Digital Marketing In The Next 10 Years

A decade ago the idea of driverless fully electric cars, digital currencies, and deep sea mining seemed like science fiction. It is a testament to the rapid pace of social, economic and technological change that we are witnessing that these concepts no longer seem impossible with Bitcoin trading at values that are best described as outlandish and the UN giving licenses away for companies to mine the sea beds. As such, a revolution is under way, where gadgets, large and small, are changing our society. And this stuff is not make-believe anymore. In less than a decade, many of these trends will be embedded in our daily lives.

By 2020, there will be over 5 billion internet users, with over half of them accessing the internet over handheld tablet devices and 80 billion connected devices worldwide. This connectivity will spread to our daily lives bringing the three silos of work, home, and our surrounding environment into one seamless experience termed by Frost & Sullivan as “connected living.” A connected living will involve digital assistants that guide our everyday lives, music that seamlessly moves from our homes to cars as soon as we shut the house door to our house to start our commute as everything will sit in a cloud that we can access anywhere anytime. A new range of technology-enabled services such as smart lighting, mobile working solutions, and smart governance will define and shape our everyday experiences.

This connectivity will push other sub trends, like big data to create market opportunities for new products and services; some that already here today, like social sentiment analysis, open innovation, new insurance business models and micro personalized marketing and medicines.

Bricks and Clicks will become the retailing norm of the future, with every retailer expected to have an online identity as well as a brick and mortar presence by 2020. Nearly 19 percent of global B2C retail will happen online, with online retail sales expected to reach $4.3 trillion by 2025, resulting in the emergence of virtual stores, virtual hypermarkets, interactive stores, and “Click and Collect” retailing models. B2B e-Retailing which has lagged so far is now ready to take off and we will see more IPOs from e-Commerce companies than from brick stores. Even car companies will start offering digital urban stores and selling more cars online, perhaps more in the developing world as protective policies and lobbyists will hold back this market’s potential in some developed countries, like the United States.

A key micro impact of this will be the focus by businesses on creating a seamless online/off-line customer journey and a unique and personalized customer experience throughout the life cycle of the product/service. Smart products will be everywhere around us from smart clothing, watches, phones, to smart buildings and smart cities. The smart city market, in particular, will take off with the industry expected to be worth $1.5 trillion by 2020. Smart city market participants will assume one or more of the four main roles in the ecosystem: integrators (the end-to-end service provider); network operators (the M2M and connectivity providers); product vendors (hardware and asset providers); and managed service providers (overseeing management/operation)

Amazon - Web Design Principles & Mobile Application Experience

Amazon follows good web design principles. Design is not just something designers do. Design is marketing. Design is your product and how it works. The more I’ve learned about design, the better results I’ve gotten. Recently, I needed to make an online purchase and immediately went to Amazon.com. That got me thinking – why did I automatically choose Amazon?

Was it because I knew their prices were competitive? Was it because I knew they had a large range of products? Was it because they offered free two-day shipping with an Amazon Prime membership? Or was it because I knew they would have a lot of product reviews?

This really got me thinking. Why do millions of Americans and customers from around the world buy from Amazon? It’s like they have this competitive advantage that no other e-commerce retailer has. It couldn’t simply come down to the price, could it?

Price isn’t the sole reason you and millions of others shop at Amazon. You do it because they offer the best e-commerce customer experience. Below are some list that make Amazon follow good web design principles.

Self-service support - For your e-commerce business, this means offering comprehensive information about your products on your website. This could be in the form of detailed and accurate product information, a wide range of product photos and/or real reviews from customers. Amazon exceeds customer expectations by offering a wide range of information that helps its customers find answers to their questions themselves. Nearly all products sold by Amazon have a detailed product description that is full of information – often information you can’t even find on the manufacturer’s own website.

