Posted by: Grant Garcia, Marketing Coordinator

Historically, email has been a great way to effectively maintain customer contact, while also providing useful industry news and resources. However, because online marketing is evolving and becoming more competitive, inboxes are overflowing with messages that are poorly targeted and irrelevant to users. How, then, do you get your message to rise above the clutter? Incorporating social media and mobile marketing into your email programs can enhance contact with customers at different touch points, while also encouraging interaction.

Companies are utilizing social media calls to action within their email marketing campaigns but are lagging in the implementation of mobile-optimized email. Business emails often include the “Like us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” buttons, but that’s not enough. According to a recent eROI survey, 63% of marketers say that they’re not even measuring the use of mobile devices for email subscribers. In the same survey, nearly 15% of marketers said that optimizing email marketing for mobile is not important. These statistics are frightening considering that 70 million smartphones are currently in use, with predictions that they will overtake traditional phones within the next 12 months, according to Technewsworld.com.

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The Online Marketing Summit’s 23-city tour made a stop in Denver this year. 90octane’s Brooke Caesar spoke at the conference and various staff members attended sessions that covered topics such as social media, search, email, demand generation, usability and integrated marketing efforts. Keep reading for some key takeaways from the June 23rd conference.

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Posted by: Sean Voorhies, Project Manager

As online and mobile marketing continue to converge, the opportunity for cross-medium campaign interaction is growing. Bertolli’s sponsorship of ads within the ‘Today Recipes’ iPhone application is a prime example of how such a campaign can be executed.

Bertolli’s ad featuring the chance to win a culinary vacation is showcased next to one of the application’s recipes. Once a user clicks on it, he or she is taken to a landing page with minimal registration and the opportunity to opt-in to receive future Bertolli email communications. As the technology advances, users will be able to complete the form without leaving the ‘Today Recipes’ app itself.

With high session times and an average click-through-rate of 3%, campaigns like this – that serve to better the user experience while furthering marketers’ objectives – are proving to be a recipe for success and a tough combination to beat.

Read more: Mobile Marketer

Posted by: Kerry Houchin, Project Manager

According to ClickZ, there are more than 270 million mobile subscribers in the United States and 96% of mobile phones are SMS compatible. Imagine how many customers you could reach using a targeted, 140-character text message. Think about your own mobile habits. Chances are you have your phone with you and turned on a vast majority of the time. If you have a smartphone, it’s likely you have an alert set up for inbound texts, but not for inbound emails. So, when is it best to deliver the message via SMS and when should you stick with email?

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Posted by: Nicole Johnson, Marketing Coordinator

Ever heard of “location-sensitive mobile advertising?” It sounds fancy, but it’s just a term that encompasses a combination of two tactics that are becoming bigger and better every day – local search marketing and mobile advertising. The major players in the game (Yelp, Google and Facebook) are paving the way for new growth in this arena.

Yelp offers a smartphone application called “Nearby” for its mobile users. The app allows easy mobile access to any coupon or offer posted on a local business’s Yelp profile page. Users can also use the app to find businesses located in close proximity to their immediate locations.

Similarly, Google released “Near Me Now,” a feature that is automatically available to any user who accesses Google using an iPhone or Android phone user a 2.0.1 version or newer browser. The feature gives users easy navigation to restaurants, banks and other businesses in their areas. The mobile search engine results page serves up 10 local businesses and features three Google Adwords paid listings. Keep in mind that the Near Me Now link only appears if users give Google permission to access their locations with GPS tracking.

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Posted by: Nikki Burmaster, Marketing Coordinator

The importance of local online search strategies has increased exponentially within the last year. Implementing and continually optimizing local search techniques give businesses, especially those in very competitive industries or those with smaller marketing budgets, a leg up in the online marketing space.

Companies with local listings on the three major engines receive preferential treatment on results pages, showing in the top few listings when served. This is a major advantage considering the integration of paid ads, tweets, videos and more in many search engines’ results pages that are pushing actual organic results lower and lower on the first page.

In addition to higher search engine results, many listing services allow companies to add coupons and messages featuring current promotions or recent releases. Some local listings offer mobile integration, displaying search results with click-to-call features and local ad extensions that populate maps, directions, reviews and more.

