email marketing

email marketing is probably the cheapest way to reach our customers, and it has many benifits such as providing detailed information, promotion, newsletters and creating great relationship with customers. But, there are also some negative impact, such as spam, unsure effectiveness and measurement.

Spam is worst thing could happen to either companies or customers. There are 80% of emails are considered as spam, which means they will be automatically deleted by email service providers or filtered into the spam box. In this situation, no matter how hard a company try its best to reach target market, and it will fail eventually, because their letters and promotion that is enclosed  with emails will bever be read by consumers. Moreover, let’s our emails go through all the spam filters and customers sign up for the newsletters voluntarily. But the question is: do they really spend time to read it?  and if they do, how long they are willing to spend their time? That’s why I said measurement, because it is almost impossible to measure the effectiveness of email marketing, and we will never know if customers are willing to read each email we send to them.

In order to make good email marketing, we need third party’s help. We need to choose a right company to plan for the email marketing campaign, here is a useful site that reviews most major email marketing companies. (link) It could help us to avoid spend unnecessary time on something we are not good at.

In my opinion, we should develop some kind of software integrated into a server, and it can monitor and generate report about how do customers behave when they get emails. For example, if customers read emails we send to them, it could report back to our server, then this software could monitor the time they spend on this email, and did them click on those links in the email. Such software could be really helpful to measure and adjust our email marketing campaign.

In addition, I think email marketing  start going after individuals rather than the same email to everyone. This could help us to build relationship with customers and focus on prospect. Here is another link about why we should do this. (link)

The Potential of Mobile Advertising

We’ve seen so many different forms of online advertising, and marketers spend millions and billions of dollars in order to reach their targeted markets; unfortunately, the effectiveness of online advertising is not reached, because people tend to ignore those ads or even dislike ads when there are so many of them. So, marketers are trying to use another way to advertise their products and services, the mobile phone. Since North America’s mobile service is behind most Asian countries, many people may not notice how important and effective it can be. In my own understanding, the online advertising is more like a mass marketing due to online ads are not designed to the specific users or individuals, and they are simply apply to everyone even if considering cookies or other features web designers have Incorporated in online ads. But still, we are not getting our customers fast enough and effective enough, and the budget of doing those ads are relatively high, and small firms may not afford to do so.

Nowadays’ mobile devices have many features, such as TV streaming, web browsing, etc. In addition, people are no longer put information in their devices, instead, they want to get out information when they on the go. For example, we want to know today’s headline news, the weather, and watching few video clips while waiting for the bus or in the subway. according to data from Read Write Web, it’s twice as effective among younger consumers with 14.2% of 18 to 24 year-olds saying that mobile video influenced them when they are buying things. And as we know that young people spend lots of time on their mobile device, so if we can advertise on mobile videos, including videos, musics and text messages. I also found a interesting ad from Burger King, the mobile version is no longer exist, but I got the youtube version:

I worked at Burger King before, so I know how popular the Whopper is.

There’s a company called “Cellfire” provides mobile service. People can subscribe this service so that they can get coupons about their local deals. By doing so, Cellfire can make profit from sending out coupons to subscribers so that local companies would pay for the advertising. Moreover, M-commerce (mobile commerce) is getting popular. Companies like Amazon now has service that allows users to shop by using their mobile phones. (link)

In my opinions, shopping malls can send text messages to shoppers, and ask them if they want to receive information about discount or other services that may improve their shopping experience. Movie theaters can also do this, asking customers to subscribe the movies updates, such as popular movie reviews, upcoming movies, etc.

The future of mobile advertsing will be interesting in couple years.

 

SEO

Sometimes, when I google something or search something I want in an online shopping site, no matter how hard I try, and I just couldn’t get the right thing I wanted. The first thought came on my mind was that this site doesn’t have the product that I was looking for, but when I started wondering around and browsing other products, the thing I wanted was listed somewhere, they call it “other customers also bought”. So, I believe that those kind of site didn’t do a good job on search engine optimization, so they would probably lose customers within few minutes or few seconds if customers couldn’t find what they want, becasue customers sometimes don’t have patience. Thus, we need to consider SEO if we want our customers not only be able to find us easily, but also find the right thing they are looking for when they are on our site.

There’s one article says that “search engine and people are alike“, because both search engine and people are looking for the best substantive result that would be rel event to the keywords. Not only that, SEO can also “drive” and “maintain” site’s traffic. Obviously, if one company’s website appear on the first page of search result, or even at the top of first page, it can get the most vsitors to its site, and this can also give this company advantage over its competitors, because the more people go to this site, the more information they would get and the more people will become familiar with this site.Therefore, people would directly go to this site next time from their bookmarks, so the traffic is maintained. A senior Vice President from Network Solution has mentioned that if we want our company to be noticed or viewd on the web, and the best thing to do is SEO. Moreover, if local small business fail to do so, they would probably go out of business. She also provided some tips to do a good SEO.

