Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that U.S. Latinos is part of the recovery in advertising spending worldwide.

Hispanics make up [...]]]>

According to Dr. Korzenny from the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at the Florida State University, when compared to other ethnicities, U.S. Latinos appear to consume more digital content.

Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that U.S. Latinos is part of the recovery in advertising spending worldwide.

Hispanics make up 12.3% of the total US Internet population in 2009, and that number will increase to 13.9% in 2013. The U.S. Latino presence in the Internet is not only going to increase in quantity but also in quality as U.S. Latino Internet users are poised to have the highest purchasing power.

A company that is truly aware of this trend is Microsoft with its current Bing TV ads called ‘Los Links’.

Why U.S. Latinos Matter

According to the Immigration Informaiton Source website, in 2006, 47.2 percent of immigrants reported Hispanic or Latino origins.  Therefore, it is not a suprise that Business Week’s Douglas MacMillan reported that of marketers that target minority groups, 95% tailor messages to Latin Americans. However there is still much to be learned about the field.  Click here for an insight into how to approach the U.S. Hispanic market.

As mentioned earlier, the U.S. Latino presence in the Internet is not only going to increase in quantity but also in quality as Hispanic U.S. Internet users are poised to have the highest purchasing power.

Consider the 2 tables below:

Los Links Son Malos

As of June 23, 2010, Microsoft has released two episodes of the popular ‘Los Links Son Malos’ ad campaign.

Here’s Episode Uno.

And here’s Episode Dos.

Why ‘Los Links Son Malos’ is a Smart Strategy

Rather than forcing U.S. Latinos into a Spanish-only version of Bing, Microsoft targets U.S. Latinos directly and lets them decide whether this is a good option for them. Mixed context in English and Spanish that is triggered by contextual cues (e.g. telenovelas, different Spanish accents, etc) appears to be savvy strategy, according to Dr. Korzenny.

On top of that, U.S. Latinos do appear to consume more digital content than other ethnicities in the U.S., specifically TV and online video.

Conclusion

Stand out from other companies targeting the U.S. Latinos audience not by forcing them to use a Spanish-only version but let them decide what’s best for them. However always keep in mind the specific geographic location that you’re planning to target. For example, While U.S. Hispanics do share some commonalities, consider that Texas has a more predominant Mexican presence, while Florida has a more predominant Cuban and South American presence.

After you’ve learned how to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics, you will need [...]]]>

Given that E-mail Permission Marketing: it works!, at idaconcpts, we’ve discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign.

After you’ve learned how to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics, you will need some email marketing benchmarks by industry to be able to properly evaluate the performance of your campaigns.

On July 2009,  eMarketer provided a list of e-mail marketing open and click-through rates worldwide by industry and list size.  Here’s an important update to these e-mail stats via Mailchimp.

About Mailchimp

MailChimp in their own words:

We thought, “Sheesh, people are too busy running their businesses to learn how to code HTML emails. Email marketing is so easy, a monkey could be doing it for them.” We put our pragmatic programming skills to work and built a simple tool that included everything our clients needed and nothing they didn’t. We made it so easy, a human could use it. Our clients loved it. So we made it available to the public. The word kinda spread.

One important caveat is that MailChimp, despite its popularity, it is not one of the biggest players in the e-mail marketing industry as a graph of monthly unique visitors from Compete shows below.

According to Compete, on March 2010, MailChimp had 648,259 unique monthly visitors to its  website while Constant Contact had 6,332,717; iContact, 1,555,720; Bronto, 1,016,602; and Mailer Mailer, 157,437.

As of March 25, 2010, MailChimp scanned over 570 million emails delivered through their system (where campaign tracking was activated, and where users actually reported their industry) and calculated average unique open rates, average unique click rates, average unique soft bounces, average unique hard bounces, and average unique abuse complaint rate by industry.

Here’s what MailChimp found out.

Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Industry

This list of e-mail stats is useful to small business owners who do e-mail marketing themselves because 70% of MailChimp customers are 1-10 employees, and they’re design-it-yourselfers. This provides an “apples to apples” comparison with others in your industry.

Use these stats to evaluate your past, current and future e-mail marketing campaigns.

Thank you for your time!

Recently eMarketer released the results of a survey of 211 [...]]]>

In June 2009, I posted a slide show presentation trying to answer the question “Does Digital Media Advertising Make $en$e?“, which used some examples such as Google’s Picasa and Skitch to provide insights into this topic.

