netCORE is shortlisted for GSMA’s 18th Global Mobile Awards!

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Posted on February 5, 2013 by Rachna Gopalan

netCORE’s Missed Call campaign for Hindustan Unilever’s Active Wheel has been nominated for the Best Advertising/Marketing on Mobile at the 18th Global Mobile Awards (GSMA).

The Hindustan Unilever’s Active Wheel campaign was aimed at reaching consumers in the media-dark and rurally deep areas of Maharashtra, Gujarat, U.P, Karnataka, West Bengal and Bihar, – and similar rural states. The crux of the campaign was based on the psychology of the quintessential rural consumer – achieving something at zero cost.

The campaign was an unprecedented success which was underlined by a massive response that catapulted the sale of Active Wheel in rural areas from a low market share to a very high market share.

The winners will be presented on Tuesday, 26th February at the GSMA Mobile World Congress, in an afternoon ceremony. In total, 158 nominees have been shortlisted for this year’s Global Mobile Awards.

The GSMA’s Global Mobile Awards offer organizations across the global mobile eco-system the opportunity to showcase the latest and best mobile products, apps, services and initiatives to the world. The GSMA today announced nominees for the 18th annual Global Mobile Award.

These Awards are open to all eligible mobile companies and supporters of the mobile eco-system – GSMA Members, Associate Members and Non-members – as defined in the individual category eligibility descriptions.

“The competition this year was of an exceptionally high quality, breaking all previous records,” said Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer, GSMA. He continued, “our judging panel has assessed well over 600 entries and nominations for the 37 awards, the largest ever number of honours to be presented at the Global Mobile Awards. It is a tremendous achievement to have been shortlisted and we look forward to recognising the winners at Mobile World Congress next month.”

netCORE’s highly innovative campaign for Hindustan Unilever’s Active Wheel has been recognized at two other award ceremonies – Best Mobile Voice Advertising or Marketing Campaign at Internet And Mobile Association of India and Best use of Mobile Media in Advertising at Mobby’s in the Mobile & Digital Marketing Summit hosted by World Brand Congress, CMO Asia & CMO Council.

This immensely successful campaign makes us look forward to more feathers in our cap!

netCORE bags two awards at the 3rd India Digital Awards

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Posted on January 18, 2013 by Soumya Sen

The 3^rd India Digital Awards was organized by the Internet & Mobile Marketing Association of India (IAMAI) on 17^th January 2013 at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. IAMAI’s objective is to expand and enhance the online and mobile value added services sectors.

The awards were bagged for the following categories:

Best Mobile Voice Advertising or Marketing Campaign for Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) Active Wheel Rural Missed Call & Voice Campaign

Best Digital Integrated Campaign forIndia Against Corruption (IAC) Cross Media Integrated Campaign

HUL’s Active Wheel campaign has become the most successful marketing campaign on mobile in the entire Asia Pacific region. Recent results from 3^rd party research have shown that close to 84% people touched by the campaign, associated the brand with the campaign, months after the campaign, and there was a 95% increase in spontaneous awareness of Wheel after the campaign.

IAC gained enormous support in its campaign against corruption by reaching out to 80 million people through SMS campaign and receiving 25 million responses over missed call within 180 days. The campaign grew virally with each person forwarding 3 SMSes on an average to their friends, acquaintances and relatives.

Commenting on this achievement, Girish Nair, CEO of netCORE said, “We undertook disproportionate efforts to understand the brands’ needs and make these campaigns successful. We went deep into understanding the brand’s evolution & devised a logical consumer flow to get the best of results, constantly driving towards achieving and optimizing brand objectives. It gives us immense joy to see our efforts being appreciated and recognized by industry veterans”

Kalpit Jain, COO of netCORE adds, “It’s always good to get appreciated for your hard work and it’s certainly a bonus to be recognized by our industry peers. A warm thank you to the entire jury as well. netCORE Solutions is overwhelmed with this reception and we will continue to provide innovative solutions through our Email & Mobile based marketing and communication platform.”

This success at IAMAI follows netCORE’s earlier triumph at the 1^st SMARTIES India organized by MMA Global (in Sept 2012), where Colgate Active Salt Campaign won the Gold award and later at Mobby’s (in Nov 2012) where netCORE won 2 awards for HUL Active Wheel & Colgate Active Salt campaigns.

