IDEASMARKIT

Internet in India 2012 Statistics based on Census 2011

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Sun, 13 May 2012 10:46:00 +0000

I have seen through number of self proclaimed hyped reports on number of internet users in India and putting that number as high as 100 Million . This is quite far from reality.Here are some numbers.

According Census 2011 of India there are 15.54 Million households (6.3% of total population) in India who have computer/laptops in their homes.
However Only 7.6 Million households (3.1% of total population) have laptops/ computers with internet.
Maharashtra is the biggest Indian Internet market with 18% of Total Internet households followed by Tamil Nadu with 10%, Karnataka 8.27% , U.P (Noida inclusive) 8.18%, Delhi 7.68% and Andhra Pradesh with 7.15%.
Delhi/NCR inclusive of Noida and Gurgaon would however have much higher numbers.

However this is just statistics for Home users there are definitely a large number of users accessing internet in India through offices and cyber cafes but then you should see the data points provide by the two largest players in Indian market.Facebook and Google.

Facebook allows you to target 45.82 Million users in India
Google's Adwords says that it has a reach of 14.5 Million users through Search in India
Number of Active users per month as per Google's Ad Planner is 30.7 Million
However as per IAMAI total internet users in India is 100 Million and as per Comscore it is close to 50 Million.

Number of Broadband connection in India are however 13.42 Million as of Jan 2012

Other interesting data point according to Census of India 2011 is that

63 % of Indians own a Telephone connection.
47.2 % of Indians own a Television
19.9 % of Indians own a Radio/Transistors

To Summarize here are

India Internet Statistics 2012

India has 7.6 Million Households having internet
13.42 Million broadband connections (Home + Offices ) combined.
Maximum targettable audience using one site in India is Facebook with 45.82 Million
Active user base per month in India is close to 30 Million mark which is still a pretty large market but not as big as portrayed by some consultants.

TRAI: Internet Penetration in India 2011 Report

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 07:55:00 +0000

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India(TRAI) has released a detailed report on number of internet connections in India. Points to note

These are internet connections and offices and cybercafes have many users accessing a connection so actual number of users in India is significantly greater than these number.
There are 19.67 million Internet subscribers in March 2011 a yearly growth of 21.59 % w.r.t March 2010
Broadband users(>256 Kbps) are growing at 35.49% and were upto 11.89 Million at March 2011
Dial Up and Narrow band users (<256 Kbps) are growing at 5.12% and were upto 7.79 Million at March 2011
Maharashtra is having largest Internet (<256 Kbps) and Broadband (>=256 Kbps) subscriber base in the country. Tamil Nadu is at second place in internet and broadband subscriber base

Complete report can be found here

How to increase conversion of your Internet Generated leads

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Tue, 31 May 2011 16:41:00 +0000

Internet lead generation is a big business internationally but in India its value is still to be realized. Having worked in couple of lead generation companies I have seen most of people complaining about the quality of lead generated by internet medium but compared to any other medium it still is your best bet. A research by Leadqual backed by MIT has some very good answers why your lead might not convert well

Prospective buyers fill out 3-5 lead forms (especially true of those coming from Google campaigns)
The first to contact a lead increases conversion 238%
More than 65% of all conversions occur on first call
Calling a lead more than 5 minutes after a lead is submitted has a 46% lower qualification rate than calling in less than 5 minutes.
Speed of response is the best predictor of a closed transaction
Enormous opportunity exists for after-hour and weekend calling when most companies are not staffed for a rapid response

So the key is time taken to respond to a lead created in your system. Here is a whitepaper by Leadqual on the same subject

Email Marketing in India: How to get best performance

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 05:37:00 +0000

While you can get visitors to your site by running marketing campaigns and doing SEO the bigger challenge is retaining them. The best ways to achieve this is through email marketing and over the last few years I have done it at an enormous scale in India and have learnt some hard lessons just thought to share them here

Image based mailers just doesn't work:
More than 50% of your users will not see your emails with images so you need to create mailers that will convey the message without using the images also. Images are however necessary to appeal to those users who will see the mail with images since it is a measure of quality for them to differentiate from spam.

Mails on Mobile:
I cannot share exact statistics on this but a large number of respondents have started reading their emails on mobile and those respondents need a text based mailers rather than graphics one thats why one should always send a text version of the mailer.