Mobile-first experience - With over 50% of users now visiting your e-commerce site via mobile, you need to consider a mobile-first strategy. A mobile-first strategy involves creating an experience with the mobile visitor in mind, from the design of your e-commerce website to your emails and transnational payment systems. Amazon’s mobile-first approach is industry-leading. Their mobile site is super easy to navigate, find information and make purchases. Navigating through a site of Amazon’s size could be considered difficult on a mobile device because they have so many products, but by taking a mobile-first approach, they have found a way to make the experience easy through smart categorization and search functionality.

Smart convenience features like auto-fill on the search engine and 1-click ordering have been designed for the mobile user. Any time you make the experience easier for a customer, you create a sense of loyalty and they will remember that easy experience next time they consider buying a product with you.

Effectiveness of IAB Display Rising Star Ads

In the last few days, I saw a lot of interesting display advertising campaigns, sharing their drop of creativity that also drives results. Exactly. And guess what? they used banner ads. Also, whether we’re talking about social media or content marketing, if you want to be in front of the right people, at the right time in the right place, your choice should be paid ads.

A lot of marketers, advertisers, publishers and even designers are struggling with the limitation of the rectangle, inserting a lot of information and trying to make it through the banner blindness.

IAB is involved in educating marketers and media companies about the importance and the value of interactive advertising, recommending ad units and standards, and they also make available critical research on the subject. According to IAB, the Rising Stars ads attracted gaze at a 63% higher rate than traditional UAP ads and had 5 times longer total gaze duration. Also, these ads were more engaging and persuasive. Why? Because they’re a different kind of ads compared to what you already see on the internet so the user gets curious about this new format of content.

But the most interesting thing we should look at it is that about 65% of the respondents think that these Display Rising Stars ads offer more personality to the brand, 64% believe they get them to engage more, 60% give the consumer more control, 60% think they find out more information from these ads, and 58% believe that they are more attractive and entertaining.

Billboard - This is a brand-centric format that performs well only when it’s placed in a premium position on the top of the web-page or above the main content of the page.

Filmstrip - Filmstrip may know it as “Half Page”. This display ad offers a larger space for advertisers to promote their message across and can mean an increased user engagement.  Google said that 300×600 is one of the fastest growing sizes judging by impressions. Also, it’s recognized by the publishers that it offers a more visual message, a feature preferred by many brands.

Portrait - This ad is a brand-centric format that performs very good when placed in a non-intrusively manner, alongside content on the left or right side of the page. We always recommend our users to try not cover the content of the ad and also think about their customers’ experience on their websites. If the customers are happy, then our user is also happy.

References:

1. Mobile Rising Stars Ad Units. (n.d.). Retrieved February 04, 2017, from https://www.iab.com/guidelines/mobile-rising-stars-ad-units/

2. Rich Media Guidance. (n.d.). Retrieved February 04, 2017, from https://www.iab.com/guidelines/rich-media-guidance/

3. Canfield, D. (2017, February 04). Here's how countries around the world are mocking Donald Trump. Retrieved February 04, 2017, from http://www.businessinsider.com/how-countries-around-the-world-are-mocking-donald-trump-2017-2?utm_content=buffer69f7e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer%2F#portugal-5

Metric Analyze

After looking at the metric from the past weeks, the most important metric I believe is how many people visit my page. With that in mind, the page view is an important metric because it tracked are the page views of the page on which a given ad is displayed. This has to be done by the site that is hosting the ad since the ad provider has no way of knowing this data. A page view is typically counted when the page begins to output markup from the server. Page views are important because they are a checkpoint for how many impressions to expect for a given ads. For example, if there are 1,000 page views for a single page during a specific time but 100,000 ad impressions, that could mean something is very wrong. 

Another important metric is traffic source. After looking at Google Analytic, 51.7% people visit my site through Social Media Source. The other 48.3% from the direct source. I also think the demographic metric is important because it tells you who visited your site. As for my site, 70% are US visitors, 20% are Vietnamese visitors and the last 10% are from Germany.

The result for this week is much better from last week due to Social Media. In other to do a bit better, I need a good article to catch the audience attention. A good Title can also make the audience curious and click on the link. After you bring the audience into your website, the next step is to keep them entertain in the site with good content. I believe if I can do all that, my social media advertising will increase more impression. 

