Monthly Archives: December 2010

Since the evolution of computers as a potent medium of communication, email marketing has been a major contributor for the e marketers to meet their business targets. Email has been a very powerful medium to market your products and services, to the potential as well as the existing customers through the virtual medium. But it would be surprising for you to know that, one of every five emails sent by the marketers don’t get through the customer’s inboxes. In this way, the efforts that the e marketers put to make their email marketing campaign successful, becomes somewhat ineffective.

A new survey by Silverpop shows an across-the-board increase in 2010 budget of about 40% email marketing companies. Among the rest, around 47% plan to hold their budget allocation to that of the previous year. Over half – about 52% of businesses engaged in email marketing services expressed that one of their primary business strategy is to broaden their loyal client base. Respondents amounting to 51% asserted that their email campaigns are meant to increase revenue in 2010, a goal agreed by 65% of companies with large budgetary allocation.

One sure indicator of the health of any business is the return on investment or ROI. All companies base their business strategies so as to achieve a higher amount of ROI. For companies engaged in some form of e-marketing, use of an effective communication tool is imperative to broaden their consumer base and highlight the brand image. Till recently the choice of such medium has been the company website and the email. Of these two, the latter has proved to be more potent. Lately, business houses have been provided with another option to reach the customers – the social networks. Social channels have come up in a big way with sizable following and the more popular among them even posing as some sort of a threat to companies like Google. So it was natural for e-marketers to utilize this form of communication with the hope that it will prove to be equally, if not more, than email or company website. Unfortunately statistics tells us otherwise.

A recent report is definitely going to prove worrisome to the major email providers in United States, Canada, and Europe including U.K. The report points out that a significant percentage, a whopping 19.9% – of business emails permissioned by users never reach their inboxes. Return Path, the company releasing the report informs that the data is pertinent for emails sent during July-December 2009 in the United States and Canada.

Gmail Priority Inbox launched by Google sometime back has turned out to be quite a popular feature with GMail users. Spam filtering already has been a standard feature of GMail but the newly featuring Priority Inbox is supposed to discriminate between important or must-be-read information and non-informative or useless ones. This is a great help for the GMail users who otherwise have to wade through each mail incurring a lot of effort, time and frustration.

Hotmail users will be rejoicing when the upgraded version of their favorite email service. Email has proved itself to be the most-used, secure and fast communications tool for all and also as a great marketing medium, borne out by the number of email marketing companies. But despite its overwhelming success there are a lot to improve upon as well as quite a few wish lists in the form of new features. Microsoft with the Active Views platform incorporated in the upgraded Hotmail version has offered a few solutions to them.

One ongoing topic of contention that is doing the rounds is the perceived threat of social media dislodging email as the primary mode of communication. Some of us are forecasting that email is on the way out and would be extinct in the foreseeable future. One unassailable fact in favor of such people is the rate at which social media is growing and the vast following that it has attracted. Though social media is comparatively a new kid on the block it has emerged a serious contender to companies like Google. But there are several valid reasons why email is not going to be replaced by it. Here are a few of them.

A report from Econsultancy based on a survey of more than 1400 American consumers reveals that e-commerce marketing relies more on email for its functioning than the social networks. This is borne by the fact that about 37% of the surveyed people do not subscribe to any social networking site.

E-mail is one of the best things that has happened since the start of the internet to individuals and businesses alike. It has emerged as a premium means of communicating information – personal, corporate and marketing. But only if it contains relevant and useful information to the person receiving it. Unfortunately it is not happening like that.

Everybody expected Facebook to come out with an announcement about a break-through in email service, but AOL has beaten them with one of their own. The new version of AOL Mail that the company is going to launch is being referred to as ‘Project Phoenix’. According to Brad Garlinghouse, President of AOL’s Consumer Applications Group, email has proved itself to be the most-used and proven way of communication medium. AOL being the pioneer in online services, they are in a position to recast email with a number of innovative features.