Email Clients:
Yahoo Leads in India , Outlook is a close second gmail and rediff are other important email clients. the data will vary depending upon the kind of database.

Frequency of sending:
This is only my observation sending more than 1 mailer per week will cause your users to hit unsubscribe button more often.

Clickthoughs on previous emails:
This is the strongest tool to segment your data

Things to test in an email
Subjectlines, Call to action/Offers,Send time and day, email layouts

Listen to feedback:
Quite a few people will reply to the email id you sent mail from. Monitor that id through which you can get lot of abuses but you can get some valuable feedback.

On a last note email marketing is not a substitute to other marketing techniques but it is a very good add on and is especially useful in lead generation and e-commerce offers

Related Reads:
Email Marketing Open and Click rates
Email Marketing Best practices

Goggle top 1000 Sites in the world

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Sun, 30 May 2010 09:02:00 +0000

Google owned Doubleclick has released a list of top 1000 sites in the world Facebook and Yahoo lead the list with 540 million and 490 million visitors respectively.The largest Indian site in this list is Rediff at 234 with 12 million Unique visitors per month. Interesting google has kept its own sites Gmail, Youtube etc out of the list. This is part of promotion of google ad planner which is the source for the list. Here are the top 10

You can find the complete list here

From Zero to Two Million Users Via Word of Mouth

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Mon, 10 May 2010 04:54:00 +0000

A very interesting presentation from founders of two hot startups Xobni and Dropbox. While quite a few things said by them don't work in Indian context there are some interesting points made also but keep in mind that these are product oriented sites and not content based sites. Here are the key statements made by them

Don't Make your users think ( reduce complexity).Every 10% easier product means 50% larger audience
Simple landing page: capture interest/email address
Xobni: Adwords users don't convert to paid but they refer others who do
Focus: do a few things really well instead of a lot of things poorly
Freemium Model: Only 3% of Ning users convert to Paid
Hook the user first, educate over time (tours, tip emails, etc.)

Here is their presentations ( via DI)

Research: Best Practices for Email Campaigns

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:27:00 +0000

EROI has done a survey on best practices in email campaign marketing and has come out with some interesting results. Here is a brief summary of best practices done by email marketeers

Things tested:

85.2% test subject lines.
54.8% test calls to action.
50.9% test designs.
49.1% test copy.
41.7% test offers.
36% test timing of campaigns.

Time of the Day:

37.9% of marketers who are testing timing are testing time of day; among them:

49.4% find sending midday (10 AM - 2 PM) to be best.
31.5% find start of the business day (6 AM - 10 AM) to be best.

Day of week: Tuesday ranks as the most successful day for emails, followed closely by Wednesday.

Frequency: 34.9% of marketers who test timing are testing frequency; among them:

33.3% send weekly, 28.21% send bi-monthly, 28.21% send as necessary (no set frequency).
The rest are divided roughly equally among sending quarterly, daily, more than once a week, and monthly.

via Marketingprofs
More on this topic:
Email Marketing Open and Click Rates

India's Online Classifieds Markets

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:49:00 +0000

Inspired by the west most of the companies in India focused on ads and ecommerce but its the Indian desi entrepreneurs who showed that focusing on classifieds business was much more lucrative. Today India's online classifieds market is much larger than India's online ad market (without classifieds) and it is estimated to be close to Rs 400 -500 crores ( though some optimists put it at much higher 800-900 crore ). The four major verticals in this market are Jobs, Matrimony,Real estate and Automobiles

It started with vertical classifieds and first to become successful were jobs and matrimony and even today job classifieds is the major part of the above no.
Next to gain attention was real estate which saw lot of entrants but no clear winner so far with Indiaproperty as the leader in traffic.
Autos was the next category to gain attention and Carwale is the clear leader here but is only expected to breakeven by end of 2010
Horizontal portals is a recent trend in this field with many players starting in 2007 these are the major players in this field in the order of traffic

Clickindia:
Sulekha.com:
Quikr.com:
Justdial.com
Olx.in

If you wonder what is the monetization model for these players is then it is the unglamorous lead generation route along with a mix of advertising. Latest in this market is raising of 27 crores by Quikr which will heighten the competition even more but what I would like is the expansion of the pie beyond the above mentioned 4 sectors and the rise in C2C sector with consumers paying to put up premium ads for other customers but that would face competition from eBay