Amazon Revenue Model

Digital marketing in its simplest term is the process leveraging on modern digital technology to market goods or services or the process of pulling website traffic or attention through social media sites; they achieve this by creating content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it across their social network platforms.

First and foremost, the company sells goods directly. A percentage of products are offered to buyers through Amazon's online storefront with a small markup, and inventory is kept in the company's large network of warehouses. Most consumers visit the company's site assuming its products are less expensive and readily available for purchase and shipping.

The business model is very simple. After customer purchase transaction, Amazon will offer a button to subscribe to Amazon News. When customer click accept, Amazon will gather all the past data from this customer and create a Newsletter base on that user preferences. The Newsletter will be sent out every 2 days to capture the user attention. There will be an article that would be interesting to the user and some keyword to trigger the user the urged of buying. The goal is to get more traffic into Amazon.com

What is CAN-SPAM Act & How Macy's performance in the Social Media War

CAN-SPAM Act stand for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing. That act is a law that establishes the rules for commercial email and commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have a business stop emailing them, and outlines the penalties incurred for those who violate the law. According to the Federal Trade Comission's website, For every single email that violates the CAN-SPAM Act, the FTC will fine you $16,000. If the company is caught being non-compliant for a list say 20,000 email, well we can do the math of multiply. Below are the list of Do and Don't which summarize the CAN-SPAM Act. The full detail can be found at FTC's website.  

DO

• Do include your valid physical postal address in every email you send out.
• Do provide a clear and obvious way to opt out of every email you send out, and honor the unsubscribe within 10 business days.
• Do use clear "From," "To," and "Reply to" language that accurately reflects who you are. This applies to the person or business sending the message, as well as the domain name and email address.

DON'T

• Don't sell or transfer any email addresses to another list.
• Don't make it hard to unsubscribe from emails. You cannot 1) charge a fee 2) require a recipient to provide personally identifying information beyond an email address, or 3)make recipients take extensive steps other than simply replying to an email or visiting a single page on a website to unsubscribe themselves from your emails.
• Don't use deceptive subject lines in your emails that misrepresent the contents of your message.

After analyze my email for the past week, the email that caught my attention the most is the one start with the percentage of discount on the subject email. The reason why it caught my attention because how much money I would save if I clicked on that email. I believe that I would save some money when I open that email and buy the products. For example, When I saw Macy's email, the subject line stated "Things we love: extra 20% off & a long weekend!", the first thought went through my mind was "I can save 20% off 100 dollars I spend at Macy. Macy already make me think to spend $100 dollars at their stores. If this message can reach out to 1000 consumers, and all that consumers thinking like me, Macy just generate $100,000 income.

 The emails are compliant with the CAN-SPAM act. The only change I would make for Macy's promotion email is that include the message inside the email instead just provide us link to click on it and direct us back to their main website. However, the subject line "Extra 25% off: Men's Private Sale & Clearance ends Sunday!" does catch my attention every time. In that subject line, it has the percentage of discount, which interest me, and Men Private Sale, which made it personal level, caught my attention every time I open my email.

According to the internet retailers, Mayc's web sale keep growing in the first quarter for the department store chain that is No 6 in the Internet Retailer 2016 top 500. Chief financial officer Karen Hoguet reiterated in a call with investment analysts that Macy’s will continue to pursue an omnichannel strategy of linking its bricks-and-mortar stores with its websites, Macys.com and Bloomingdales.com, and its mobile sites and apps. Hoguet also pointed out that Macy’s recently had been ranked “as the sixth largest online retailer in America,” an apparent reference to the 2016 Top 500 Guide released last month. Macy’s does not report its online sales separate from total sales, saying that the way consumers move between stores and the web today blurs the line between store and online sales. Macy's also take step to advertise on social media as well but the result is not good. While Macy’s Inc. is bullish on social media—and Pinterest in particular—this holiday season, so far it has found that few consumers are transacting via buyable pins.