Now I want to talk about SEO in a certain web site, for example “EBay”. There are way too many things on EBay we can look for, and looking for the right thing is easy, and I believe EBay has optimized their search engine for customers to spend less time finding things they are interested in. First, it has many different categories we can choose from so that we don’t need to waste time to filter things we don’t want. Second, when they search results come up, we can make them into certain order we desire, such as end soon, lowest price and recently added, etc. This gives customers a chance to customize results to the way they want to view, and it is user friendly. Third, Ebay’s search engine automatically corrects the spelling if we typed in the wrong words, and the results are as expected. Great way to maintain customers by saving time for us, and think ahead for us.

SEO is not for everyone, because it reqiures special skills and enough budget to do so. For individuals, we can use google’s web master tool to do it. For other companies, they could hire SEO company to do it for them. SEO.com is a good place. There are also things we should avoid when doing SEO, please see the video.

 

Online PR

It is hard to stay invisible for any kind of company on the Internet, and the impact of user-control web contents is more serious than we thought. There are so many web sites provide free service for users to publish their posts online, I consider blog as a personal free web site, which contains information about a user’s interests, perspective and personal life. Users usually post comments about everyday lives, politics and events that happen around us. The problem is that we can’t control people’s opinion; especially we are exposed in all kinds of information every day, and our opinion could be altered due to others’ comments or posts toward something. On the other hand, companies could consider this as an advantage to make it to be visible or popular on the web. As we all know that many companies have their own blogs, which provide information about the company, the current products, developing products and share stories with us. I think the reason they are doing this is because they want to keep in touch with customers by letting people come to them rather than looking for people who are not interested in at all. As I learned in the last class, the marketing public relation has shifted to a new approach from “control” to “creditability”.Almost every shopping site provides opinion for customers to review the products they bought, so that the following customers could get a big picture or general idea of what they are going to get. This could give companies opportunity to increase their sales, but also could bring negative impact, such as the game “Spore”, the DRM issue, because customers are not ready to accept this new technology, and they get used to the traditional technology already.

I don’t think the traditional advertisement is working for nowadays customers, because people are no longer approached by commercial; instead, they look for information they need, and that’s why RSS became popular. RSS brings new things directly to people who subscribe it; here is a simple example from YouTube.

 
Marketers have to come up with a new method to sell their products to existing customers, and try their best to get more new customers.  And they also have to think about a new way to do the public relation online.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is a very interesting theory for me. Although I’ve seen some web sites use this approach to gain profit, I never knew we call it “viral marketing”. Basically, it lets users to promote and advertise certain goods or services in the given web site. In other words, we call it “word-of-mouth”, which people share their good or bad experience with their friends, and then their friends tell other friends. Finally, good thing gets better, and bad thing gets worse. In addition, it’s more like a virus that spreads very fast if someone has been targeted, and more people get this virus in the same way. That’s why I think if people talk about something in a positive way very often, even it is a bad or a lie, it will eventually become a good thing or the truth and more people would accept it and spread it.

There are some strategies we can use in viral marketing, and the elements of viral marketing are,  according to Dr. Ralph F. Wilson:

1. provide free things that would attract customers to your site.
2. easy to use and share with friends.
3. increasing registered users on site to ensure “word-of-mouth” can be used.
4. users generate contents by themselves.
5. user others’ resource as advantage to against them.

I found two major Chinese web sites that use viral marketing strategy to penetrate the market. The first one is called “Public Praise“, (sorry, Chinese contents) which is now owned by Yahoo China. This web site contains information about almost every major cities in China, categories from food to consumer products to automobile and  to real estate, etc. Registered users in different geographic area could contribute information about their cities, such as recommendation about certain stores or restaurants, and rank them to give others a general idea what they could expect if they go there. This site is now one of the biggest viral marketing site in China.

The second one is different, it is called “YoHo City“, (sorry again, Chinese contents) it means yelling in those traditional markets in order to attract customers to buy your goods. This site’s users can be categorized in two parts: consumers and companies. As I mentioned before, the first element of viral marketing is that we have to provide free things for people, well, this is what this site does. It gives out free gift such as samples from cosmetic companies, or books or other interesting things. The purpose of this is to create strong brand images for registered companies by sending out free gifts to customers who interested in. It also use “word-of-mouth” approach, we can see from its picture :

Finally, here is a funny video about viral marketing.

Web Design, Before and After.