Sports sites traffic in India , Internet traffic continues to grow at 14.6% in 2009

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:57:00 +0000

Comscore has come out with some numbers regarding sports site traffic in India.An additional insights from these numbers are that internet traffic in India grows at 14.6% in India in 2009 to reach 37 Million. Now for Comscore like any measuring agency numbers are to be taken with a pinch of salt but numbers show a massive difference in Jan 09 and Jan 10. I will take this opportunity to explain this factor and some of the other key observations in sports sites traffic in India

Sports sites traffic is primarily cricket oriented in India
The numbers go up when cricket matches fall more on weekdays rather than on weekend due to offices being primary source of traffic.
Yahoo cricket leads and is followed by Espn Cricinfo combine interesting rediff numbers are not shown which I know to be substantial but this might be due to rediff strategy of paying comscore to hide its numbers
In Jan 09 and Jan 10 number of cricket matches that were held is the cause of difference in traffic
This category of visitor is bound to be more engaged with an avg sports category visitor spending 30.1 minutes at sports sites, viewing 41 pages of content and visiting the category nearly 6 times throughout Jan 10
The leadership of a site like yahoo cricket in Jan 10 vs cricinfo in Jan 09 points to the fact that yahoo primarily attracts lot of immature traffic in India which rises in match times while cricinfo attracts lot of mature traffic which stays with it even in non cricket season.

More Posts on stats
Comscore India internet 2009 data
Comscore Google dominates in India
Social Networks in India stats
Twitter India comscore stats
Comscore India search engine stats

National Youth Readership Survey: Internet most engaging but least known medium

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:35:00 +0000

NCAER has released the finding of its 2009 National readership survey. The survey—with a sample of over 3,11,431 literate youth (1,02,021 rural and 2,09,410 urban) covering 432 villages in 207 districts as rural and 753 urban blocks in 199 towns as urban—is a first-of-its-kind exercise aimed at providing an objective understanding of the media consumption, reading habits and preferences of literate Indian youth. Some of the key points were
Reach:
Television is the medium with the highest reach pan India
Internet's reach was 4% overall but at a higher 8% in urban areas
Time Spent (Engagement):
Television 97 minutes
Internet is the second most engaging medium in India with time spent of 70 minutes.
2/3 rd of the people accessing internet accessed it from cyber cafes and workplaces
More research:
Indian audience preferences: Why Internet has not reached mainstream
Research : Coca Cola India on Indian youths

Source: FE

Research: How Videos are found and consumed Online

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:53:00 +0000

Some interesting research from watchmojo and tubemogul was recently shared on TC and it points out to how online video is discovered and consumed online. Some of the key points of these researches were that regardless of whether the video is user-generated or premium professional content

An online video will garner on an average 500 views over time nearly 53% of youtube videos have less than 500 views
25% of those views will come in the first four days and 75% in first 44 days
54% of audience will watch only the first 30 to 60 seconds

How an Online Video is found:

45% of views come from direct navigation where a user goes to YouTube and searches to “recover” something they have already seen or are actively looking for.
The other 55% of the time, users stumble upon a video and “discover” it. Most of this discovery happens via blogs, search engines and social networks

More research :
Youtube research : How people Interact with videos
The images below summarize the results well

Source: TC

Social Commerce: Deals drive engagement in social media

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:53:00 +0000

Multiple studies from marketing sherpa and razorfish are confirming the fact that most effective means of gaining social media traction is to offer deals and discounts through twitter and facebook. The Razorfish study points out

Of those who follow a brand on Twitter, for example, 44% said access to exclusive deals is the main reason. And on Facebook and MySpace, 37% cited special deals as the main reason they have "friended" a brand. The report points to companies such as Starbucks, which has amassed nearly 5 million fans and soared to the top of Facebook brand pages by offering coupons for free pastries and ice cream.

The study from marketingsherpa also confirms this fact but also has a different point of view when it comes to the power users or the influencers

Users described as “max connectors”—those with at least 500 social connections—were less interested than average in getting deals. Instead, they cared about new products and company culture, demonstrating the deeper engagement expected by social media power users.

