Key Insights and implications for marketers from Mary Meeker's latest annual report for KPCB
Have you seen Mary Meeker's latest report of Internet trends? There's a fair chance you have. The Slideshare featured at the end of this post has been viewed by over one million since it was released on the 31st May. It's testament to the quality of insight in the report, with a reputation built up over 10 years. What we can add, other than alerting you to it, is a summary of implications for marketers since many of the charts in the 355(!) slide report are similar to previous years and not directly relevant to digital marketing.
Trend 1. Global Internet and Smartphone growth has slowed
Well, it had to happen, after banging the drum about the rate of mobile growth for many years, Mary Meeker leads with this summary of the main trends:
Global Internet Users =…
How often should businesses mail their subscribers? Research reveals the average number of monthly contacts.
These are classic 'tough questions' for email marketers which always raise a lot of debate. A question on our LinkedIn group about email reminder frequency for events had 20 comments.
Choosing the best frequency for sending email emails is challenging since we are looking to maximise response, but avoid 'over-mailing' which can lead to unacceptable levels of unsubscribes and an increase in inactives since our audience may feel they are being spammed. Even if they don't unsubscribe they will become "emotionally unsubscribed". Worse still, with overmailing, the business may have email delivery problems and messages aren't getting through to the inbox at all.
On the other hand, with 'under-mailing', opportunities to explain the proposition and promotions or to get the right product in front of the right subscriber and sales may be lost.
The DMA's National Email Client Report now known as the 'Marketer Email…
Our roundup of the key stats you need to know to be successful with Snapchat marketing in 2017
Snapchat added more users in one year than Twitter did in 4. It has grown to be larger than Twitter and Pinterest despite being far younger. It pioneered the concept of 'ephemeral messaging' which is now so popular it has been copied by a number of other social messaging apps, and its stories feature has famously been copied by Instagram, Facebook, and What's App. Its incredible growth has obviously attracted marketers, who salivate menacingly at the prospect of reaching so many impressionable young millennials.
Before you jump into using Snapchat for marketing, make sure you know the size of the opportunity and how users are interacting with the platform. We've put together a list of 18 essential snapchat marketing stats divided across the Smart Insight RACE framework to get you up to speed with all things Snapchat.
Reach…
Chart of the Day: How often do Americans open and send emails per day?
The American worker spends a lot of time checking their email. All across the country people are spending large blocks of their workday in their inbox. But what exactly does the typical American inbox at work look like?
Email marketing company Reachmail surveyed one thousand American workers who consider email significant to their job. The survey focused on 4 core areas relating to email use at work:
How often American’s are checking their email at work
How many emails they send per day
How quickly that they respond to emails
How many emails are unread in a typical inbox
The goal of the survey was to get a better look at how American’s deal with email while at work. As a result of the survey, they discovered several interesting trends.
Checking Email
The survey found that 54% of Americans check…
Content Recommendation Engines are used by over half of all top sites
We're all familiar with those 'around the web' sections featured at the bottom of articles in many news sites. These 'advertorial' boxes can sometimes show dubious content which hasn't been short of criticism, specially among the editorial stuff of leading publications. However, the reality is that they're a significant revenue stream for some of the biggest media sites in the web. While the proliferation of content recommendation engines as a monetization tool for sites of all sizes has been remarkable, recently Slate.com and The New Yorker decided to drop them due to links that can lead to questionable websites, run by unknown entities.
SimilarTech released new insights showing the market share of content recommendation engines to understand their popularity among the biggest US & UK media publishers online.
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How does your business compare with others for digital marketing capability to Plan, Reach, Act, Convert and Engage?
Since we introduced our free interactive benchmarking tool to audit digital marketing for Smart Insights members in September 2015, we've expanded it from auditing top-level digital strategy to also review individual channels like SEO, AdWords, Content Marketing, Email and Social media as part of our toolkits on each. This uses a similar approach of selecting a rating from just 7 questions for each - there aren't hundreds like some other audit tools.
Want to try the auditing tool?
If you want to try the audits, but you're not a member, just sign-up here using the form.
http://www.smartinsights.com/howgood/
If you're already a member simply sign-in - top right and click on any of the toolkits on the members home page with…
What are the most important marketing investment priorities for Smart Insights members for the year ahead?
Each year, we ask Smart Insights members for their predictions of THE most important high-level digital marketing technique for their business or their clients. This has been really interesting to take the pulse of opinion on marketing trends across the main digital marketing techniques. Thanks if you shared your opinion, we had 2,352 responses from marketers around the world! Here are the results for 2017:
How the top trends were selected
From September to mid-December 2016 we asked readers of our post on Digital Marketing Trends for 2017 to select just one marketing tactic which would give them the biggest uplift in the year ahead. While this doesn't have a controlled sample of our free research reports like Managing Digital Marketing, it does canvas opinion widely.This isn't necessarily…
Example of how to harness Instagram to capture new audiences and convert that attention into sales
Instagram is one of the most effective ways to boost your e-commerce marketing. In a recent Yotpo survey of over 165,000 e-commerce businesses, 75% of them reported being active on Instagram. Customer research data is on their side. In fact, the research found that:
Traffic from Instagram is the most engaged: this means that visitors from Instagram stay on a site for an average of 192 seconds – that’s longer than visitors from every other channel, including Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
30% of Instagram users have bought something they first spotted on Instagram: meaning the potential for the browsing conversion to sales is high.
83% of Instagram users reported that they were influenced by friend’s posting about a brand on Instagram: meaning Instagram is a powerful megaphone for your brand’s messaging.
…
Retail Industry is set to spend a record 15 billion on digital ads this year
The retail industry spends more on digital ads than any other vertical. It outstripped automotive, travel, financial services, pharma and media this year. It is predicted to smash it's 2015 record of spending $13 billion on digital ads by $2 billion, racking up an impressive $16 billion in digital ad spend this year.
That's the good news. The even better news is that these trends are only getting started. e-marketers 2016 predictions forecast digital spending increasing still further to a massive 23 billion by 2020, as you can see from the chart below.
Separate data from CMO survey also confirms this big shift to digital. Their data shows consistent double digital rises in digital ad spend since 2012. This is showing no sign of…
A Smorgasbord of cutting-edge e-commerce stats to benchmark your business against
'It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics' - George Bernard Shaw.
I don't think these statistics can lay any claim on being moving. Least not in the sense old Georgie B intended. But any good plan to move your Ecommerce needle in the right direction needs to be based on a solid foundation of accurate online market forecast data for your sector. If you live in blissful ignorance of key stats relating to how people are using mobile devices or what social networks are driving the most revenue on e-commerce sites, then it will be all too easy to misallocate budgets and resources and end up with a sub-par plan that doesn't get the results you want. So take a look that these 37 crucial Ecommerce stats structured around all customer lifecycle touchpoints using our…
