Which was the only one of nine advertising sectors in NZ to increase its revenue in 2009?  Online ad spend in NZ increased from $193m in 2008 to $214m in 2009, and its share of overall advertising grew from 8.3% to 10.5% (the first time over 10% threshold).

The $21m increase in interactive countered the decline of $272m as it dropped to $2045m in 2009 from $2317m in 2008. Interactive advertising grew by more than 10% against a total industry decline of 12%.

Read the IAB’s release of the New Zealand Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) here.

Nielsen Media put these facts together last week for IAB members – since we are one, we are sharing the top takeouts with you.  You might want to use them when trying to remind management that online no longer = niche!
> 88% (3.2 million) NZers (10+) have access to the Internet
> 67% of people who have Internet access from home have broadband connections
> 80% (2.9 million) NZers10+ have gone online in the last 4 weeks
> 67% of households with an internet connection now have broadband
> 90% of regular users have Internet access from home
> Regular Internet users from both home & work spend over 9 hours per week on the net
> Only work or home users spend around 7 hours browsing the web

As you plan for 2010/11 with crash/recovery/crash/recovery circling around meeting rooms worldwide, budgets remain a battleground.
If you need statistics to help you to demonstrate the importance of a well-funded email program – here they are.

Head’s up – the data says: Keep email off the chopping block.

If the recent StrongMail “2010 Marketing Trends” survey is correct, online marketing spending will be up in the coming year. According to the report, 89% of respondents said they will either maintain or increase the amount of their marketing spending in 2010, with 50% of businesses saying they would allocate additional dollars to their marketing efforts. The survey, conducted online Nov. 17–25, surveyed 1,057 business executives.

What will they be spending their dollars on? Social media and e-mail marketing are the top two areas, with 69% of respondents saying they will be increasing e-mail spending; 59% saying they would be increasing social media efforts; and 69% saying they would be integrating social media and e-mail marketing. Among their goals, marketers reported a desire to increase relevancy by adopting segmentation and targeting, cited by 46% of respondents.

New technology that makes it easier to perform A/B testing, should become more important in 2010, she said. “It’s always challenging to come up with two sets of creative, but with subject lines, everyone can do some form of A/B testing,” she said. “These new tools will enable marketers to test on the fly and optimize for winning subject line as a campaign is in flight.” (Blog note: Our new SmartMailPro has A/B split testing tools built in).

Of course, marketers will also strive to make better use of what they already have available to them, Hersant said, with 68% of respondents saying that they plan on making better use of the data they already have.

Silverpop has revealed in a survey that in spite of recession email marketing budgets will increase in 2010. It also found that social media is poised to play a bigger role in 2010.  Four out of 10 marketers reported that their email budgets in 2010 would increase, and nearly half revealed that their budgets would stay the same.  Most of the respondents have agreed that the recession is badly affecting the business and it is likely to continue this way or time to come. More than half of the marketers (52%) have prioritised customer loyalty as top goal for email marketing.

Overall, spending on email marketing in the US will balloon to $2 billion by 2014 — a nearly 11 percent compound annual growth rate — according to a new forecast by Forrester Research Inc. A high return on investment, and growing consumer use of social email accounts will fuel the use of email by Direct Marketing professionals.

And the Small Business sector – far and away New Zealand’s biggest segment -  were asked by VerticalResponse, Inc.on their planned usage and spend for email marketing, social media, search engine marketing and online banner ads for  2010.

Here’s a snapshot of where SME owners said they would and would not be spending their budgets.

• 74.1 percent will increase their email marketing spend.
• 68.3 percent will increase their social media spend.
• 23.8 will avoid search engine marketing.
• 54.2 percent will not invest in banner advertising.
• 79.6 percent will not run television ads.
• 72.7 percent will be not run radio advertising.

Retail and eTail email is consistently critical.  And even those who were already planning to spend, were last year spending more than that.  65% of retailers are planning to spend more on email than originally planned. – Forrester Research and Shop.org, “Retailing Online 2009: Marketing Report” (2009)

As ever, we have to turn to the US for these statistics, but the point is clear, and there are plenty more numbers where these came from.

Here at our place we see the smartest clients working their email programs harder than ever.

Best practise strategy and execution, segmentation and always, always relevant content is king, no matter what your budget.

Over the last decade email has come to replace many forms of traditional communication. More and more of the same old messages you are used to are being delivered online.  This concept should be familiar to anyone who has received a newsletter or an air-miles statement in their inbox.

jericho’s business is email design and delivery management. Using our online tools our clients can deploy anything from simple email marketing messages to transactional activity such as billing and account statements.  

As long as you have consent to email your database you can send just one email, or millions, at one time.  By delivering this personalised, branded, tracked and reported information via email, we significantly reduce printing, postage and copying for our clients.  But more relevant to the current zeitgeist is the green cost of all this activity.

If you think of all the steps in normal media delivery – printing, posting, delivering, opening, filing, dumping and even recycling – you will appreciate that they consume vast amounts of energy. This has a cost that can be calculated to assess the impact they have on the organisation, its customer, and the planet.

As an example in the first instance, let’s look more closely at just one of these impacts – conserving paper.

In the first quarter of 2009 Smartmail clients sent in excess of 8 million emails per month.  Given that each email has an average size equivalent to two A4 pages, this is 16,000,000 pages of content per month.

Assuming these emails are not printed by their recipients, it’s possible to calculate how may trees are saved each month when using email.

There are 500 pages in a ream of paper, so that’s 32,000 reams per month not used.  Each ream requires 3.6 kg of wood and as an average tree weighs 680 kg*, jericho’s clients are saving 170 trees per month! 

That paper consumes trees is pretty well known – but you may not know that the pulp and paper industry is the single largest industrial consumer of water in OECD countries.  It is the third largest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, after the chemical and steel industries.**

Smartmail users are saving tens of thousands of litres of water every year.

This could all just be a raindrop in the ocean, but in a world where billions of tonnes of waste is generated annually, you can feel a lot better about yourselves.

So, as a leading email marketing services company who works with over 600 client organisations, we can pat ourselves on the back. And you can feel pretty good that while you have chosen to get the best of services from us, you are doing your part to save the planet too.

It’s nice doing business with smart companies, and we are proud if that includes you.

*http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/23702
**OECD Environmental Outlook, p. 218