Both these studies actually reveal a much deeper trend the rise of social commerce and the fact that social media can be actually effectively used to acquire users for ecommerce platforms via the deals methodology and this way is way cheaper than by advertising on search engines like google.The best example of this kind of companies is groupon , hautelook and giltgroupe in US . Groupon's model of getting people to sign up for local deals which are only effective if a group of people sign up for it means that people had the incentive to refer people to it from the start which has powered its explosive growth.What took me by surprise is that even in India My dala which is similar to groupon has gained some good early traction gaining nearly 7k fans which shows that the model has potential in India too.
via emarketeer and mediapost

Most Effective Social Media Marketing tactics on Facebook and Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:51:00 +0000

Facebook and Twitter are the fastest growing networks in the world and are also the most popular amongst social media marketeers. A September 2009 MarketingProfs survey of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers shows some of the commonly used tricks as well as the most effective techniques of social media marketing on these two sites.
Most common marketing tactic used on Facebook was attempting to drive traffic to corporate materials through status updates, followed by friending customers. This tactic is one of the most difficult to follow and getting friends is very difficult to achieve.

But the most effective tactic for consumer-oriented companies was creating a Facebook application, which was done by less than one-quarter of total respondents. Both B2B and B2C companies also reported surveys of their fans as effective; fan surveys were the third-most-common tactic attempted.

Twitter:
Again marketers using Twitter were also most interested in increasing traffic. Driving traffic by linking to marketing Webpages was the most common activity on the microblogging site, followed by driving sales by linking to promotional pages. But again, the most effective tactics were different.
B2C marketers had the most success with monitoring Twitter for PR problems (done by one-half of all respondents) and contacting users who posted negative comments about their brand (done by only 22.4% of total respondents). B2B companies also succeeded with brand monitoring, as well as with using Twitter invites for in-person events (the least common tactic of all).
source emarketeer
More on this subject:
Survey: what do Indian marketeers think about Social Media
Research: Social Media marketing not effective

Eyetracking Research: How people interact with online ads

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:20:00 +0000

Jakob Nielson is one of the oldest and most respected name in terms of web usability and research in this field and now he has written a book titled Eyetracking Web Usability, by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice of the consultancy Nielsen Norman Group. For this book what Nielsen and Pernice have done is track the eye movements of hundreds of people as they navigate websites this has led to great insight into how people interact with ads some of the key results were

People in the study saw 36% of the ads on the pages they visited.
The average time a person spent looking at an ad, though, was brief — one-third of a second.
People who were just browsing the Web looked at only 5% more ads than those trying to accomplish a specific task.

Participants in the study looked at

52% of ads that contained only text,
52% of ads that had images and text separately
and 51% of sponsored links on search-engine pages.

Ads that got a lot less attention included

Those that imposed text on top of images (people looked at just 35% of those)
and ones that included animation (it might seem movement is attention-grabbing, but only 29% of these ads garnered a look).

Source Time via plug

More on this subject
What kinds of advertising attracts user attention
Banner Advertising Clickthrough rates
Online Advertising what works the best

10 Best Posts of 2009

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:37:00 +0000

Its the new year and it means its time to collect and make a best of lists and so here is one more for you the 10 best posts of 2009 from ideasmarkit

Orkut Key trends and Usage Insights: Orkut being India's leading social network these trends are reflection of India's online population in general
Social network in India actual statistics: A combination of actual and Comscore statistics
Nielson Upper Middle and Rich in India Survey: An interesting and unique survey conducted across 35 cities in India
Nielson India's Top display advertisers:A measure of number of display campaigns in India
Twitter Trends:10% of most prolific users account for 90% of tweets
Forbes Ad effectiveness Survey: How to build a brand online, an emarketeer survey tells us the view of CMOs
Google Research:How people react to TV ads: This one is interesting
TCS Web2.0 Survey: Urban Indian kids are extremely web savy
Digital Marketing becomes prominent for auto industry : Figures on number of cars sold online in India
Amazing Internet stats and Trends: Worth a look they are really amazing

Research: Insights into sharing of links on social media

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 06:31:00 +0000

Any study of how people engage in social media is always fascinating but this study from sharethis is extremely useful in terms of insights into how publishers can make use of sharing tools effectively and on which sites should they concentrate for sharing the key things in their report are:

