This post was originally published at ClickZ.asia on January 19, 2011.

As a working professional, I spend about 30% of my time reading and writing emails. Outside of work, I find that I am spending less and less time in front of a computer on personal emails. As digital communication continues to evolve so too have consumers’ behaviors. Web-based email, which for many years was on a continual growth curve, is now seeing declining usage across many geographies throughout the globe as consumers are offered a growing number vehicles to digitally communicate.

Globally, total minutes spent on web-based email (note this does not include PC web applications such as Outlook) was down 2 percent in November 2010 versus November 2009, with time spent in the Asia-Pacific region showing even more dramatic decline dropping 10 percent. Within the region, markets showed varying levels of engagement trends. The largest decline in time spent was seen in Malaysia (down 22 percent), India (down 19 percent) and South Korea (down 15 percent). Taiwan, Hong Kong and New Zealand on the other hand actually showed increases in overall minutes spent in the category.

What or Who is Driving the Web-Based Email Exodus?

When looking for the email declining culprit look no further than the demo segments that usually begin online trends – young users. Analysis across the market showed that younger users most often exhibit the strongest change in email behavior, driving down overall category engagement. A look at Malaysia for instance revealed that although there are more unique Internet visitors across all age segments, young users are showing the strongest decline in email visitation. Visitors age 15-24 visited web-based emails 16 percent fewer instances than a year ago, while those ages 25-34 declined 7 percent. Even persons age 35-44 experienced a 6-percent decrease in visitation to email sites. Older demographic segments saw more users visit email destinations with those 55+ growing 14 percent, as once again age marks a major difference in consumption patterns.

We now know web-based email isn’t capturing the same level of engagement and visitation it used to in many markets, and it is obviously not because we communicate less with each other. Humans are now more connected that ever before. The question is where and how are people communicating digitally? There are a few key trends to consider here in the evolution of digital communication, but the most important are social networking and mobile.

As social networking has reached a critical mass across most of Asia Pacific (52 percent reach), communicating via wall posts, messages, tweets etc. has often replaced the need for regular emailing in some peoples’ digital lives. Time spent on social networking sites in November 2010 grew 44 percent worldwide to reach a total of 272 billion minutes, in Asia-Pacific total minutes spent social networking climbed 16 percent. Across the region, every market except mobile-obsessed Japan experienced double-digital growth in minutes spent social networking on the computer; Malaysia - the market that witnessed the greatest decline of time spent on web-based email - experienced the greatest increase in social networking minutes – up 114 percent!

Another theory on the decline of web-based email usage: people are turning to their mobile devices to email and communicate. In the U.S. for instance (which has also seen the web-based email declining phenomenon), mobile email usage has grown 36 percent in the past year. In Europe, mobile email users grew 55 percent in the past year. In Japan, 53 percent of users access email via their mobile in September leading as one of the top mobile behaviors in the market. Whether for work or personal email use, mobile offers the convenience of staying in the loop no matter where you are, and for some couch potatoes sitting at home, it offers a quicker way to check your inbox even when there is a PC at your disposal. Let’s not forget the approximately 9 million iPads that have been sold and gives you apps for accessing your mails. With the tablet market set to explode this year, this is yet another device that supplants web-mail usage.

So what does this mean for marketers?

1. Email is still important, don’t take this as the sign to stop all together using the email channel to reach your audience. Targeted, permission-based email will remain one of the best ways to reach your existing and potential customers.
2. Web-based email remains engaging. No one is going to give up his/her Gmail or Hotmail account without a fight. When they read their mails, they are still going to staring at that screen longer than the average web page so they will be exposed to the ad longer.
3. Targeting and Re-Targeting. Many web-based email providers give advertisers a lot of information about the users that can be used to target advertising. In addition, if you are doing a branding campaign where frequency is important, you will have greater confidence that your message is reaching the same audience. People are not going to change email addresses every month.

It’s not that people are communicating less and that is why email usage is declining - they are actually communicating more but just through an increasing amount of channels. So the era of email isn’t over per se, it’s just evolving as all communication channels have throughout history. The digital landscape just makes those changes happen a lot more quickly, and distinct communication channels will become blurred. Google launched Buzz last year to try to integrate social into email. Coming from the other way, Facebook recently offered email accounts. The term “email” will soon become as outdated as the “telex”.

This post was originally published at ClickZ.asia on December 21, 2010.

Tis the season for holiday shopping, and across the globe more people are turning to the Internet to make their purchases – particularly in the retail sector. E-commerce is traditionally led by travel transactions and purchases, but towards the end of the year in the U.S., retail e-commerce picks up. E-commerce can equal big bucks – take for instance the recent record the U.S. hit in holiday spending when the country experienced its first day on record of achieving more than $1 billion (USD) in e-commerce sales on a single day during Cyber Monday (November 29). This highlights the opportunity the digital channel holds for retailers.