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Posted by: Erin Wilson, Marketing Coordinator

Mobile consumption has continued to increase in popularity for both marketers and consumers. In fact, while the amount of time spent on other media channels such as television, video and radio has decreased, mobile phone usage has seen a large increase. In 2009, average daily mobile Internet use rose 36 percent, talking on mobile phones was up 12 percent, and texting increased by 55 percent.

Smartphones continue to grow in popularity; ownership increased from 11 percent to 17 percent of mobile users within the last year. More and more smartphone users are using their devices to access social media. The amount of mobile users who visited social networking sites on their phones grew from 2.9 percent to 18 percent in just one year. 38 percent of smartphone users fall into the 18-24 age range. However, people of all ages seem to be using their phones to perform all sorts of activities, such as watching videos, texting, taking pictures and accessing the Internet.

These mobile usage trends are extremely important to marketers. Approximately 56 percent of companies are now planning to increase their marketing budgets to include mobile. The Mobile Marketing Association predicts that mobile ad spending will increase from $1.7 billion in 2009 to $2.16 billion in 2010. The market is currently valued at $5 billion and is projected to reach $19 billion by 2014, proving that mobile is a space that companies must be in.

Many companies have already optimized their websites and content to be mobile friendly and more companies are jumping on board. The companies that recognize the growing importance of mobile marketing will continue to be successful and reach many consumers that they otherwise would have missed.

Sources:

eMarketer
Econsultancy

Posted by: Chelsea Maxwell, Marketing Coordinator

Mobile marketing is a strategy that we often hear talked about and the bottom line is mobile marketing is here to stay. As such, you need to make sure that you are creating and optimizing your website to be mobile-friendly.

The first way to ensure your website is compatible with most mobile browsers is to confirm your site is entirely W3C XHTML validated. Mobile browsers are not nearly as forgiving of XHTML errors as standard browsers. Additionally, when you adhere to XHTML accessibility guidelines, any images that do not show up on a mobile browser will appear in a text format.

When you are building mobile versions of your website remember that Flash, AJAX and Javascript don’t always translate across mobile browsers and should therefore be used sparingly in development. This will not only contribute to a better overall user experience, but will also help you gain better positioning within mobile search results.

If your company is already using mobile marketing be sure to test as you would the rest of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.

Learn more about mobile optimization at Search Insider.

Posted by: Nikki Johnson, Marketing Coordinator

Mobile advertising is here to stay.
Sixty four million U.S. wireless subscribers accessed the Internet using a mobile device in May 2009, which is two times the amount in the previous year. The Kelsey Group conducted a study that predicts the mobile ad market to reach $3.1 billion in spending by 2013. According to another study by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), CTR’s coming from mobile campaigns are falling in between 5% and 15%, significantly beating the 2% average of desktop campaigns.

Looking to try your hand at mobile marketing, considering all of these compelling stats?
Try a mobile paid search campaign. PPC ads, via mobile or through a traditional paid desktop campaign, follow similar business models, giving advertisers the ability to leverage their existing knowledge. However, it is very important that advertisers develop their mobile campaigns with SEO at the top of their minds. Because of the limitations that some mobile devices face when viewing the mobile Web, people are less likely to scroll down and view results beyond the first page, or maybe even the first three results. It is hard enough to see all the information on that tiny little screen. The good news for mobile is that some SEO experts predict future mobile sites to have an advantage in rankings compared to a desktop site vying for the same keywords. This points to the necessity for mobile advertisers to pay special attention to their campaigns.  It is important to maintain top paid positioning within your campaigns as well as achieve top paid placement for terms where you may struggle to reach top organic positioning. Optimization of paid search bids and positioning will become critical, so be sure to monitor any new mobile campaign on a daily basis!

Posted by: Nikki Johnson, Marketing Coordinator

CEO of VerticalResponse Inc. said that “E-mail recipients probably aren’t going to buy something from another company on their BlackBerry or iPhone, but they certainly might flag something or take action on it later back at the office.”

This statement points to the importance of tailoring your email campaigns to fit the capabilities of today’s mobile device.  People rely heavily on their smart phones for everyday activities, like checking their email. However, the small screens on many mobile devices are not equipped to allow users to easily view large amounts of text and/or images. For this reason, email marketers should be careful when constructing their messages. Below are a few tips to follow when creating an email that might be viewed through a mobile phone.

• Survey subscribers: Who is viewing your email through their smart phones? Add a question in the opt-in process.
• Eye catching, concise subject lines: Some people might only be able to see the subject line from their phone. Eliminate the “From” label to save space. read more »