Email is the most popular way of sharing links despite all the hype about other mediums.
Sharing is now accounting for as much as one-third of the amount of traffic driven by search
Engagement: Share-originated links are driving up to 50 percent more page views per unique than search. Search drives a very focused click and is still the standard for intent.
Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel. Sharethis research, found that 46 percent of shares came via e-mail, 33 percent from Facebook, 14 percent from other channels such as Digg, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, etc., and just 6 percent from Twitter.
Clicks: Of content shared, 40 percent of clicks come from shared articles on Twitter, 35 percent of clicks come from email and other social channels, and 25 percent of clicks come from Facebook.
Sharethis found that Twitter is the least engaging share platform with users visiting an average of 1.66 pages when they click through to a site, while users coming in off e-mail were the most engaged, visiting 2.95 pages, and Facebook trailing closely behind 2.76 page views. Of course this varies by vertical and site

Source: Sharethis

Doubleclick Research: How to optimize online ad campaigns

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:36:00 +0000

Most advertisers have struggled with returns on display advertising and are moving more towards performance oriented advertising on this background Doubleclick has released an interesting report on how to optimize effectiveness of an online ad campaign mostly focussed on their foray banner display advertising. Some of the key insights which I got from there reports are:

Heavy users (who went online for 10-19 days a month) created 73% of all page views, while light users ( who went online 10 or fewer days in a month) accounted for only 6% of pages visited.The challenge for marketers, therefore, is to reach effectively that third of the audience generating only 6% of all pages, while avoiding having heavy users consume ad impressions at disproportionately high frequencies.
An ad campaign of four million impressions could reach an audience at least a third larger when spread evenly over three large sites as opposed to concentrating the same-sized buy on a single site. The key implication was that a broader media buy across several sites was a more efficient way to optimize reach, and moderate frequency, than by concentrating the same number of impressions in fewer sites.
The Internet is the only medium other than radio to have two prime times daily: the middle of the day (it also being the only high-engagement medium with significant access to people during the workday) and again in the evening. By concentrating ad buys to those two times of day, advertisers would again best distribute their impressions to times when the largest number of unique users were likely to see their ads.
More interactive and prominent rich media units have far higher click rates than standard image ads.
Larger Ad units generate Higher CTRs as shown in the image below

More on this topic
Banner Advertising Clickthrough rates
Online Advertising Preferences of Consumer
What Kinds of Online Advertising attracts attention

You can find the complete report here via DI

Google Research: Role of Internet on Financial Products Sold in India

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 05:52:00 +0000

A study was conducted by Google and research firm Netpop Research to get a fix on how Indian consumers use the internet and other traditional sources before buying financial products/services.The study was conducted amongst users who had purchased a product from banking services, home loans, personal loans, credit cards, investments, insurance policies and remittances in the last six months.

Google India records 70 million searches every month for financial products
8 out of every 10 consumers use at least one internet source before buying a financial product.
Around 70% of the consumers compare costs during such research ( That I can verify since Rupeetalk the company I work for is focused on this concept and has seen some explosive growth )
The use of search engines has been pretty high — 92% for home loans, 89% for credit card enquiries, 84% before seeking a banking service, an insurance product or a remittance, 83% for personal loans and 75% before making an investment in a fixed deposit, mutual fund, equitylinked financial products.
The study also reveals a consumer uses nearly 15 information sources before buying a product like home loan. And nine of these are internet-based information sources.
Majority of internet financial purchasers in India are educated males between the age of 30 and 35 .
The study said reputation of the financial brand plays a vital role in the final purchase decision. And herein, trust and company reputation have emerged as key reasons, much ahead of factors such as rate, customer service and past experience.

What Influences Consumers to go for Online Research:

About 62 per cent of the respondents went online for further product information, after they had come to know about the products from their friends.
Nearly 58 per cent and 52 per cent respondents went online for further research after they became aware about the financial products through TV and print ads respectively. Only 22 per cent respondents were influenced by radio ads to explore the products online.
While 47 per cent respondents had used consumer reviews, 41 per cent respondents relied on social networking sites and 29 per cent relied on blogs to get information about the products.

More Google research
Google Research:18% of all financial products are sold online
Google India's study on Consumer Buying behaviour
Google Research: How people react to TV commercials

Visa Survey: E commerce in India

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:39:00 +0000

If you had any doubts that Ecommerce in India has grown beyond travel this survey by VISA should open your eyes .

