I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks looking at data on how consumers and marketers use e-mail and social media. Last week, I published a report covering the ways that marketers can maximize the connection between the two channels.

One thing that’s clear is that marketers are very focused on linking their existing e-mail marketing with their emerging social media strategies. In a survey published by Econsultancy and Adestra, 37% of e-mail marketers (mostly UK-based, but some from other regions) said they already encourage people to share content on social networks, and another 31% said they are planning to.

This sort of linkage is the low-hanging fruit; it’s relatively easy to add badges or tags to e-mail newsletters encouraging people to share with a friend or to become a fan or follower. Over time, we will see a lot more sophisticated integration of the two disciplines, as well as more segmentation. Marketers will segment not only their e-mail database (something 80% of survey respondents already said they did) but also their social media database, to better understand how (or if) the two audiences overlap. The next step will be to customize communications to each audience group.

That is what marketers need to work toward; without a total understanding of their audience across e-mail AND social media, they are leaving a lot left to chance. I discussed this and other strategies for linking e-mail marketing and social media marketing in a Webinar presented by StrongMail last week. If you missed it, you can view the entire Webinar here. If you only want to see the slides, they’re below.

We recently spoke with Dan Graham, who heads up the California office of consumer products and services consultancy Dechert-Hampe, which specializes in retail operations, go-to-market strategies and sales efficiency. Here’s a snippet from the full interview, in which Mr. Graham spoke about best practices for consumer products brands and manufacturers looking to enter the online marketplace. (Read more…)

The sixth annual “State of Search Engine Marketing Report” was released on March 25. Produced by the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO), the report is based on a global online survey of nearly 1,500 client-side marketers and agency respondents conducted by Econsultancy in January and February 2010.

SEMPO estimates that the value of the search engine marketing industry in North America—where most survey respondents are based—will rise 14% this year, to $16.6 billion.

Nine in every ten companies polled said they use search engine optimization (SEO) in 2010—a proportion unchanged since 2007. But the number using paid search marketing has risen, from 78% in 2009 to 81% in 2010.

Spending is up too. On average, the companies surveyed said they expected to spend 43% more on SEO in 2010 than in 2009, and 37% more on paid search.

Much of this investment is coming from the print sector. Agencies in particular commented on this trend, with 69% saying they had seen budgets shifting from newspapers and magazines into search engine marketing.

Budgets for social media marketing are still small by comparison with those for SEO and paid search, but search marketers polled for the report said they saw social media as their biggest opportunity in 2010.

Agency respondents considered the “rise of local search” to be the most significant emerging trend; 38% said it was “highly significant,” and 47% believed it was “significant.”

Selected datapoints from the “State of Search Engine Marketing Report” will be available in the eMarketer Total Access database.

I was genuinely surprised (and pleased) by the level of interest in my blog post last week on mobile stats in the BRIC countries. It is certainly the case that some of the numbers are eye-popping, as they inevitably will be anytime you deal with populations as large as those in China and India. But when I wrote the post, I assumed that would be self-evident.

At the same time, I will admit that putting out such lofty projections brought to mind the “data inflation” of the Internet boom a decade ago, when research firms, investment banks and media outlets effectively collaborated in a game of one-upmanship – the bigger the projection, the more coverage it got. Although this was decidedly not our intent, it is hard to put “billion” after anything without recalling the excesses of the Internet bubble.

Skepticism of market projections – born from the previous cycle of boom and bust – was apparent on a number of blogs that cited my earlier post. At eMarketer, we certainly both welcome and encourage the scrutiny. Still, I would again urge readers and those interested in the BRIC markets to not get overly caught up in the big numbers and focus instead on trends in mobile adoption and usage.

For me, the most relevant bits of information are those that reveal the degree to which mobile devices are vital communications lifelines for emerging market consumers – their “all-access pass,” as I describe them in the full BRIC Mobile report. This is as much the case for the farmer working in a remote rural area who can now get up-to-the-minute commodity prices delivered to a mobile handset as it is for the urban consumer who uses a smartphone to post a social network status update. Two highly different settings, user types and need states, but both cases where mobile helps users achieve their goals.

The bottom line: not all of China’s projected 1.3 billion mobile subscribers in 2014 will be created equal. Rather, as I conclude in the report:

In each of the BRIC countries, the mobile user population is divided along several key lines, notably age, income, location (urban versus rural), ethnicity and language, just to name a few. The same holds true for the BRIC countries as a unit. Each country and each subsegment within the BRICs has a distinct usage profile and brings with it a unique set of opportunities and challenges.

The Procter & Gamble Company raised some eyebrows with its January announcement that it would sell CPG products directly to consumers via a new Website. But P&G maintains that its eStore is a learning lab, one of the many groundbreaking test concepts it has launched over the past several decades.

We spoke with Glenn Williams, External Relations Manager at Procter & Gamble, about the new eStore and some of the strategies and expectations behind the concept. (Read more…)