Mobile Email Rendering – The iPhone

Since the release of the iPhone in November 2007, the sale of ‘Smart Phones’ – mobile phones with greater capabilities such as internet browsing – has been aimed at the regular customer, not just the businessman as before. This has resulted in more and more people using smart phones on a day-to-day basis and as a direct result, emails are being accessed on the move more than ever before.

A study by Marketing Sherpa indicated 64% of ‘key decision makers’ access their emails on a mobile platform. 36.4 million smart phones were sold in Q1 of 2009 worldwide and a further 40.9 million in Q2. In 2009 as a whole, research firm IDC says a total of 174.2 million units were shipped, a 15.1 percent increase on 2008.

Marketplaces for Retailers

Online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay and Shop.com offer sellers a different way of getting their products in front of potential buyers. Since the recession took a hold, these types of marketplaces have become a popular avenue for many as it can be very cost effective. As well as the heavyweights like Amazon, there are many smaller marketplaces that are growing rapidly such as Alibris.com, also some larger more well known websites such as play.com have also changed from only selling their products to now offering a marketplace platform.

One of the best reasons for using marketplaces such as Amazon to sell your products is that these websites already have a huge number of visitors, unlike creating a website and waiting for traffic to flow in from the web. Your products being on these marketplaces mean that the traffic viewing your product will be highly targeted and will have a better chance of converting to a sale.

Our Top 5 Blogs of 2009

2009 was the first year we spent blogging, and we’ve been really pleased with number of people regularly reading our blog.

Lots of great stuff was posted by us last year (even if we do say so ourselves!), so for those of you who are new to the Indium Web Management Blog we’ve pulled together the Top 5 Most Read articles from last year in one place:

• Top 5 Affiliate Marketing Metrics
• Good Examples of Facebook Marketing
• New Google Adwords Site Links
• How to incorporate a news letter opt in into your Facebook page
• Top 5 SEO Tips

How to Get Set Up On Twitter

Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter at the moment, and why not – it’s a fast growing phenomenon with a lot of questions still be answered.

If you’re thinking about dipping your toe in the water, but don’t know how or where to start we’ve recently added a guide to our website that explains how to get your business up and running on Twitter.

It’s really not that difficult to get set up so why not download the guide and get tweeting?*

*there’s also a handy twitter glossary!

Which Channel Customers Like to be Contacted via for What

Back in November NMA published a fantastically useful piece of analysis called “NMA Special Multi-Channel Marketing”. They surveyed just over 1000 UK consumers in early November 2009. Among the very useful graphs and stats was one detailing the preferred communication method for different company services.

The survey breaks the communication channels into:

• Email
• Post
• Home phone
• Mobile
• SMS
• Work phone
• Social Network
• Twitter

And split company services into:

• Price promotion
• Company info
• Confirm order
• Invoicing
• Customer Service

Whilst the preferences did differ by service, the overwhelming conclusion is that Email is very much the number one channel via which consumers want to be communicated with:

• Price promotion – 82%
• Company info – 76%
• Confirm order – 87%
• Invoicing – 73%
• Customer Service – 69%

We just need to all be very careful how we use it.

You can see the full report here

How Businesses are Using Twitter

There’s a lot of coverage of Twitter at the moment – “it’s the next big thing”, “you’ve got to be on it” etc. This raises the question of how it can be used to help a business, and is that going to help meet the businesses objectives.

Twitter’s made a profit!

Interesting news in this week’s NMA – it seems Twitter’s search deals have exceeded it’s operating costs leaving them with a profit of about £3m.

It’ll be interesting to see what that leads them to do this year!

Latest on the snow – business as usual

We’re currently operating business as usual – see our site for the full details (and pictures!)

On Average Email Lists Growing Despite the Economy

Interesting new chart from MarketingSherpa shows that most marketers (67% of them) have found their email list growing this year- that’s taking dead and unsubscribed lists into account.

What also makes this interesting is that consumers are still signing up – despite us hearing other reports that say there’s too much email being sent. So the public still have a desire to receive information in this format. We’ve just got to all be more careful about how we use their data.

Everyone’s using Twitter – but not twitter.com!?!

Very interesting stats were recently published by Sysomos showing the top applications that are being used for Twitter.

These are applications used by people to manage their Twitter account – rather like using Outlook or Thunderbird to manage your emails.

The top 20 makes for interesting reading as does the change from June to December. However, for me the most interesting thing is that the number of people actually using Twitter.com to manage their tweets is falling fairly rapidly.

In June 45.7% of Tweets were made using Twitter.com, by December this has falled to 40.5% – a sizeable drop in just 6 months.

Tweetdeck is still the most popular app, but is loosing market share almost as fast as Twitter.com.

Check out the full analysis here