In Asia Pacific, visitation to retail sites has achieved a much higher market penetration than travel – which tends to be the gateway and primary category in online purchasing. In most markets, more than half of Internet users frequented a retail destination in October, while in most cases less than half frequented a travel site. Looking at which markets were most retail savvy, Japan topped the list with 80 percent of its online population visiting a retail site in October, followed by Australia (76 percent) and South Korea (72 percent). Singapore achieved the highest percent penetration for travel with 52 percent reach, followed by New Zealand and Australia at 48 percent and 43 percent; these markets have retail penetration rates of 64 percent and up. It’s interesting to note that just because a market exhibits high propensity for utilising retail sites, does not necessarily mean they are as willingly to frequent travel sites, with large differences in these two activities seen in several markets including Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan.

Local and Global Brands Attempt to Win Consumers’ Loyalty and Dollars

When consumers turn to the digital channel to purchase retail goods or travel, global and local brands are often pitted against each other to fight for the attention and dollars of visitors. A look at the top destinations on a regional basis paints a mixed picture with Asian-based companies and multi-nationals finding nearly equal popularity with consumers. Alibaba.com Corporation was the clear retail leader with nearly 120 million visitors from the Asia Pacific region; its flagship taobao.com retail site accounted for 108 million visitors in the region. Alibaba.com is also ranked as the second largest global online retailer after Amazon. U.S.-based Amazon and Apple followed as number two and number three, while local players such as Rakuten.co.jp, Paipai.com, and Zol.com.cn all secured places in the top 10 listing.

In Consuming Retail Content – Females Take the Prize

In most markets across the region, women were more likely to consume content at retail sites than men, with Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan showing strong disparity in page consumption. On the flip side, Vietnam and the Philippines showed males much more likely to consume pages of retail content than females. For brands looking to develop engaging content on their sites, understanding viewers from a demographic and behavioural standpoint is critically important.

The Future of E-Commerce: A Promising Outlook

At this point, e-commerce revenues in Asia Pacific are still not comparable to the Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays, but increasing traffic to retail sites means more shopping, which will result in more buying – online or offline. The e-commerce channel holds incredible potential for brands and retailers across the region and for some markets in particular. For brands attempting to access and capitalise on the online channel as a way to reach consumers and their wallets, it’s important to remember several things when building your digital commerce strategy:

• Know your target audience and where to find them: Understanding who your key audiences are, including their demographic characteristics, what online sites and categories they visit, and what digital content they spend time consuming, will help you reach and engage your audience more effectively, especially for smaller or less-known brands.
• Create a secure environment: In many markets, consumers still face a lack of confidence in conducting secure transactions online. Developing a secure environment and providing consumers with transparency in your purchasing policies can help build trust in the channel and make the differences if a consumer buys from you or your competitor.
• Online presence can equal offline sales: It’s important to remember that not all people will buy online, but many will in fact research and browse online and make the actual purchase offline. So even if you don’t plan to sell your goods digitally, having a digital brand presence is increasingly important to savvy shoppers.
• The payment gateway is key: Credit cards are not “King” in many markets in Asia Pacific for e-commerce, because not everyone has one (or two). Alibaba.com has Alipay to connect to banking debit accounts and is one of the main reasons for its success. Other markets are following a similar debit rather than credit route.

E-commerce in Asia Pacific is growing as our company also highlighted in a recent press release that the U.S.-focused Cyber Monday also attracted a lot of international shoppers. Nearly 6 percent of the billion dollar hoard on that day came from people living outside of the U.S., but shopping at U.S. websites. This is a consistent 6 percent trend that also occurred last year in 2009 – but last year’s 6 percent was out of $887 million whereas this year’s 6 percent was out of $1.028 billion…and I, for one, did my part and bought online from U.S. retailers on Cyber Monday.

This post was originally published at ClickZ.asia on November 18, 2010.

The Internet was coined ‘the most measurable medium’, largely as a result of the industry’s reliance on click-through rates (CTRs) to measure online advertising. But over the past several years, and through a variety of industry research, we’ve learned while clicks can be measured, they do not necessarily matter, at least not to the extent that many might have believed.

There are several reasons why CTRs are not the appropriate measure of display advertising’s effectiveness. Perhaps most notably is the fact that the majority of Internet users do not click on display ads, and the percentage of users who do is continuing to decrease over time.

In March 2009, only 16 percent of U.S. Internet users clicked on an ad, according to our research with Starcom USA. That’s a 50 percent decrease compared to July 2007.