Recently eMarketer released the results of a survey of 211 participants indicating their use or plan of using social media marketing.

Of those 59% who responded that they social media marketing is currently part of their marketing activity, more than 50% indicated that Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and online videos are the core of their social media marketing strategies. From those that are planning to implement or are not using or not planing to use social media marketing, it appears that they seem to be stuck on trying to answer the question: “Does Digital Marketing Make $en$e?”

I would like to point out a couple of important problems that become clear with the results of the survey above:

1. No funding for social media budget: If you’re not willing to set up a budget for a marketing campaign, how are you expecting to create leads for sales or actual sales? The GIGO concept applies here. If you’re putting in $0, you will most likely get $0 in return. Yes, setting a Facebook Page is free, but you do need to spend a bit of targeted advertising to reach to more people. Yes, it’s free to set up a LinkedIn Group, but you do need a business account to be able to view more search results and get more InMails.
2. There’s no established way to measure social media: Are you kidding? It’s the same way that you measure any marketing campaign: How many leads or sales did your marketing created! (This of course, depends on what type of organization is running the campaign: it could be calls to an 1-800 number, or downloads of a registration form for a seminar, or registering to receive a newsletter). All you need is a strong web analytics package such as Clicktracks or Google Analytics.
3. Don’t know enough about social media: Then what are you waiting for? Employ a couple interns to decipher what you don’t understand to you. If you don’t have the time to find out, then pay somebody to find out for you. Note: don’t invest in a marvelous web analytics or social media optimization package without having properly trained staff in place. In social media marketing (as well as in web analytics), follow the 90/10 rule: 90% of your social media marketing expenses should be in the people and 10% in the equipment/software. 2  employees well educated in web analytics can achieve far more than 1 software.

Even if you “feel” that you don’t need any online presence at all, do probe further into fulling supporting your reasons. Don’t be surprised if you find that at the very least you must take care of your presence that happens from search engine visits.

With the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting an over 9% unemployment rate in June 2009, it appears that job search sites will continue to show an accelerated growth during this economic recession.

On August 6th, 2009 eMarketer reported that more than [...]]]>

For career sites, there’s no business like the recession business!

With the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting an over 9% unemployment rate in June 2009, it appears that job search sites will continue to show an accelerated growth during this economic recession.

On August 6th, 2009 eMarketer reported that more than 65 million visitors have rushed to job search sites in June 2009.  Most of the top 10 career service and development websites in the U.S. (ranked by unique visitors) have experienced double digit percentage increases in the number of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009.

June 2009 data from comScore pegged growth in unique visitors to career resource sites at 10% over the previous year, with seven of the top 10 sites seeing at least double-digit increases. More than 65 million visitors checked out career sites in June.

“The top three sites in the category—CareerBuilder, HotJobs and Monster—have maintained their leadership positions for several years now, but there are also a few upstarts in the industry making some noise,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president, in a statement. “Certainly with millions of Americans reevaluating their careers right now there is opportunity for continued growth and innovation in this segment of the online marketplace.”

What are the most common search terms at career sites? Here’s the list:

These job search terms are closely aligned with the job categories of the list of over 3 million jobs that can’t be filled, released by Fortune back in February 2009.

Among all the excitement from career sites, there appears to be no discussion about this fact: the combined number of page views from the top career sites wasn’t even close to that of Craigslist back in 2007.

– craigslist.org – monster.com – careerbuilder.com

According to data from Compete, lately Monster has been able to start getting closer to the number of unique monthly visitors of Craigslist, however it’s important to remember that Craigslist doesn’t operate the large marketing and advertising expenditures that Monster does. Furthermore, the other 3 sites that showed healthy numbers of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009 (Careerbuilder, Indeed, and Hotjobs) have a long way to go to reach the monthly unique visitor numbers of Craigslist and Monster.

That is one major question to tackle. And the guys at TechCrunch are surely busy trying to give the best possible answer.

After all, they do have the staff and the inside information available for the job.

Wait a minute…what inside information?

According to Michael [...]]]>

For how long will Twitter survive?

That is one major question to tackle. And the guys at TechCrunch are surely busy trying to give the best possible answer.

After all, they do have the staff and the inside information available for the job.