Base on IR's website, “Customer adoption of buyable pins has been slower than we anticipated,” says Serena Potter, group vice president of digital media strategy at the multichannel retailer, which is No. 6 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide. “There’s still a lot of Pinterest users who don’t understand how they work.” Macy’s has been using buyable pins, which enable users to purchase a retailer’s products directly within a pin, since Pinterest rolled out the e-commerce-enabled pins last year. But while Potter thinks consumers will come to buy directly on Pinterest in time, for now she primarily views the image-focused platform as a place for “discovery and inspiration,” she says.

There are many strategy elements of direct marketing to help achieve the direct marketing strategy goals. The offer is one of the proposition made by the marketer to the consumer. It has two out of 4P's product and price. The offer also include branding and place as well as other action that affects concrete attributes or product image of the product and the company. A good offer must have a deadline for expiration to let the customer know it's a one of a life time deal. Macy's is really good at doing that. Every promotion email they sent me, it always have the percentage discount and a section of item that really interest me. The list  is where business keep the prospective customer contact information and send out ads and weekly email to them to notify the promotion for the store. Macy's is really good at getting those information from the customer. Macy's already have many coupon which require a Macy's card or a member card. Those coupon could save you up to 35% off on all items. On top of that, when you sign up for Macy's member card for the first time, they will take another 15% off on the entire purchase. I have to admit, I saved a lot of money when I signed up with Macy's for the first time. The media is where Macy's is lacking on. I don't see a lot advertisement on TV for Macy's as much as before. Maybe it's the new era where everything is on mobile.  

References

1. Econsultancy, D. M. (1970, September 09). How Macy's uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google. Retrieved January 20, 2017, from https://econsultancy.com/blog/63374-how-macy-s-uses-facebook-twitter-pinterest-and-google/

2. Macy's Says Social Media Strategy Begins with Good Content. (2013, November 01). Retrieved January 20, 2017, from https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Macys-Says-Social-Media-Strategy-Begins-with-Good-Content/1010351

3.  CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2017, from https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business

4. 10 Email Marketing Spam Laws You Need to Know About. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2017, from https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/resources/10-email-marketing-spam-laws-you-need-to-know-about

5. Abby Callard Associate Editor. (n.d.). Macy's takes more steps to link its stores to the web. Retrieved January 20, 2017, from https://www.internetretailer.com/2014/09/16/macys-takes-more-steps-link-its-stores-web

Amazon - Business Models

     Amazon operates under a business model with many moving parts. First, the company sells products directly to the consumer. Percentages of goods are presented to buyers through Amazon's online front page with a little markup. The inventory is kept in the company's largest network building. The consumer always thinks items on Amazon are less expensive and readily available for purchase and 2 days shipping. Amazon also provides another platform for other companies to sell the product to buyers. Product sold through Amazon's partner retailer are normally less common items or those with a higher purchase price. That will allow Amazon stay away from holding slow-moving items that could lower the profit margin. While Amazon does not charge a fee to list the items for sale but the company does hold a small percentage of the sale price as commission.

     Amazon also has a subscription-based business model which call Amazon Prime. Under Prime account, the consumer pays an annual fee to secure the free two days shipping on eligible items. Prime member also have access to streaming media such as music or video. Amazon also creates more benefit for Prime membership such as Prime Now and Hotwheel. Prime Now is where the consumer can order item and will get it deliver to their address within 1-2 hours. Hotwheel is where customers can order food and get it deliver to their address within 1 hour.

     If Amazon would use a different business model such as Infomediary model, which mean to resell useful data from the customer, I believe that the company would not become a famous e-commerce today. 10 years ago, Amazon could just collect all the data the company gathered from the consumer and sell it off to a marketing company and make a chunk of money. A lot of marketing company would put a big bid for consumer behavior's data. Those marketing will use those data to put ads on the internet while you browse around. The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, had the long-term vision for the company. He planted the seed in the customer from the start when the company still selling the book. He made the customer feel safe for the transaction, the customer receive their product and this company is trust worthy. Now he uses the data that he collected to sell the more useful item to the consumer. Due to that reason, the company continues to success and grow bigger.