I'm blogging live here from the ad:tech conference in Singapore. My colleague, Will Schnabel, our vice president of international markets, and I are both speaking at the conference.

Kudos to the ad:tech team for putting on a great show. There are 600-plus registrants from countries across Asia. The choice of Singapore is excellent—it's an incredibly modern, spotless and safe city filled with multi-lingual residents and business people.

Email marketing is definitely one of the hot topics at the conference, with multiple sessions dedicated to it. Mobile marketing is also of great interest. But, despite the rumors that mobile is so dominant here in Asia, marketers here have yet to "crack the code" on how to market over this medium.

Mark Read, the CEO of WPP Digital, made a powerful point this morning on the topic. He said that Google reported that the majority of mobile searches are being done from the iPhone and that a huge amount of the overall mobile Web surfing is being done on that phone as well. His point was that the break-out of mobile Web and mobile marketing is less likely to come from WAP and SMS and more likely to be achieved by bringing the current Web and email world onto the mobile devices themselves.

Asia will remain a challenging region for marketers but it will offer tremendous rewards for those who execute well here. Like Europe, multiple languages and distinctly different cultures make any single marketing effort difficult. And, the geographic size, travel distances and varying political approaches perhaps make it harder to market here than anywhere else in the world.

For ad:tech's first conference in this part of Asia, I think the turnout and the topics suggest that the marketing maturity here is high and the opportunity is massive.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Silverpop uncovered some interesting results when it recently joined with Internet Retailer magazine to conduct research for the “Top 500 Guide” profiling the largest 500 U.S. retail Web sites ranked by annual sales.

To evaluate the email programs of the top online retailers, our research team logged on to the Web sites of 820 top retailers identified by Internet Retailer and registered to receive emails from each that had an email marketing program (94 percent of Top 500 companies vs. 83 percent of other companies studied). Then we compared the practices of Top 500 retailers to the other 320 retailers.

Among the findings:

• Not surprisingly, nearly six out of 10 retailers in the Top 500 offered a preference center at opt-in, while only one out of four other retailers studied did so.
• However, nearly three-quarters of the companies in the Top 500 with email programs didn’t offer customers any alternatives to unsubscribing, such as choosing different subscriptions or altering message frequency. And even more interesting, three out of four companies that had offered choices at opt-in didn’t offer to let recipients change those choices when they went to opt out.
• And the most surprising finding: one out of five companies that didn’t offer recipients any choices when they opted in to receive emails did give recipients choices when they tried to opt out. As a last ditch effort to keep subscribers on board, these companies offered to send less often or send different types of content.

While this may be a successful strategy for some companies that want as much freedom as possible in their frequency and content up-front, the impact of this tactic should be closely measured, since recipients may choose to hit the spam button instead of going to the trouble of unsubscribing, jeopardizing your deliverability.

While the study underscores that leading retail companies do optimize their programs for best results. It also reveals that even the best programs can improve and take results to new levels of success.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Despite the rise of Web 2.0 and other emerging communications methods, email remains stronger than ever, according to an April survey conducted by market researcher Ipsos for online reputation management firm Habeas.

In the study of consumer attitudes toward email and online interaction with businesses released in late May, nearly three-quarters of adult email users in North America said they use email every day, and two-thirds said they prefer email for communicating with businesses.

The report also found that consumers not only prefer email for communicating with businesses now, but they also expect to prefer it five years from now, despite the rise of online threats and the emergence of other communications channels and Web 2.0 applications.

“Far from being eclipsed by Web 2.0 and other emerging communications methods, consumer expectations suggest that email will be the workhorse channel around which future online communications will revolve, said Habeas CEO Des Cahill in Habeas’ announcement.

I agree. This is something I have believed in and talked about for a while now. People love email for its ability to be highly personalized, relevant and timely. Marketers also love its immediacy and low cost in relation to other channels. And, as email marketing tools continue to evolve and become increasingly central to marketing execution, email truly will become the workhorse channel for marketers. It’s exciting to see this future unfolding.

But it’s important to remember that just because people like email doesn’t mean they will tolerate anything you want to send. More than 88 percent of survey respondents said they would like to be given more choices over the content and frequency of the emails they receive. And, a rising percentage expressed concern about being a victim of email fraud, and worry over spam and virus threats reaching them through their mobile devices.

Although email appears set to remain a favorite of consumers, email marketing as a percentage of overall online advertising spend will actually drop over the next five years from 2 percent to 1.5 percent, according to new figures from eMarketer. The research firm cites email’s low cost relative to other channels as reason for the drop, even though its figures predict that money spent on email marketing will hit $492 million this year and increase by 55 percent to $765 million in 2012.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)