Congrats team netCORE!

netCORE bags 2 Awards @ Mobby’s

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Posted on November 23, 2012 by Soumya Sen

netCORE won 2 Mobby’s Awards at the Mobile & Digital Marketing Summit hosted by World Brand Congress, CMO Asia & CMO Council on 22^nd Nov in Mumbai. Mobby’s Awards recognizes the best of the Mobile Industry.

netCORE won awards in both the categories it was nominated in:

Best use of Mobile Media in Advertising – Hindustan Unilever (HUL) Active Wheel Campaign
Best Multi-Channel Integrated Marketing Campaign – Colgate Active Salt Taste Challenge 2012

HUL’s active wheel campaign was successful in reaching media dark markets while the Colgate Active Salt campaign enabled the brand to connect very closely with the target audience – the campaign received 6.15 million unique enrollments within its initial 95 days.

This success at Mobby’s has come after tasting an early triumph at the 1^st SMARTIES India organized by MMA Global, where netCORE’s Colgate Active Salt Taste Challenge Campaign won the Gold award while the HUL Active Wheel Campaign was nominated in 2 other categories.

netCORE wins Gold at Smarties India 2012

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Posted on September 24, 2012 by Bhairavi Mirani

netCORE’s Colgate Active Salt Taste Challenge 2012 campaign won Gold in the Cross-Media Integration category at the 1st Smarties India 2012 Awards presented by the Mobile Marketing Association in Gurgaon on September 21, 2012.

netCORE was also nominated in two other categories – Brand Awareness and Innovation, for Hindustan Unilever’s Active Wheel campaign. It was a eureka moment for netCORE when HUL’s Mr. Abhiroop (Head of Media Services – South Asia) spoke about the campaign at the event, and also singled out netCORE’s contribution.

Kudos to netCORE team for this achievement!

Why move your Email to the cloud?

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Rachna Gopalan

Until recently, I thought clouds are those white, fluffy things in the sky, of which I tried to figure out shapes and figures. Over a few months at netCORE, my perception has completely changed. I, no longer think of cotton like, white puffs in the sky, I think of email, archiving and computing.

You ask why?

Companies of all kind have started adapting to this wonderfully new technology called Cloud Computing, which is evolving like never before. Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Businesses are quickly moving to the cloud because it tends to be cheaper, more scalable and easier to upgrade to the latest level of technology. Here comes the million dollar question, where to begin if an enterprise does want to move to the cloud? An enterprise certainly cannot flip a coin in the air and migrate all the data to the cloud, there are a multitude of considerations to be evaluated.

The quickest win is moving your company’s email to the Cloud. Financially speaking, enterprise email is expensive, and with on-premise email, it’s difficult to fully realize the cost of all the resources needed to support. Furthermore, a hybrid approach can be taken, where both cloud and on-premise deployments are used in conjunction with one another. Additionally, there is less power consumption, reckoning further cost effectivity.

Elimination of having to upgrade, install add-ons, or patch software could definitely be noted as some of the more obvious reasons to move your company’s email to the cloud. Nevertheless, e-mail is a distinct case, because it demands 99.9% uptime. Enterprise email administration is a tedious endeavour as it requires a perpetual uptime. The fact that there aren’t blackouts with cloud e-mail services cannot be discounted, it guarantees uptime. Therefore it increases operating efficiency as there is no loss of business due to downtime.

Lately, the number of emails sent and received in any enterprise is enormous. In this case email archiving becomes a matter of critical importance. Cloud comes into picture here as well, allowing you to store all your emails, irrespective of size and without an upper limit. You can store the mails in any volume and it is a considerably convenient facility with which you can seamlessly archive all your emails without worrying about attachment size!

With the help of cloud-based email, life becomes easier, secured as well as more seamless. Let us agree that these benefits are too compelling to ignore.

ISP Conference Meet for 2013 – Gmail dominates the session

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Avadhoot Revankar

One fine morning I was just strolling down an alley heading back home from my early morning walk. From the corner of my eye I saw something behind the bush moving, sticking to my habit of poking nose into things, I decided to peek.