According to VISA's survey the maximum spend in India on Ecommerce is on Airlines/Travel tickets which on the average is 700 dollars.Other key results of the survey were:

The top three reasons for shopping online, cited by a majority of Indian respondents are ‘the freedom to shop anytime’ (75 percent), ‘the ability to compare prices and save money’ (74 percent) and ‘save time’ (74 percent).
The survey also found that Indian respondents spent an average of US$2,086 in the second quarter of 2009.
The most popular online purchase items in the past 12 months were music downloads (50 percent), airline/airline tickets (49 percent) and travel information (without booking functions; 49 percent).

The sample size is however very minuscule to really pass a judgment on these results this survey only had 2294 respondents across 6 countries.

Ideasmarkit nominated For Best Indian Business Blog of the year

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:24:00 +0000

Indibloggies has nominated Ideasmarkit for best business blog of the year and you can vote for ideasmarkit here. Thank you Readers for making Ideasmarkit one of the top blogs about India. This blog is just my part time effort to dig up statistics and research about Internet and the Indian consumer with a hope that people who visit this blog will realize the actual truth and not fall for the hype that is created about things and i will hope to continue that.

State of Internet in India -2009 Analysis on comscore data

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:28:00 +0000

Comscore recently held a webinar on state of Internet in Asia pacific which threw up some very interesting data and some obvious questions regrading the Indian Internet

India has 35.4 Million users of Internet according to comscore which is up by 17% over last year ( ages 15+ accessing internet from home or work computer) which makes it the third largest in Asia pacific after China and Japan
77% of Indian web audience is under the age of 35 and 41% is below the age of 24
Audiences in almost all major Asia Pacific regions consume internet content in their local languages with the exception of India
Books and Computer Software are the only 2 categories where e commerce is gaining some small traction otherwise pure ecommerce ( non travel) is very much in its infancy in India.
Entertainment reaches 63.8% of Indian internet users and Indian users spend on an average 1.3 hours in a month on this which is half of APAC average.
Indian users spend the lowest amount of time online in Asia Pacific at 11 hours in a month which is half of that of global average of 22.4 hours
News information sites reached 41.8 % of users in India
Average searches per searcher is also the lowest in India.

The above data points out that internet is yet to mature in India and there is lot of scope for growth and secondly this growth is likely to only come when local languages become dominant on the internet as is evident from places in Asia Pacific especially China. A search in Hindi (हिंदी) on Google will lead you at least 5-10 times lower number of results compared to that in english. Indian audience are young and have not started spending a lot of time on the internet yet and don't move away from there core work of email, social networks etc which is why other sites in India have struggled to gain traction in India.. But then there is another way to look at this data that India has huge potential of growth and as the internet audiences matures and grow older they will become more valuable and will start exploring internet for more useful informations and then those who already built a brand name over a period of time will be hugely successful.

Synovate: Impact of recession on Money and finance habits

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:22:00 +0000

Synovate surveyed around 11,400 from 16 markets across the world to find out what they had changed about their money management style and attitudes in the year since the global financial crisis hit. In India the respondents were only from the 4 metros so you have to take the results with a pinch. The key insight that this survey brings is that despite the recession causing more people in developed countries to move towards safer avenues the percentage of population doing so is still lower than compared to India where more than 50% of population still prefers Bank deposits. Amazingly India topped two categories of questions for the answer to what they would do if US$1,000 landed in their lap today 21% said that they would put it in a bank cash deposit while 12% said they would buy an insurance policy both highest across the world. The results are summarized in the picture below ( more at Synovate press release )

Survey:Digital Marketing in India CMO's perspective

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:22:00 +0000

Digital agency Sapient Interactive has released the findings of a survey, titled Digital Marketing: The CMO perspective. The survey figures out the views of chief marketing officers (CMOs) or marketing heads of 52 organisations represented by sectors such as automobile, airlines, telecom and FMCG on various aspects of digital marketing and commerce. The findings are based on interviews conducted among respondents

