What will be different 5 years from now? Let’s take a look into my crystal ball… Continue reading →

Since I have first dialed up to the Internet in late 1993 I consider myself an “early adopter”. There is one trend that existed ever since Web 1.0 was born: Today’s cool stuff will be tomorrow’s ordinary stuff.

Back in the late nineties it took years for a really cool web feature to reach its expiry date, mainly because Internet users expected less than today and because development cycles were much slower due to technology limitations. Having an Internet presence was cool enough. Today, new web sites and applications can be developed in very short time, and to please the demanding internet audience, a lot more features and frequent upgrades are required.

In order to keep up with this fast changing medium, online markters need to spend a lot of time researching online. Unfortunately I can not always make sufficient time available for reading blogs and email newsletters. Listening to podcasts on my way to work helps, but podcasting does not sufficiently cover all important areas of online marketing yet. I wish I had at least one hour just for research every day. Too many of my email newsletters are trashed without reading, and too many RSS feeds create no more than a headline that is never clicked. Pressing delete on interesting subject lines really hurts.

How much of your time do you spend researching online?

Writing compatible markup for web browsers is a tedious process of trying and testing. Doing the same for graphical emails is next to impossible. Some of the most popular email clients and web mail services either support only a rudimentary set of CSS and HTML or render designs very different from others. Continue reading →

I have always pointed out that an eMarketer needs to have a good understanding of the technologies involved. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that every eMarketer needs a strong technology background to properly do the job. But it certainly helps a lot. Actually I would not want to do my job without this knowledge. Just a few examples: Continue reading →

A funnel is often used to illustrate how many of your target audience will finally perform a desired action on the web site. For those who still believe that the mere existence of a web site is enough to get the “e” part of their marketing job done, a funnel is a handy tool to prove how wrong they are. Continue reading →