I still remember that moment, I was spellbound for a minute after what I saw, rubbed my eyes pinched myself but I could still see it. There were a bunch of people like figures busy in some discussion.

I could distinctly recognize from the colours: “Yahoo, Hotmail, Rediff, AOL, Rocketmail. Gmail missing? Even I was surprised, but decided to be a silent spectator. Saw a board stating “ISP Quarterly Conference. Agenda – Kill Spammers“

Just as I finished reading the board, I saw someone enter followed by complete silence, undoubtedly it was Gmail, walking with arrogance and attitude. Gmail started off loud and clear, “Good morning Friends & Enemies, good to see all of you present here today.”

“Agenda as we all know is “Kill Spammers”

These Email Marketers and ESP’s think that they are too smart and can easily reach our Inbox by:

a) Using a Pool of IP’s/Domains.
b) Avoiding usage of generic words.
c) Testing prior to campaigns & many other cheap tricks

Without any further delay I think we should start our discussion my folks, Yahoo let’s start with you”

Yahoo:
“Unfortunately my “Sender ID”(Using same sender id mail in spam) filter seems to have been mapped by Marketers.
(Everyone hears Gmail giggling.) :p

Yahoo continues, “No reason for people to laugh; now I am getting a much stronger functionality termed “The Watch Dog” this would analyze User Engagement (Open/Clicks etc.) based on which it would define delivery to Inbox or Spam.

Hotmail:
My filters are simple, anyone in the address book of the user comes to Inbox, rest in spam; there are some exceptions though.

Rediff:
I am quite famous to deliver Emails 24hours late and that too the distorted ones, haven’t specifically thought on spam filters. :p

Yahoo whispers to Hotmail, “Wonder why rediff users are migrating” :p.

Arrogant Gmail steps up to speak. Good to see everyone setting different types and varieties of filters.

My filtering has 3 Levels:
Level 1:
- IP & Domain Reputation
- SPF Entries
- DKIM Signing

Level 2:
- Algorithms and Usage of Type of Words and Content.
(Words: “Free, Discount, Offer, Buy Now, Shop Now, Numerics. Images: Single Images, Dark Colored Images.)
- Speed of Delivery of Emails.

These filters are different based on day and time slot.

Level 3:
Purely Based on Engagement of the User with a respective Domain & IP.

Example:
“Ram@gmail.com” has received 10Emails from “abc.com” but “Ram@gmail.com” has opened only 1Email from “abc.com” ideally the 11^th Email would land up in spam.

+ Would also track this at a broader level wherein “abc.com” sends 10lakh/day – how
many Engaged (Open/Clicked/Replied) versus how many “Reported Abuse” and based on this the domain would be ranked after every campaign.

I guess we have covered most of it, Yahoo please send the minutes.Let’s move out from here folks, we shall soon announce the next conference dates.

Unbelievable start to my morning, please share if you by any chance have been an audience to such a session, would like to hear your experiences.

What’s so special about ‘Welcome Email Programs’?

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Rahul Sawant

Recently I visited my old circle of friend – people I had lost touch with given a hectic corporate job . I was really excited to meet all of them, some I was going to meet almost after a year. We all had decided to meet at a friend’s place, Pratik. On the way to his house nostalgia had already set in and I found myself smiling to the thin air a couple of times.

As I finally reached Pratik’s house and rang the doorbell, his elder brother opened the door and welcomed me in. It was a simple ‘Hi Rahul, how are you doing?’ welcome and he walked away. Now I have known his brother for ages and hence know that he’s a man of fewer words but a warm heart. Had there been another person in my shoes, he would’ve surely felt disheartened.

The same morning we were discussing about Welcome Programs in office. These programs would be specifically targeted to new customers who would be entering our sales funnels post a website subscription process. The whole incident at Pratik’s place got me thinking that different people would respond differently to our welcome process. A much more casual person would be happy with a simple ‘Welcome onboard’ message, whereas someone else would love the special attention that he gets through a series of welcome mails. In the later case, I am pretty sure even the casual customer won’t mind the extra attention.