17 % of the overall advertising spend goes to digital media, while 24.7 % and 19.4 % of the total advertising amount is allocated to print and TV respectively. Outdoor gets 10 %, while 4.5 % ad spend is allotted to radio.
33 % of the CMOs feel that they are over-spending on print advertising while 22 % on television.
59 % of the respondents would like to invest more in digital advertising.
Maximum number of CMOs rated website advertising or product based microsites as most effective. Viral campaigns are regarded as the least effective way of digital advertising. Website advertising and viral campaigns get an average weighted score of 100 and 30.7 respectively.
Search marketing campaigns (score of 94) and e-mail marketing (score of 90) are considered as the 2^nd and 3^rd most effective ways of digital advertising respectively. Banner ads received a score of 78.
Almost 100 % of the respondents agreed that the main constraint in adoption of the digital medium for advertisement is the lack of understanding of metrics used to measure the effectiveness of digital advertisement. Another difficulty mentioned by CMOs in adoption of digital media is the inability to adapt traditional media practices to new media.
75 % felt that in the current economic climate, digital channels would take on a greater focus in their overall marketing strategy.
Sectors most at ease with adapting to digital media include- Travel, Insurance, Airline/ hospitality, financial services and IT.

Source: Afaqs

Social Media in India: A technology brand is mentioned every 2 minutes

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:45:00 +0000

Edelman in collaboration with Brandtology, which provides business and brand online intelligence services have unveiled a Digital Brand Index for India. This was built by analyzing conversations in Indian social media sites. However I must warn you that these results should be taken with a pinch of salt since the largest channel which they mention for social media is twitter which has only 1.4 million users in India. The key findings of the index are

Findings show a technology brand is mentioned online once every two minutes
74,452 online conversations pertaining to 96 large technology brands, contained within 423 influential channels were monitored between July and September 2009 – Averaging at one brand mention every two minutes.
Google and Microsoft topped the rankings by way of volume of conversations, securing approximately 20% and 12% of all monitored conversations, respectively.
Yahoo!, Intel and Sony complete the Top 5 list, securing 14% of the overall conversation amongst them.
While Internet & Software brands lead the conversations online, Mobile & Telecommunications brands like Nokia and BlackBerry, as well as Consumer Electronic Brands like Dell, Samsung and LG also feature in the Top 10.
Twitter emerged as the “buzziest” channel in India with almost 60% of the overall conversation share.
Select online forums, including the Chip India Forum, TechArena Community Forum, Digit’s Technology Discussion Forum and DigitalPoint Forum, emerged as other key hubs where technology related conversations take place, securing approximately 16% of the conversations amongst them.

Nielson Upper Middle and Rich in India Survey 2009

noreply@blogger.com (abhi) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:50:00 +0000

Nielsen has just declared results of its Upper Middle and Rich (UMAR) survey. The survey covered more than 18,250 individuals across 35 Indian metros. The survey has identified three segments of affluence from lifestyle and consumer durables mapping and estimates that there are 2.5 million population belonging to urban rich segments in India.

2.2 million belong to the Upper Middle segment (owning a car and a computer)
0.2 million households belong to the Upper-Upper Middle segment (owners of a car, computer and LCD television).
The Rich segment (owners of a car, computer and LCD television, and have holidayed abroad) consists of about 0.1 million households.

Interestingly most of people belonging to this group are heavy users of internet.The key highlight of this survey are:

Half of the targeted consumers are schooled in English
English is the preferred language for newspapers however the television programmes watched are more in regional languages.
Nine in ten affluent individuals own a house; three-quarters have a fully automated washing machine; and nearly two in five affluent individuals have a home theatre and modular kitchen.

Media Reach:

98 per cent of the individuals watch TV;
70 per cent read English dailies;
67 per cent watch movies outside home;
55 per cent use the internet at home;
54 per cent listen to the radio;
while 38 per cent and 10 per cent read magazines and English business dailies, respectively.

Recession:

40-50 per cent of the respondents saying that their expenditure on travel, luxury accessories, fuel, vehicle usage, branded garments and consumer durables has seen no change. However, spending on luxury accessories and vacations, compared to other items, has reduced due to recession.

Lifestyle:

Fine dining is high among this section of the society, with eight in ten individuals going out for meals often.
Shopping is also a fad. Nine in ten prefer to shop at modern retail stores – articles of interest include footwear, jewellery, handbags, sunglasses, cosmetics, fragrances, pens and watches.
Respondents are found visiting gymnasiums, spas and beauty parlours, with three in ten visiting a parlour or spa once a month.

The survey ranks Delhi, Bengaluru, Greater Mumbai and Chennai as the most affluent cities in India, followed by Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi, Pune, Jaipur and Ahmedabad, respectively.
Source: afaqs