Study: Online Retailers Plan to Focus on Search, Email Marketing & Social Media During Recession
While the U.S. economy is still puttering through a recession, a new marketing study from the National Retail Federation's Shop.org and Forrester Research found that at least some online retailers have been able to take greater marketshare in the last few months. About 46% of the 117 retailers polled in this study also said that they had no plans to scale back their original budgets for 2009, though 54% of all respondents expect their overall growth to slow during the next 12 months. Over the last few months, shoppers have become increasingly price-sensitive, and this has clearly helped some online retailers to outperform their brick-and-mortar competitors.
While some online retailers might be weathering the economic downturn better than their competitors at the local mall, 30% of the respondents also said that they would cut spending on their web retail operations this year. Among those who are planning to cut costs, 88% say that they will scale back their hiring plans.
Email Marketing a Top Priority
Those companies that are seeing the current downturn as a chance to expand and that are planning to spend more on their online efforts this year, say that they will focus their investments on search (80%), email (65%), and social marketing (60%). According to this report, these businesses see email as one of the most important means to communicate with their customers and most plan to use it to inform customers of new product launches, promotions, and to get customer feedback. 90% of all respondents listed a focus on email marketing as a top priority.
Companies Won't Scale Back Social Media Campaigns
Interestingly, the study also found that those companies that are growing faster than expected during this downturn are also more likely to embrace social media. Even those companies that are planning to scale back their online operations this year still plan to experiment with social media campaigns.
Imaged used courtesy of Flickr user jakerome.
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Situation is so bad that I don't think these all options will work out. One has to only wait and watch for good times to come back.
Thus we all are going to receive even more emails, that hopefully end up in our Spam box.
Email opening rates are already plummeting. Consumers are overloaded. But very focused, very targeted emails to maintain a relationship with core existing customers should still be useful.
I feel embracing social media is also all about learning about the medium, and would expect retailers to put more focus on this to try and figure out how to use it. Plus its currently the buzz thing, so naturally will gain more attention from them.
I think that companies are already aware of the potential of social networks, but many had not yet established a strategy and do not know how to make the most of them.
A tool such as E-goi can combine all the potential of e-mail marketing “and disseminate the information and / or products automatically in social networks.
I think this article is illustrative:
Broadcast your campaigns to your favourite social networks!
I thought email marketing was dying. With all the spam everyone gets into their inbox daily it makes you sick of all email offers regardless!
I believe email marketing will never die. I feel embracing social media is also all about learning about the medium, and would expect retailers to put more focus on this to try and figure out how to use it.
In business as in all business practices are good. I think it should be legislated to limit this activity!