Being a part of the Email Marketing Consultants group at netCORE, I have come across many welcome emails from clients and other organizations which are merely triggered mails. Most of them even lack basic first name personalization! I definitely wouldn’t like a mail, from a website where I register, addressing me as a ‘nobody’. I just gave you my name guys!

Another important aspect of welcome email programs is to reinforce the branding message. This opportunity should also be utilized to educate the new customers about different offerings and services because they might have landed on your subscription efforts as a part of different advertising efforts for different products. Additionally you can also touch base with them and gather their preferences which will serve as critical inputs for sending relevant offers. Welcome email programs can also serve as an important vehicle for propagating your social media activities and spreading a positive word of mouth.

This entire program can spread over a 7 days period where you connect with the new customers through various emails at an interval of 2-3 days. A sample welcome program could be:

Day 1 – ‘Thank you’ + Preference gathering

Day 3 – Service offerings mail

Day 5 – Testimonials (comments from social media platforms)

Day 7 – First promotional offer

Benefits of a Welcome Email Program in a snapshot:

1) Induce branding

2) Provide information on products and services

3) Gather preferences

4) Promote social media activities / testimonials.

Your first impression may not be the last one, but it’s definitely a lasting one. It only makes sense that we make complete use of the initial phases of a customer joining your mailing list and establish a strong bond. While every marketer swears by providing his customers with the best and relevant offers, not many execute it well in the initial phases and struggle later on.

So put in enough time and effort to develop a robust welcome email program to bind your customers to your brand and more importantly, do catch up with your friends from time to time – It might just open up your mind to a whole new perspective, the way it did for me

How well do you know your email?

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Rahul Sawant

Last weekend I caught-up with my MBA batch mates. And as you might have guessed, conversations revolved around nostalgia. Of course we all were eager to hear with what’s new in everyone’s life. Having heard where all of them have reached, it was my turn to share. So I told them I am working as a Digital Marketing Consultant with an Email Service Provider… and what followed was definitely an eye opener.

Much to my amusement the general notion behind sending a promotional email is getting a product image, some well written text, modifying the look to match the corporate branding (some skip this as well) and sending it out to all your customers and acquaintances. While half of them asked me if there is any quality learning whilst working in a profile that revolves around ‘sending emails’, the others went like ‘What’s the catch in sending an email?’. And I leapt at this one window of opportunity of letting them know that I wasn’t exactly hatching eggs.

A promotional email consists of a logical flow – The sender name & subject line, headline, subheading, body and Call-to-Action (CTA).

Getting your emails delivered into your recipients Inbox is a different ball-game in itself. Once you are there, you’ve won only half the battle. To know more on how the Big 3 determine if your mail will land in the Inbox read here: Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.

Your sender name and subject line are your first points of contact with your recipient (who might be a prospect or a customer). It will determine if your recipient will even open your email in the first place. Well, now that you’ve realized how important you subject line is, how much time do you actually put into deciding one – come up with a few variants, ask around and shoot. It is very critical to think your subject lines properly and decide on one based on the best practices of designing a subject line.

By now, I could see them hooked on to my jabbering. Our drinks were empty, but I feared ordering a refill thinking it might stray their attention. So I continued as slyly as I could

The next important part is the headline. Now that you have enticed the recipient to open your mail, you have to keep him interested throughout the entire length of the mail. Your headline states the entire email’s agenda followed by the subheading which speaks more about how the headline relates to the remaining part of the mail.

This is followed by the email body which essentially is the product/service being sold. You need to ensure that you don’t go over the top with praises about your product. Keep is short and crisp. On an average you recipient will spend roughly 6 seconds on your email given the vast amount of emails he receives per day. Hence it is recommended that you announce key benefits of your product as bullets and also your pictures for better understanding and association.

And finally, we come to the part that helps you gauge the effectiveness of your email campaign – the CTA. A CTA represents what is expected of the recipient. For e.g. A promotional mailer selling sunglasses might have a CTA with a button saying ‘Click here to buy now’ or simply ‘Buy Now’, clicking which would take the recipient to the actual landing page where he can buy it.

