Interesting demographics

Steven | marketing, advertising & campaigns | Tuesday, 15 May 2007

In today’s BizReport: “Gmail users are younger, richer than Yahoo“.

They claim this to be a fact e-marketeers should take note of.

Should they?
On the one hand targeting gmail “might” result in higher conversions (depending on the parameters of course, what do you want to sell, what does it cost, ..). On the other hand: is there a reason to exclude older and less fortunate users? Don’t they have value?

2 things:
- Since I assume every self respecting e-marketeer uses the opt-in principle for his/her campaigns, demographics based on email address is of minor importance. You should know the things you need, if age and income are important for you this is data you should try to collect elsewhere.
- I love optimization, but keep asking myself how far this should go. We might end up with a model only for-sure-conversions are targeted. In this case prospects will lose their value, and in my mind they should be part of every brand expansion strategy.

But interesting demographics indeed.
Hope those spammers won’t take note ;-)