And the same trend in rates has been seen across global regions, according to the DoubleClick annual benchmark report (PDF).

If a campaign’s effectiveness is only measured using clicks then the campaign is ignoring 84 percent of Internet users – a major missed opportunity for the majority of brands.

How do online direct response ad dollars measure up to other media?

Using click-throughs to measure effectiveness is essentially making the Internet a direct response medium. A look at how the online channel is utilised for advertising versus other media such as TV, print, and radio revealed vast differences in the brand versus direct response dollar split. Of the $186 billion spent on media vehicles outside of the Internet, 63 percent is spent on brand marketing; while 37 percent of the total dollars is spent on direct response marketing, according to Lehman Brothers/ThinkEquity Partners. In comparison, of the $26 billion spent on online media, only 23 percent of dollars is spent on brand marketing; while 77 percent is spent on direct response marketing.

But what will it take to move the industry beyond viewing the online channel as a direct response medium where the click is king?

The industry has been slow to move beyond the idea of the online channel as a direct response vehicle measured by click-throughs to utilising it as a branding vehicle, where the true potential of the digital economy can become a reality. There is clear and mounting evidence in support of the Internet’s ability to build brands and the industry is beginning to recognise and act on the potential. As addressed in our company report, ‘How Online Advertising Works: Whither the Click?’ even with dismal CTRs, display advertising has been shown to lift site visitation for the advertised brand, to lift trademark search queries and to build both online and offline sales.

As an increasing percentage of brands’ budgets move to digital, marketers must be able to effectively measure the total impact of their digital advertising campaigns, which includes many other more meaningful measures other than the click, and to develop strategies and execute campaigns that will result in the greatest return-on-digital investment.

The digital environment is increasingly complex, but with this complexity comes an immense amount of opportunity for innovative and forward-thinking brands to seize the potential that comes from this engaging and far reaching platform. Before planning and measuring your next campaign, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Digital Advertising: What to Remember and Forget About the Click

• Clicks on display ads are a misleading metric, and one should only use clicks for direct response ad campaigns (or search).
• Clicks do not reveal information on brand building. Clicks don’t measure all of a campaign’s sales impact nor the cumulative (latent) impact of ads.
• Click-through rates continue to decrease as more content is created and more advertising inventory is available.
• The majority of clicks come from a small percentage of the total population. One of our company studies found that heavy and moderate clickers only represent a combined 8 percent of the U.S. Internet population, yet they account for about 85 percent of all click-throughs.
• Clicks are not the right metric to use for measuring online branding. Better metrics such as ‘reach and frequency’ help establish online media on the same playing field as traditional media to provide continuity in planning.
• Although it might be coined ‘the most measurable medium’, brands need to understand what metrics (and there are many!) are important in measuring their digital success.

This post was originally published at ClickZ.asia on October 13, 2010.

Across much of Asia and the world, online video consumption has become nearly synonymous with Web usage. Of the six markets in the Asia-Pacific region currently reported in comScore Video Metrix, nearly all see more than 80 percent of their online audiences watching online video.

Not only does online video reach a large number of visitors, but it is also one of the most engaging online activities. In Japan, viewers spend nearly 17 hours a month consuming video with double-digit hours also spent in Hong Kong (12.7 hours) and Singapore (10.4 hours). As high-speed broadband continues to gain adoption enhancing the user experience, it is expected that visitors will continue to consume more video content online.

Online Video Goes Mainstream

Online video used to be considered an activity largely for younger users, but as content options have continued to expand, online video viewing has become ubiquitous across demographic segments. A look across Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia revealed that although there are higher engagement rates among some segments, online video viewing is no longer dominated by a single age group of users. Malaysia experienced the greatest disparity in demographic usage with viewers age 15-24 accounting for 39 percent of video viewers in July.

In terms of viewer engagement, viewers age 15-24 represented the most “tuned in” segment across the three markets. Hong Kong saw viewers in this segment consume more than 20 hours of online video during the month, with Singapore viewers 15-24 watching nearly 15 hours per month. Interestingly in each market, visitors age 55 and older represented another strong segment of engaged users.

Although each market has its unique demographic patterns, it’s important to note that online video viewing is a mainstream Web activity with a far reach and engaging quality.

Online Video and TV: What’s Next

There is no doubt that video will continue to play a strong role in the online consumer experience. In an arena that was once dominated by user generated content, online video is maturing considerably as a medium with more professionally produced content – including broadcast TV content – capturing consumers’ attention, and shifting the dynamics of “where, when, and how” people consume video content.

