SALE: Get your E-marketer now! Only £9,99!

Congratulations you are our 1,000,000th visitor, click here to see what you have won”. For years these kinds of pop-ups, unwanted newsletters and other spam were synonyms for E-marketing. Nowadays these irritating messages are almost extinguished and only remind us of the horror of web 1.0.

In those days you only needed a large database of e-mails and basic html knowledge to be successful on the internet. Luckily courts around the world judged and barred these pirates of the early internet. Adapt or die.

Thanks to online discussion forums companies think twice when applying e-marketing strategies, an upset consumer can easily influence hundreds of peers. On the other hand, companies have more resources for effective targeting than ever before. Booming websites and applications where a lot of user details are publically shared such as Amazon.com, Facebook, eBay, MySpace, … provide a massive amount of data. Webtraffic became also increasingly measurable so return-on-investment rates are just a few clicks away.

Marketing departments all over the world are preparing a war over the consumer, online. By the end of 2009 an average of 10% of the total marketing budget spend by global corporations will be allocated to e-marketing. To feed this war build-up companies are desperately recruiting youngsters who are familiar with the latest internet buzz and know the principles of marketing. Kids born with IPods in their ears who are 24/7 on the WWW browsing the blogosphere are hot.

Not often a blog writer is offered a quite impressive job such as Kris Hoet of ‘cross the breeze, who actually takes care of blogger relations for Microsoft in Europe. Off course, recruiting hobby-bloggers to develop marketing strategies is far from ideal. E-marketing is gaining so much importance that the subject should be taught at higher education level.

The question remains which profile an e-marketer should have. Off course he needs to be aware of the latest trends on the web. And yes, as a member of the marketing division he should know his P’s. Mix that with some technical and graphical knowledge such as flash, adobe, xhtml, java,… and you will come close finding your perfect e-marketer.

So, it seems that an e-marketer must be a multi skilled person huh? That is exactly how one should be trained: with a wide look on business environment. Ideally, students of all different business disciplines need to be mixed up and work in groups. Consequently, computing students get to know advertising strategies and marketing students learn that not all of their ideas are technically feasible.

Let’s take a look to some fine examples of e-marketing in various industries. Off course, e-marketing is mainly used in a B2C context. The good-things-should-never-end campaign of Orange, the Axe chocolatizer facebook-application, the ikea dreamkitchen, …But also non-profit organisations apply e-marketing in a very clever way. Or what to think of this Unicef campaign?

References:
Time magazine (2009) First E-marketing, Now E-research [online] available from <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995937,00.html> [Monday, Jan. 24, 2000]
The Guardian (2009) Expert panel Q&A: E-commerce [online] available from <http://www.guardian.co.uk/royal-mail-growing-your-business/expert-panel-e-commerce> [Tuesday November 18 2008 ]
AllBusiness (2009) Trend Watch: The importance of E-marketing [online] available from <http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/4283264-1.html> [Friday, December 1 2000]
Article Alley (2009) Importance of Internet Marketing Education [online] available from <http://www.articlealley.com/article_745355_81.html> [09th January 2009]