Wait a minute…what inside information?

According to Michael Arrington on July 14, 2009:

The guy (”Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to us earlier today. The zip file contained 310 documents, ranging from executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs of various Twitter employees.

My personal favorite is this spreadsheet with cash flow and revenue analysis from Twitter, here’s a peak:

Earlier this April 2009, eMarketer calculated that Twitter would have 12.1 million US adult users in 2009 and 18.1 million in 2010.

The 18.1 million number for 2010 appears to be far smaller than the one from the confidential Twitter documents that TechCrunch claims to have in its power because they estimate the Twitter population at a 100 million.  (Note: Twitter’s USA population represents about 40% of its total population.)

The Harvard School of Business points out another problem for Twitter, there is growth in quantity of users, not in quality.  People are just not tweeting:

While some people find Twitter highly addictive (myself included), since Oprah, Ashton & Co. have joined in, everybody knows that soon Mom and Dad will be joining and Twitter could become…so 2009!….next year.

Maybe. Maybe not.

What do you think?

According to Dr. Korzenny from the Center for Hispanic Marketing [...]]]>

Back in March 2009, we reviewed how to measure the click-through rate (CTR) of your e-mail permission marketing campaign with Google Analytics, so I believe it would be very useful to now provide you a benchmark to compare your collected CTRs. For Internet startups, these will be critical benchmarks.

Earlier this July [...]]]>

Welcome back!

Back in March 2009, we reviewed how to measure the click-through rate (CTR) of your e-mail permission marketing campaign with Google Analytics, so I believe it would be very useful to now provide you a benchmark to compare your collected CTRs. For Internet startups, these will be critical benchmarks.

Earlier this July 2009, eMarketer just released a list of e-mail marketing open rates worldwide, by industry and list size for the second half of 2008.

But before I show you these e-mail marketing open rates, let’s review some e-mail permission marketing fundamentals that you must gather:

1. Number of e-mails sent
2. Number of opened e-mails
3. Number of bounced e-mails
4. Number of unsubscriptions ( You MUST provide this option! Remember that we are doing e-mail permission marketing. No permission = no e-mail.)

With these metrics you will determine:

1. Delivery rate = (number of e-mails sent – number of e-mails bounced) / number of e-mails sent
2. Unsubscribe rate = number of unsubscriptions / number of e-mails delivered
3. Open rate = number of opened e-mails / number of emails delivered
4. Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened

Once you have your open rate and CTR, now you can compare them to these benchmarks provided by eMarketer:

How well do you rank against these open and click-through rates?

eMarketer projects $443 million will go toward in-game advertising spending this year in the US. But marketers should take note that women make up a substantial portion of the audience for that advertising.

Video gaming has grown increasingly popular among older players, other demographic groups and particularly [...]]]>

Ladies, grab your Wiimote!

eMarketer projects $443 million will go toward in-game advertising spending this year in the US. But marketers should take note that women make up a substantial portion of the audience for that advertising.

Video gaming has grown increasingly popular among older players, other demographic groups and particularly women. This fact is a wake-up call for video game developers, as they are now focusing more on casual gaming.  The leader in this trend is the Nintendo Wii and this strategy has paid off as  in a study of U.S. Next-Generation Video Game Console Usage, for the Nintendo Wii, the % of total minutes used by female gamers is higher than that of its male counterparts in the 25 – 34, 35 -44, 45 – 54, and 55+ age ranges.

According to eMarketer, in addition, 29% of total PC game players were women ages 25 to 54, the largest percentage of any group. Women ages 55 and up were 17% of the market, the third-largest behind men 25 to 54. Older women spent the second-highest number of minutes playing.

“Even with the increased competition from mobile and social network gaming, the console gamer segment added the most new participants to its ranks in the last year,” said Anita Frazier of The NPD Group.  Many of those new participants are women.

Although consoles such as the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have Internet playing capability, most game play (62%) is still offline.

Think the highly advertised World of Warcraft is the highest played PC game in the U.S.? Think again. Solitaire (yes, you heard right: Solitaire) is the highest played PC game in the U.S. with 7,750,623 unique players in December 2008, dwarfing the 1,104,334 unique players of World of Warcraft in the U.S. in the same month. In PC gaming, the games that come prepackaged with many PCs (Solitaire, FreeCell, Hearts, Minesweeper and Pinball) are the ones with the most players.