In Singapore, MediaCorp recently launched xinMSN with Microsoft and offers users the ability to catch up on the broadcast local shows that they have missed. Media Prima in Malaysia, the largest free-to-air TV stations, has offered “catch-up TV” since last year and just launched Tonton for video-on-demand over the Web. There are other similar plans in the region.

Where will these initiatives lead? A look at cross-platform TV viewing in the more matured U.S. showed that 35 percent of viewers are either cross-platform (Internet and traditional television) or online-TV viewers only as the dynamics of TV-viewing continue to change with a growing number of content options available online.

Broadly, audiences are increasingly enjoying the option of tuning in to their favorite scripted TV programs online because they value freedom and personal empowerment. This has both a time and a space component – in time, with on demand viewing on one’s own schedule, and in space, with the convenience of watching wherever you want, and on the screen that is most convenient to you.

What will be important for the industry is how to effectively monetise online video content, an area that is still in its infancy. Questions such as which types of video ads are most effective, the debate on the free versus paid model for content viewing, and the cross-platform synergies that exist will be important for the industry to address as the online video space continues to evolve.

This post was originally published at ClickZ.asia on September 13, 2010.

• Where do 3 out of 4 global Internet users visit during a month?
• What captures 15 percent of total time spent online worldwide?
• What do Asia-Pacific Internet users do online for nearly 3 hours each month?

If you answered social networking, you’re right.

For those people that still consider social networking a niche market, it’s time to wake up and face the data.

In June, 924 million Internet users around the globe visited a social networking site, making it one of the most popular online activities, and it just keeps growing.

In the Asia-Pacific region, half of all Internet users visit a social networking site each month. Although Asia Pacific as a region reports lower social networking usage than other regions (due largely to low broadband penetration in some markets as well as restricted usage in places such as China), usage across the region continues to increase rapidly. Several markets in Asia were some of the most avid users of social networking in the world including the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, which each saw more than 90 percent of their online population social networking during the month.

What’s even more impressive than the sheer volume of traffic to social networks is the amount of time people spend on these sites. Social networks now capture more time than e-mail, news, games and entertainment activities online. Instant messengers are the only online activity more engaging than social networking in the region. In several markets, visitors are spending more than four hours a month on social networking sites including in the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and New Zealand.

But wait, isn’t social networking just for kids and young people? No longer the case. What used to be an activity dominated by the 18-24 year old demographic is now a main activity in the digital lives of users across all age groups. In Singapore and Hong Kong for instance, more than half of social networkers are age 35 and older.

So now you have an idea of just how ‘non-niche’ social networking is, but what does this mean for you as a digital marketer? There are three ways to use social networks:

Word of Mouth Marketing

Social networks – as a matter of course – offer communication. Not just two-way communication between you and your customers, but between your brand and your brand advocates and your potential consumers. There are many case studies about successful word of mouth campaigns. That’s the beauty of social networks; if you create content that has intrinsic value and spurs interest in consumers to forward it on, or to retweet it, or to ‘like it’, it will take off with a life of its own. This is not easy and requires much research and creativity and, more likely than not, some failure.

Social Listening and Reputation Management

It is not enough to just put up a Facebook page or Twitter account. Many companies stop there and don’t dedicate full-time resources to read, update, and reply to all the activity that goes on. Social media engagement does not stop when the campaign stops. Your thousand of followers are still there and they are still commenting. In many cases, telling you what they think of your brand or your marketing campaign. You should listen and engage with these consumers – all the time. Whether it’s communicating with customers via Twitter.com, advertising on Facebook or offering special promotions on social media sites, if you aren’t commanding your brand in the social media realm you are missing opportunities to reach and engage with your audience.

Brand Marketing Campaigns

With over 75 percent reach in most Asia Pacific countries, social networks are now mass market media just like Yahoo, MSN, and other major portals. Branding is about reach (eyeballs) and frequency (the number of times these people are exposed to your message). If you have large cross media campaign to brand a new product or service, the social media is just as effective as the other main media. Just like other sites, it’s important to remember that each social media site offers brands and advertisers access to unique audiences. Many people are on more than one or two social networks for different reasons. Are you looking to reach women age 15-24 from a certain region in Malaysia? Are men age 55+ your key audience? Are you looking to reach social networkers that are also heavy users of online retail sites? Each social networking destination is unique in not only the utility it offers to its users, but also who these users are. Understanding audience characteristics from a demographic and behavioral level is integral to a sophisticated digital strategy.

Social media platforms will continue to evolve and it’s important for brands and advertisers to look to the future. That includes examining: How will social networking evolve in the mobile environment? How will this change PC-social networking usage? What are the synergies that exist between PC and mobile social media usage? What are the differences between PC and mobile social networkers?

Although still a niche market, one can assume mobile social networking won’t be for long.