Bo Z.

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)

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.