What implications has this on marketers?

Do your homework!

Learn from Nintendo and become aware of casual gaming and the increase of female video players.  2 good places to start are:

1. Meet the Digital Mom
2. Digital Mom: A two-part report from Razorfish and CafeMom

The first article provides some interesting [...]]]>

I’m a big fan of The e-Marketer Daily newsletter and on 06/26/09 I received two very interesting articles on the presence of U.S. Latinos on the web. The first one is titled Hispanics Online: No Mas E-Barrios and the second one is Looking at Hispanic Behavior Online.

The first article provides some interesting stats on Internet use in the U.S. by race/ethnicity.

Hispanics make up 12.3% of the total US Internet population in 2009, and that number will increase to 13.9% in 2013. The U.S. Hispanic presence in the Internet is not only going to increase in quantity but also in quality as Hispanic U.S. Internet users are poised to have the highest purchasing power.

Among marketing organizations, the competition to grab the U.S. Hispanic buck is intense.  Business Week’s Douglas MacMillan reported that of marketers that target minority groups, 95% tailor messages to Latin Americans, 76% target African Americans, and 38% focus on Asian Americans, according to a survey released in November by the trade group Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and marketing agency Mkgt. That’s up from 86%, 60%, and 35%, respectively, in 2003, according to the research.

This has a lot of implications for online marketers who want to be culturally sensitive, while being cost-efficient at the same time. The main problem, as Dr. Felipe Korzenny, Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at the Florida State University, states, is that:

Hispanics have a lot of commonalities, and it’s OK to talk about a group that has these sorts of common roots and interests. It doesn’t work well to try to segregate people. I don’t think it works to say, “This is a site for Hispanics and this is a site for others.”

Forcing Hispanic U.S. Internet users into Hi5 (the most popular social network in Latin America and no, it’s not Google’s Orkut, that’s in Brazil) and Myspace versions in Spanish is not the correct strategy.  It’s all about personal choice, let the user decide what’s best for him or her.

That is the reason why MySpace has both—I mean having people having two sites, one in Spanish and one in English—but that doesn’t mean that the Spanish-language site is for Hispanics only, or that the English-language site is for non-Hispanics only. There’s a lot of overlap.

Mixed context in English and Spanish that is triggered by contextual cues appears to be savvy strategy, according to Dr. Korzenny. The good news:  when compared to other ethnicities, U.S. Hispanics do appear to consume more digital content.

However, making any generalizations about U.S. Hispanics is always a mistake. The easiest example: location, location, location.

If you use the same strategy in Miami, FL, that you used in Dallas, TX, you shouldn’t be surprised to get mixed results.  While U.S. Hispanics do share some commonalities, consider that Texas has a more predominant Mexican presence, while Florida has a more predominant Cuban and South American presence.  Put it this way: imagine if you were to use Canadian slang to target a British and Australian  audience, would it make sense? After all, they all speak English, right?  That’s the most common mistake of companies that purchase one-size-fits-all, prepackaged marketing solutions.

Marketers should never throw out the window marketing fundamentals when dealing with U.S. Hispanics.  There is no easy answer.  Only one thing is certain: do your homework, research, research, research.

Notice that [...]]]>

Apparently, the Japanese seem to think so. Via the eMarketer Daily, I found that according to Marsh Research, 84.4% of adult Internet users in Japan have felt at least once that the Internet is “scary.” Here is the breakdown: Now, why do they consider the Internet scary?

Notice that at the top of the list appears “when lots of pop-up windows opened”.  Have you been a victim of  a “rickroll”?  Definitely annoying. Extreme use of pop-up ads is what Seth Godin refers to as interruption marketing.  You’re interrupting the natural flow of the user experience to say “hey, buy this!”.  Remember that ads or communications can only be effective if they are relevant, personal, and ANTICIPATED.  You need to employ permission marketing (another Godin term). I believe that the only way to a marketer can make a pop-up ad relevant, personal and anticipated is through the use of a tool such as 4Q from iPerceptions. Here’s a 10-minute video explanation of 4Q by Google Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik.

Here’s an example of how 4Q looks like at the CIO website:

Using permission based marketing initiatives, we can all make the Internet a less scary place. If you want to learn about how to get started with E-mail Permission Marketing, here’s a primer.  Once you have read about it, you can learn about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals.