of the infrastructure, Japan comes out and says that for the first time in history they've sold absolutely 0 second generation devices (read this article at AFP).

This is very interesting to me. I'm always telling everyone that the use of mobile phones that we do here in Europe and the States is already very simple, and we are not taking this devices to their real potential. I envision that in a few years from now mobile phones will be in fact much more: your own small Personal Computer, in the sense that they will be our main and only computer. They will be contstantly connected to the Internet through high speed networks and Wimax, we will have our files on the cloud, small folding flexible screens for using on the go, and we can just enter our office or home (or anywhere), plug the device on some kind of docking station and start working the usual way.

In a world like that (which is nearer than you may think) SMS will have no sense as a marketing mean. In fact in Korea and Japan SMS have dissapear several years ago and they use only e-mail (check this at iSchool Research, and this at Huawei.com).

E-mail marketing use only can increase :-)

If you’re interested in e-mail marketing, probably you’re also interested in web analytics. Remember that high quality traffic in your site is the first step to build a great database for your newsletter.

Google analytics, one of the best  free web analytics systems, has recently added a new optional feature (currently in beta): benchmarking. Now you can share your analytics (remaining anonymous) and benchmark your site with the rest of your competitors:

From Analytics Blog:

Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how their site is doing. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.

How to activate it: Click on “Benchmarking”  in the section “Visitors” and go!.

Today I've just stepped into a real cool banner ad in a geek-page that I think it deserves a post.

Peter Blum, according to his web page, is a web control programmer that, after many years building UIs for commercial Windows and Macintosh applications, started to develop and sell commercial products on his own. Its company is a one-person one. Peter creates the documentation and provides the tech support. And he has no complex about it.

In fact, he does his own marketing too.

He has setup a real effective banner campaign based on "sincerity". Take a look at his banner:

It's real cool. I especially like the frame that puts an arrow pointing to the "Corny call to action" :-D

And I bet he's getting good results. Guerrilla marketing once again!

Visit Peter Blum's webpage. I think he's got to enhance the landing page, but I like the real cool and funny banner.

I hate to admit it, but in some business scenarios e-mail is flooding people, who cannot pay attention to (or even almost read) everything that goes into their inbox. And although e-mail is by large the most effective way to reach your focused audience, there are alternatives that will lead to better use of your information. And you can get added value too.

The alternative I'm talking about is, of course, RSS. Despite all the hip surrounding this TLA^* these days when almost everybody seems to know it very well, 4 or 5 years ago (when we introduced RSS support in MAILCast) it wasn't that way. So, now that the knowledge barrier is very low, it's a very good time to start taking advantage of RSS possibilities.

RRS is very suited for situations where you produce a large volume of information that is difficult to deliver to the right people. You can slice this info in several specialized RSS feeds, and keep your e-mail newsletter active for anyone to subscribe.

This way, people really interested in all the content you produce on a specialized issue will keep receiving it by e-mail. But people who prefer to be more proactive or who is not interested in everything you published on every channel, will have the option to subscribe to your RSS feed and will be kept informed at their own pace. You'll gain some extra readers for your info, because these people probably wouldn't get subscripted to your newsletter anyway.

And you get some free extra features too.

For example: you can use MAILCast's RSS footer content in order to enter any information you want your feed subscribers to read. This can be a simple slogan or copyright notice, or even advertisement banners (check the news displayed in the frontpage of Krasis.com or campusMVP.com). This content will not be shown in the e-mail newsletter when you send it (with automatically layout) to your e-mail subscribers. You gain an extra path to keep in touch with your customers.

Another interesting thing is the fact that you can get anonymous reading stats for your RSS feeds. You get a clear view on how many times your feed is read and by which IP addresses (you can easily restrict which IPs have the rights to read it), and even more interesting, what are the most popular news or articles within the contents your publish in your different RSS. You can even know how people get to your content (through a search engine query, direct subscription, an on-line RSS aggregator...).

Click to zoom

Just give it a chance and integrate it with your Website. You will not regret.

^* TLA: Three Letter Acronym :-)

I have just seen this comic strip about marketing on the Internet and couldn't resist to post it here.

It's just so fun :-)

Enjoy!

Virtual communities come to play with the popularization of the Internet. They were born as online spaces to satisfy their members’ needs: information sharing, offer support, debate and socialize in an informal manner.

Nowadays, they are also a valuable tool from the business point of view (i.e. corporative blogs) because they enable and improve the internal communication within the organization, and establish a closer relationship with their clients and providers. But not only…many companies have discovered other advantage: being able to anonymously analyze how these communities (and their members) evolve and develop overtime, their likes and dislikes, their habits and uses. So handling this information, they can after introducing new devices and products adapted to this particular market.

Virtual worlds like Second life or communities like Del.icio.us, MySpace or YouTube are open spaces not only to promote products, and so get ahead to their respective competence, but also a perfect environment to interact and know, just as any other member, the marketing patterns of this targeted audience, say young people 18-40 years old and engaged with new technologies.

This online experience can be also transferred to RSS marketing. Publishing your news by RSS, people who is interested in our products and services will subscribe to our feeds. We will not know their names or email addresses but we will be able to discover their likes.

Say that I subscribe myself to a recipe’s blog. Then I could also check in my RSS reader how many people are subscribed to this particular blog. And even to what more blogs about recipes (or not) have are they subscribed to, and so on. So I will discover on what else is interested people who is interested in cooking.

With the new social networks, it becomes a game to know what is interesting to other people like me, or any other group. So many new worlds to be explored by marketers... Exciting, isn't it?

These are the main steps to develop an e-marketing campaign: