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Published on August 14, 2007

The eight trends are video direct, RSS, blogs, search engine optimisation (SEO), paid search engines, social bookmarking, e-mail and affiliate marketing.

Prasit Worachatrawanit, author of marketing.com, said video direct marketing was a 72-per-cent more effective e-commerce strategy compared to print marketing, and equally effective as live presentations. The Web video can increase sales by 30 per cent.

RSS marketing is a simple-to-use publishing tool for marketers and publishers. It allows customers to easily get Internet content delivered to their customers and to other Web media.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is an XML-based vocabulary that specifies a means of describing news or other Web content that is available for "feeding" - distribution or syndication - from an online publisher to Web users.

RSS is used widely in various types of marketing activities such as direct marketing, public relations, advertising, internal and team communications and online publishing.

"RSS marketing seems aggressive in a world where people are fed many marketing campaigns through various channels electronically," said Prasit.

Blog marketing is the third trend of e-commerce. Its strength is it is updated and relevant, faster and easier to access, and can increase visitors and customer networks.

"E-commerce businesses can apply the blog as an effective marketing strategy, not only using it as customer relationship management, but also as an intranet for distributing virtual marketing messages effectively," said Prasit.

Meanwhile, Jatupol Tanarutai, chief executive of Globlet Company, a local online advertising, search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO company, said the fourth trend in marketing strategies for e-commerce is SEM, a form of Internet marketing designed to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results.

SEM methods include search engine optimisation (SEO), paid placements and paid inclusion. SEM is the practice of buying paid search listings, different from SEO which seeks to obtain better free search listings.

A Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation report said that in 2006, the advertising industry in North America spent US$9.4 billion (Bt324.3 billion) on SEM, a 62-per-cent increase over the previous year.

According to Truehits, a web statistics provider, Google.co.th is the largest search engine having a 93.1-per-cent share in Thailand, followed by Sanook.com with 5.47 per cent, Yahoo.com with 0.59 per cent, and MSN.com with 0.25 per cent.

The fifth trend is paid search engine marketing, sometimes called "pay per click" (PPC).

It is technique of advertising and search engine marketing used on websites.

The worldwide PPC market is dominated by the three largest search engines - Google AdWords, Yahoo Service Search and Microsoft adCenter.

The sixth is social bookmarking. This kind of marketing refers to Web-based applications that enable users to store bookmarks online instead of in their favourites or bookmarks folders on their own computers.

Its advantage is that users can access their bookmarked sites from any computer, even a mobile phone, rather than being stuck to a specific device.

Songyot Kanthamanon, managing director of Grand Planet Enterprise, the ready-made website provider of www.readyplanet.com, said the seventh trend is e-mail marketing. With the power of e-mail and six trillion business e-mail addresses worldwide in 2006, e-mail has become an important marketing tool. Each day, around 25 billion business e-mail addresses are used.

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing.

Researchers have estimated that US firms alone spent $400 million on e-mail marketing in 2006. Many companies use e-mail marketing to communicate with existing customers, but many others send unsolicited bulk e-mail, also known as spam.

"E-mail marketing in 2010 is expected to be worth $1.1 billion, an increase from $900 million in 2005. This spending would be to acquire new customers and to retain existing customers in similar proportions," said Songyot.

The eighth trend is affiliate marketing. It is a method of promoting Web businesses, both of merchants and advertisers, in which an affiliate, called a publisher, is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through their efforts.

This kind of marketing uses one site to drive traffic to another that is a stepchild of an online marketing enterprise. Meanwhile, as search engines, e-mail and RSS capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing, despite a lineage that goes back almost to the beginning of online retailing, carries a much lower profile.

On top of these eight trends, the group of local e-commerce experts also recommended another trend called usability design, saying that good usability design is more effective in communicating through websites and enables more online retailers. Therefore, when designing an effective e-commerce website, they must consider users' perspectives and focus on a practical design.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation