Ecommerce & Web Marketing Research: July 11 - 20 2005

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19 July 2005

Spam still a profitable strategy - unfortunately

I'm definitely not trying to encourage the practice of spamming over legitimate email marketing, but eMarketer has reported some rather disturbing statistics on the success rates of spamming. For example, some figures taken from various surveys:

• 11% of users purchase from spam marketing 
• 9% of users have lost money to e-mail scams
• 39% of users have clicked on links in spam
• 57% of those who click on spam links say they receive more spam

So why do people spam given the risks? Simple, because it gets results. It's only going to be through ongoing education of consumers by legitimate sources that we have any hope of stemming the tide - by making it unprofitable.

Read more of the report

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16 July 2005

New article - tips for faster page loading

It's simple - slow page loading times costs you sales. In our online world, people are becoming increasingly impatient and won't hang around if your site is sluggish. A few years ago, there was much talk about page loading times, but that appears to have disappeared given the uptake of broadband. But the problem remains - learn more in my new article on page loading optimization.

More on marketing to teens

A few days ago, I briefly mentioned some marketing strategies for targeting teens. Adweek's What Teens Want conference has unveiled more interesting data on marketing to this demographic. For instance, in their survey of thousands of teens, it appears that most teenagers consider themselves to be leaders rather than followers. The race is on to be the coolest in any given area and to set the example to their peers.

According to the report, teens don't wish to be dictated to in marketing, they want to discover things for themselves; introducing fads and fashions to their friends. Given that, it makes rewards programs especially beneficial for getting teen influencers to introduce their friends to a product. Even simple applications such as a tell-a-friend script can be great promotion tools.

Read more on marketing to teens

Pakistan isolated - undersea cable damaged

The Internet may have been designed to survive a nuclear war, but the technology that connects countries sure wasn't. It appears that Pakistan has basically been isolated from the rest of the world for over a week due to damage to an undersea fiber optic cable. The only external access is via satellite and given the load, bandwidth is limited. The problems may extend to India and the United Arab Emirates while repairing and testing is carried out.

Read more

13 July 2005

Wasting work time online

A report posted on Salary.com states that the average US worker spends over 2 hours a day on non-work related activities. Over 10,000 people were surveyed and guess what the biggest time waster was - wait for it - online activities (44.7%). The survey report states the amount it costs employers each year in terms of salary paid for work not performed along with other interesting statistics. 

However, I do wonder how much money is generated by people at work engaged in surfing on the sly in terms of online shopping, viewing ads that generate revenue for marketing companies etc. While I'm sure it's a substantial contribution to ecommerce, there's not much joy for the employers who subsidize this revenue :)

Read more

12 July 2005

.mobi domain extension for 2006

The mobile top-level domain (mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd) collaboration spearheaded by companies including Microsoft, Vodafone and Nokia has been given the go ahead by ICANN for the establishment of a registry service for the .mobi domain extension. The consortium's goals were to establish an easily recognizable domain extension for sites that catered to mobile devices. According to the group, .mobi registrations will be available sometime during the first half of 2006.

Read the mTLD .mobi press release (PDF 24kb)

Online marketing to teens

The teen market online is huge, but perhaps not as big as we might think. For instance, according to an article on Internet retailer, teenagers are online less than adults. The article also contains a number of handy hints for those targeting this demographic, including:

• Offline marketing to drive teens to sites. TV is mentioned as a favorite

• Online marketing via youth oriented educational and social networking sites

• "Youth" versions of company web sites incorporating modern graphics and fonts

• Clutter free pages because of ummm... teens' short attention spans (sorry, I got distracted by some dust).

The article also points out that email marketing to teens *is* definitely effective. I would tend to agree given the experiences I've had with some youth oriented products; very high click rates if you can grab their attention :).

Read more about marketing to teens online

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Currency converter from Google

If you're like me and always needing to convert back and forth from currencies and you run the Google toolbar, try inputting a number, followed by the currency code, then "in", then the currency code you wish to convert to. Examples:

5 USD in AUD
or
5 GBP in USD

Google will return a conversion. The currency converter is powered by CitiBank. Nice feature Google, very handy!

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