As I know, the web design started from what we called the HTML coding, which allows us to design website with rich contents, such as images, videos and hyperlinks. With the advent of high speed Internet and advanced technology, web site design became a common thing for general Internet and computer users. The one obvious phenomenon was that bloggers started modifying their blog by either using HTML, XHTML coding or some other third-party easy-to-use software. Adobe’s Dreamweaver is widely used due to its visual design concept, which allows us to design website visually instead of writing codes. But not everyone is a artist when designing website, or we simply don’t have enough time to spend on learning how to design.

Moreover, website is one of the most important things for companies that whether they do ecomerce or not, because a website is more likely to be a face of a company, and it presents viewers a big picture of what this company does and what image it creates. For my point of view, I like website that is simple, creative, and with less words on it, because I feel relaxed while I am browsing this kind of site, and I tend to spend more time on it even though there’s not much things to read. This brings us a question: What is a good web design?

When I was surfing Internet few days ago, one company really got my attention, the “nclub” web design agency, and I started looking for the information about this company besides its official site. During a interview, the Co-Founder and Senior Consultant of nclub, Martin Ringlein,  described that the web design should bring information architecture,  accessibility, usability, user-experience design and development together to truly define nowadays web design. nclub’s work also brings marketing integration into its design, which means it extended its service from a traditional web design service to a new level. As Martin said that they helps small communities to promote events. But nclub doesn’t do this to advertise itself; instead, it sponsors to help and appreciated if it got noticed.

Me and my friends was once trying to start a small online business by selling jewels on Vancouver Island. When it came to the web design, we got frustrated due to the lack of knowledge and online marketing experience. There are too many things to consider, from the initial goal, ideas, and planning to the actual web design process or hiring a company to help us. And finally we gave up, it’s just too costly to do so. Moreover, there are too many wed design companies out there on the web, and we have no idea which one o pick, because they all seemed so professional about what they do to live. This made me think a lot, such as what would the future of web design would look like few years from now.

Content Management Systemhelps both web developers and their clients to get updates, and this enables both of them to communicate easily when problems arise or new technology is being introduced, so web designers can help their clients to update their website or fix issues premotely. A “old news” predicted CMS would be used by many companies.

Finally, Web 3.0 is coming too, and it would bring us more exciting improvement, and it would make our online experience more relax and bring us more freedom. Web 3.0 Features

Online? Offline?

More and more companies have changed or adopted the online marketing model in order to attract more customers, and some of them are also trying to shift their entire business to operate fully online. As a result, the online shopping, services and other types of goods and services are being used every day. This major change in marketing has also created some concerns or problems when customers engage in many kinds of online activities, such as privacy, software pirating and other common issues.

Downloading is the most discussed issue in the past few years, and the concern is still not solved. Since the “peer-to-peer” technology has been used in many downloading software and websites, internet users can easily download many types of files off the internet, such as music, movies and video games without purchasing them. That is, customers only pay for the monthly fee to internet service providers, and then they can start downloading things insanely. On the other hand, music industry suffers the most, because the traditional CDs are no longer popular after MP3 music players have been putted in the market. And, even though customers still buy CDs from local music retailers, the physical CD records themselves are no longer attractive enough to motivate the purchase. That’s why more and more CDs are now including some sort of bonus “add-on”, such as an extra DVD or gift to push sales. 

But nothing can prevent the sales drop of CDs. According to REUTERS UK, US sales of digital music albums grew by 60% in first six months in 2007, and the sales of traditional CDs dropped 19.3% that equal to 205.7 million units. I believe that the online music “sharing” caused this, and it would still harm the CD market in the future. EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation is an organization that helps to protect Digital Rights.  DRM, Digital Rights Management becomes the saver of the traditional music market. DRM technology locks our digital media from being pirated, converted or copied to computers, and this means we can’t make back up of our music CDs or DVDs, but it didn’t work good enough. DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act is backing up DRM in US, so that if people unlock or hack digital media which are being protected by DRM, they would receive a lawsuit. But similar law did not take effect in Canada, because we are paying extras when we purchase blank CDs or DVDs, which “grant” us the rights to “sharing digital files online.

Many people are afraid of shopping online due to the concern of security. In most cases, we have to provide our personal information when shopping online, such as Credit Card number, phone number and address to the website. Although companies that provide security feature to protect customers, many online criminals are still trying to steal our information in some ways. Therefore, companies like VERISIGN and HackResistant provide a seal to requested sites in order to prove to customers that the site they are shopping is safe and their personal information will be kept safely during or after shopping.

New technology and policy will help both marketers and customers to have a safe environment to shop online in the future. We should also be knowledgeable to deal with online crime and try to protect ourselves from privacy theft.