Study: Online marketers rely on e-mail marketing

The three most important topics for online marketers are email, search engine and affiliate marketing. Internet telephony, mobile marketing and accessibility are gaining the most importance. This is the result of the new study "Online Trends 2006" by the service provider directory Marketing-Börse. 95 percent of the 1,500 online marketing experts surveyed consider e-mail marketing to be an important topic, as it is considered to be one of the most efficient customer retention tools. Many companies are pushing ahead with the development of their own mailing list. According to the study, the challenge here is to retain readers by continuously providing relevant information. In addition to search engine optimization, affiliate marketing is also very popular among those surveyed. It brings in visitors by linking your own website to partner sites. Systematic link building is also an important instrument of search engine marketing. One successful example is the online retailer Amazon: 23.6 million hyperlinks point to its German website alone. 88 percent of study participants consider Internet telephony to be an indispensable marketing tool. It offers customers the opportunity to call with questions or problems about a product at the click of a mouse and communicate immediately with a real person instead of a computer. The authors of the study also consider it important to keep an eye on weblogs: Those who regularly check a forum such as Technorati.com to see what is being written about their company in blogs can prevent many a PR disaster.