City University Hong Kong Interviewed eOneNet for Internet Marketing - Part 1
By Harrace (Hong Kong)
This early Saturday morning, a professor and her assistant came to my office. She is doing a research paper on Internet marketing and email marketing in Hong Kong and would like to interview me regarding this topic. During this one hour interview, she asked a lot of interesting questions.
Dr. Ming Cheung, Assistant Professor in Department of English and Communication in City University of Hong Kong, unlike the stereotyped professor, is a young and vibrant lady with excellent communication skills. She interviewed me on the digital environments and Internet marketing trends in Hong Kong, the consumer culture, the Internet marketing strategies, and in particular email marketing strategies and campaigns effectiveness.
Below are some of the Q & A:
Q: Could you describe the development of Internet marketing at the present moment in Hong Kong?
A: Despite Hong Kong has the highest Internet penetration rate in Asia, Hong Kong still lags behind Malaysia, Singapore and even China in Internet marketing. Of the relatively few companies offering Internet marketing services, most of them are doing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns with Google and Yahoo, i.e. they pay to appear on the right hand columns of the search results pages for the keywords they buy, on each click that links to their sites.
Some companies are doing email marketing with limited sources of Hong Kong email database.
Practically, very few companies are doing search engines optimization (SEO), i.e. to get top rankings in search engines in the search results pages for the keywords relating to their sites. I suppose the main reason is most Internet marketing companies in Hong Kong are only doing PPC campaigns and very few know how to do SEO, so companies in Hong Kong do not have a better alternative, until eOneNet has started offering SEO training via our popular Internet marketing coaching program in Hong Kong since last year.
Q: What are the strengths and weakness of Internet marketing and email marketing?
A: The strengths are:
1. You are able to reach out to a global market, with relatively low costs, and without setting up offices and hiring staff everywhere. For example, a lot of overseas clients found out about eOneNet and engaged our services by doing searches in search engines for Internet marketing related keywords, which we don’t have to pay.
One customer, Camper shoes, found us from search engines and engaged us to plan and execute Internet marketing campaigns for them last year, with satisfactory results.
2. You can engage different Internet marketing channels fairly easily and targeting different target customers and markets. For example, we targeted the online campaigns for Camper for Hong Kong markets and Japan markets only, where they have physical stores. The most effective Internet marketing channels include:
- SEO
- PPC
- Email marketing
- Blog marketing
- Joint venture
- Social networking
- PR (press release and media interviews)
- Affiliate programs
- Online stores (e.g. eBay, Yahoo stores)
3. You can compete with bigger regional and global competitors. eOneNet, though having expanded and established offices in Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, is still considered to be a small company compared to our competitors in the US. However, with our integrated Internet marketing strategies, we are able to establish our position and mindshare as the leading Asia Internet marketing company, and for some highly competitive Internet marketing related keywords, eOneNet is ranked #1 worldwide.
Weaknesses:
1. Internet marketing cannot reach out to the groups who never or seldom use the Internet. That’s why we need to integrate online and offline campaigns to reach out to them. eOneNet has been spending a considerable budget to do offline campaigns to capture the offline targeted customers.
2. The effectiveness of email marketing has dropped considerably since a few years ago, with the average opened rate for emails being decreased from more than 30% to less than 10% now, because of hundreds of SPAMS we are receiving each day. Therefore the effective costs of email marketing has increased more than 3 times.
Q: How would you describe the consumer culture of Hong Kong in general?
A: Most people in Hong Kong still prefer to shop in shopping malls, as Hong Kong is a small place and it’s convenient to do shopping. Further, it has become a culture and a form of entertainment to go shopping, and to “walk the mall”. As a matter of fact, I also like and enjoy shopping and visiting different shopping malls, especially during the festive seasons with great sale!
Those who shop online would invariably go to websites selling items not easily found in Hong Kong, such as books in Amazon.com, fashion and cosmetic brands not available here, or items which are cheaper than the physical stores.
Q: Can you provide any figures or information about the online and offline purchase patterns of your customers?
A: We have managed to get about 70% - 80% of customers to pay online, because of the credibility we have shown in our websites and the incentives we offer to customers paying online. For example, online payment for our seminar ticket is HK$150 and payment by bank transfer is HK$180.
I will share more interesting Internet marketing strategies in Part 2 of this interview.
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January 18th, 2007 at 11:00 am
[…] This is Part 2 of the posting on City University Hong Kong Interviewed eOneNet for Internet Marketing - Part 1 . I will be sharing more Internet marketing strategies here which I discussed about during the interview by Dr. Ming Cheung, Asssitant Professor of City University of Hong Kong. […]
January 18th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
[…] This is Part 2 of the posting on City University Hong Kong Interviewed eOneNet for Internet Marketing. I will be sharing more Internet marketing strategies here which I discussed about during the interview by Dr. Ming Cheung, Asssitant Professor of City University of Hong Kong. […]