Marketing Advisor Blog

CMOs want to invest in social media this year but they want to see the money

According to a survey that was conducted last year by Bazaarvoice and The CMO Club, Chief Marketing Officers want to be able to better measure their social media activities this year.

The survey results, released late last year, show that CMOs are planning to invest more in social media in 2010 but not because ‘others do too’.

As is the case with marketing in general these days, CMOs want to know the return of their spend across various media and channels. And of course social media is just one of them, albeit the main one for 2010.

For us it’s good news to read that CMOs also want to look beyond obvious metrics and look at what counts: sales and the bottom line.

Recession drives growth in Internet usage in the US

According to a Harris Interactive poll, US Internet users are now spending an average of 13 hours a week online.

20% of adult Internet users are online for two hours or less per week. 24% spends 3 to 5 hours a week online, 6% 6 to 7 hours and more than a quarter (27%) 8 to 15 hours.

This means that 21% of US adult Internet users are online for more than 6 hours a week (with 14% more than 24 hours!).

A refined CRM strategy is an indispensable tool for banks in order to survive

Atos Origin expertise and EFMA (European financial management & marketing association), recently released the results of European research regarding the use of CRM in banks.

The survey found that the Customer Relationship Management rules applied by banks “before the financial crisis” are no longer valid and that the “post-financial crisis” global CRM approach is still rarely explored.

The research is based on a survey of 75 European financial institutions and the resulting report provides interesting insights for banks to help them refocus their CRM strategy in order to reassure customers and bring back profit in these uncertain times.

The key conclusions are below but remember mainly this: “customer centricity”.

1 out of 3 internet users sells online

According to recent European research from InSites Consulting, 1 out of 3 internet users sells online.

InSites Consulting says the P2P economy (consumers doing business with other consumers via the Worldwide Web) is the biggest market place that ever existed.

In 12 months (summer 2008 – summer 2009), 32% of European internet users sold something to another internet user via online classified or auction sites.

International social networking sites on the rise in Portugal

Recently we wrote that, according to comScore a total of 3.8 million people accessed the Internet in Portugal in September 2009, up 4 percent on the previous year and the most popular properties were Google Sites, followed by Microsoft Sites and Portugal Telecom.

But the Portuguese are into social networking too. The fourth most popular property was social networking site, Hi5.com, with 2.3 million visitors.

This made Hi5.com the most visited social networking site in Portugal, followed by Windows Live Profile (1.2 million visitors), Facebook.com (639,000 visitors) and MySpace Sites (289,000 visitors).

Twitter rules in social email marketing

One of the aspects of social email marketing is the integration of links towards social media in email marketing campaigns.

This is of course not the most complex thing to do, and it’s also just one aspect of social email marketing that goes way beyond just this aspect.

Various surveys found that the most linked to social marketing outlet in email marketing campaigns is Twitter now. Most of these surveys come from US-based companies, for Europe, we have few data.
One of the organisations that looked at the number of email marketing campaigns that contain links to social media is Email Data Source.

Email marketing: Sendmail releases its enterprise email predictions for 2010

Enterprise email marketing infrastructure specialist provider Sendmail last week released its predictions regarding enterprise email (marketing).

The company sees five important trends but starts by stating that email is not dead, as we did so many times before.

Sendmail: “despite claims that social networks are dominating person-to-person communications, enterprise email continues to remain a business-critical capability, and the dominate messaging tool used by enterprises throughout the world for secure, business communications”.

Sendmail refers to the recent study conducted by Osterman Research which found that “email is considered important by 97.6% of individuals in larger organizations in the course of doing their work, and 99.2% anticipate email will be this important to them in 2010.”

Social media become more important customer engagement channels but email still rules

Econsultancy released its fourth Customer Engagement Report. The edition 2010 of the Customer Engagement Report, produced in association with sCape, found that the proportion of surveyed businesses who regard customer engagement as “essential” has risen to a record 55%.

According to the report “customer engagement is seen as being about creating relationships,
which result in value both for customers and for companies”.

37% of the surveyed companies describe their interest in customer engagement as increasing long term customer value and 35% as increasing value delivered to the customer.