Posts Tagged 'marketing'

With the New Year slightly closer than it was when we brought you part 1 of our email marketing trends for 2012, now seems the perfect time to hit you with part 2.

The demand for relevance in messaging, the prominence of social platforms and their messaging capability and inbox competition increases will all have bearing on email performance in 2012. Read on for our final 4 thoughts on email trends for 2012.

Engagement based deliverability

Inboxes are beginning to serve emails to the inbox owner based on their behaviour, which has potentially very damaging affects for regular broadcasters with poor open rates. In 2012 we expect to see ESP’s provide an inbox that archives emails based on whether the user opens and click from a sender on a regular basis.

The Facebook messaging centre

Borrowing from the principles behind Google+ Facebook is providing users with a new way to communicate through its message centre allowing people to stay abreast of conversations between groups of people via email, text message or instant message all within Facebook’s walls. So what’s the impact for businesses broadcasting emails to consumers? It’s likely that less time will be dedicated to the traditional inbox, meaning messages will be read less frequently and open rate tails will get longer.

Email will become more valuable

Despite threats to email’s online communication dominance, an opted in email list is now more valuable than ever. With recent studies showing that an opted in email list is 23% more likely to convert to sale than other online communication channels the importance of keeping that list up to date, keeping communications relevant and timely and not losing the interest of the recipient are as important as they’ve ever been.

Open rates are set to fall. CTR’s are set to rise.

More email senders, more sophisticated inboxes, more options for online communication means less emails will be opened by recipients, whilst the volume of emails sent by brands will just keep going up. In 2012 we expect to see the open rate decline continue. On the flip side click thru rates are on the increase. With better targeting & timing, stronger calls to action and better content consumers are taking action on more emails than ever before. We’re predicting continued increases in CTR’s throughout 2012.

So the New Year is still more than 70 odd days away, but that’s no reason for us not to share with you our thoughts on the top trends that will affect your email marketing performance in 2012.

With the explosion of smartphones, social media and inbox competition over the last few years, we’ve looked at how these channels will continue to impact performance into next year. Below is Part 1 of our 2 Part series.

Inbox Overload
Email addresses have become a standard information requirement for pretty much every business when capturing a customer or prospects details. This has led to an enormous increase in inbox competition. As businesses knowledge of email marketing practices increase, so does their appetite to communicate. Making inbox standout, timeliness and targeting more important than ever.

Communication Complications
Social media has begun to threaten the effectiveness of the inbox. Faster, more up to date, easier to interact with and share, this up to the minute communication poses a series threat to email’s relevance. Compare social to email and unless you’re sitting in front of your computer with your inbox open or surgically connected to your blackberry, email reaches you when you get round to  accessing your inbox.  Being aware of the roles of both channels and their relative merits for your communication goals is essential for continued inbox success.

Portable Inboxes
Smartphone handsets now represent 30% of the entire UK mobile market and this figure is expected to grow rapidly in 2012. Optimising emails for mobile handsets, indeed creating dedicated templates for mobile handsets is becoming increasingly important. Ensuring there is a mobile optimised site at the end of a click thru is key to success with email marketing in 2012.

Smarter Inboxes
Email inboxes are smarter than ever. Providing users with automated filing, and ‘sweep’ options for mass inbox clean up. Making sure you are listed as a preferred sender or ‘starred’ as a sender they want to hear from is essential for consistently high open rates and preventing your message being deleted en mass with every other sender.

Part 2 of our ‘Email Marketing Trends for 2012′ coming soon.

Since the launch of the original iPhone in late 2007, heralding a brave new world of flat rate mobile internet access, touchscreens and apps, along with the first Android handsets in 2008, we’ve seen an explosion in mobile usage.

In September 2009, mobile traffic accounted for a fairly meagre 0.02% of all UK web traffic. This number has ballooned since and now accounts for 12.59% of all UK traffic. As a percentage increase that works out to a quite frankly mind boggling 62,850% rise over 2 years.

There always tends to be a lot of internet chatter about the on-going battle between Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS platform for market share, with most estimates now putting Android at around 42%, ahead of iOS on around 27%. What’s far more interesting to us is how those devices are actually being used, a metric that Apple appear to be dominating.

If we consider iPhones, iPads and iPods as one device then we see that it accounts for around 75% of ALL UK mobile traffic. That’s astounding. Android, despite its market share advantage, only accounts for around 10%. In fact, the iPad alone beats all other Android devices combined. Now, the numbers may not be the same for everybody but there’s definitely a trend here.

The interesting thing is that this iOS usage dominance doesn’t just relate to mobile web traffic. Taking a look at Flickr’s stats indicate that the top camera overall for Flickr submissions is the iPhone 4 and out of the top five cameraphones used to submit photos, Apple makes four of them. In fact, the iPod touch ranks higher than all but one Android smartphone.

The key thing to take away from numbers like this is that iOS consumers appear to be far more engaged and invested in their platform. That makes them far more valuable to brands trying to interact with them, and ensures that, for now at least, the future development of mobile platforms, both native apps and the mobile web, is likely to be driven by iOS users.

It’s all about usage, not units.