This week's bite-size news (23/07/10)
Friday 23 July 2010
TAGS: Email marketing | Google | Social media
Bringing you this weeks most important digital happenings is our bite-size weekly news roundup...
Google granted new search patent for monitoring cursor movements on screen
Without clicking on anything, Google’s latest development is a system that can monitor the position of a user’s mouse cursor on screen.
Although still in the early stages, Google will be able to modulate search relevancy using cursor monitoring, which will allow the search giant to find out where a user’s mouse sits on screen when viewing search results and adverts.
Google states that ‘sometimes a user may review multiple informational items, moving a cursor over or near each of the information items. These various pointed activities can provide another way to evaluate the user’s feedback with respect to a particular informational item and help further understand relevancy.
61% of consumers prefer to receive promotions via email
According to Econsultancy’s Habits and Motivations of Consumers report, 61% of people prefer receiving news of a promotion via email. These emails can lead directly to a sale. 36% of respondents in the survey said they’d make an online purchase and 27% said they’d hit the high street to buy the promoted items.
But, emails should be relevant. 50% of consumers said there’s no value to emails lacking a ‘special advantage.’
However, social networking sites are growing in importance, as marketing tools as well as a means of evaluating quality. 55% would check social networking sites for a high rating before deciding whether or not to purchase an item promoted through an email.
Latest IPA survey finds internet use up by 38% since 2008
In this year’s TouchPoints Survey, the IPA found the average consumer now spends 1.8 hours per day online.
The most popular reasons for doing so were emailing (20%), work (16%), social networking (11%) and ‘consuming media’ (at just 2%). This confirms that despite social networking use rising by 113% since 2008, emails are still the favoured form of communication.
The overall number of people using the Internet has also increased to 75% up from 53% in 2006. But the main growth has been among 15-24 year olds, where time spent online has risen by 43% compared to just 20% growth among over 55s.