This flow ensures that your promotional email has a logical sequence which keeps the recipient glued to your email right from the subject line to the heading to the content and eventually to the CTA. The email now appears complete with a strong purpose. Not only will this email perform well in terms of Open Rates and Click-through Rates, but also produce good qualified leads and revenue.

Well, I was done delivering my pitch and found it quite amazing that they had never thought of an email that way. A few even responded saying maybe that’s the reason their Marketing teams are always cribbing about dropping Opens Rates and Click-through Rates. And this is where I told them their teams would find the answers to all queries on Email Marketing.

Email Marketing lessons from Railway TCs

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Rahul Sawant

Like most residents of Mumbai, I take the infamous Western Railway trains to work. The jam-packed peak hour rush in the compartments always acts as a motivator, it helps me remember that I have a long way to go to be able to travel in a plush luxurious car and avoid this daily encounter with my fellow Mumbaikars.

As I get off to reach my office, there is a very strange behavior that I have seen amongst the Ticket Collectors (TCs) that act as the sentinels of discipline when it comes to carrying a valid Railway ticket for the journey. We all know that there are First Class and General Class compartment in a railway train. And while the number of General Class compartments is much more than that of the First Class compartments, which inherently means that more number of people travel in the General Class as compared to the First Class, what surprised me is the most is most of the TCs stand outside the First Class and not the General Class.

Last weekend I happened to attend a friend’s birthday party. His uncle, who’s a TC as well, was also present at the gathering. This was my chance to know the logic behind this strange behavior of the TCs. I made sure I put forth the question in the best possible way in order not to hurt his sentiments. He gave me an amazed look when on hearing the questions.

He said, according to the new regulation all TCs get a certain incentive based on the number of trespassers they catch hold of. He told me most TCs stand near the First Class compartments not only because they can levy a heavy fine, but also because there is a higher probability of a trespasser in the First Class being able to pay a fine. Those traveling without a ticket in the General Class compartment usually crib they don’t have any money to pay the fine and many a times that is actually true.

After the party was over, I pondered upon this ideology. Many times people miss the date of their seasonal pass renewal. Recently, my colleague found himself in such a position. Only when he got into the train did he realize that his pass had expired the day before and he wasn’t able to renew it because he was stuck in a meeting. Had he been caught that day he would have surely ended up paying the fine. Similarly, there must be so many people who must have fallen prey to such situations and there is a much higher probability that they paid their fines as compared to those from the General Class.

The point that today’s marketers can take from this is that it makes more sense in monitoring the smaller percentage of your subscribers who respond to your mails than worrying about the larger inactive chunk. Those responding to your mails would be all those who have opened, clicked, landed on your website and some who have even gone to the extent of filling a shopping cart but abandoning it unpredictably. On the other hand, the inactive chuck would comprise of those who have taken to not opening your emails over a period of time.

On an average, a good performing email campaign gets around 4% Open Rate and 1% Click-through Rate. This is the cream volume which is receptive to your promotional offers. Hence, it makes more sense to cater to these people based on different attributes such as the time when they have opened the emails, their preferences, if they have purchased in the past then what type of purchases they made and what is their spending capacity, what pages have they navigated to after landing on your website, what type of products they have selected before abandoning the shopping cart, so on and so forth.

Ironically, most marketers are worried about how they can reach to even more people, expand their customer base and turn the major dormant inactive base to active. While it is important that one worries about these issues, the highest priorities should be around focusing on the active base – because you obviously have a better shot at converting these into sales figures.

Hence, dear fellow marketers, be vigilant about your First Class customers. Build a cohesive strategy to cater to these people and also focus on the inactive base in parallel. And most important of all, in case you travel by train don’t forget to renew you seasonal Railway pass

Disclaimer: The analogy of First Class and General Class has been used only to distinguish between different groups of customers without any biased intentions.

Thirty years of the net : what’s next?

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Soumya Sen

Dear Internet,

You’re older than me, my brother, most of my friends but younger than my
father. This January, you turned 30 – and while you’re spiraling
very quickly into middle-age, the irony is this: the millions of
people around the world who benefit from your services are getting
older, while you’re getting younger and more innovative every
passing day.

This blog wouldn’t have been possible without you and without the dense
network of hardware and programming structures that have gone into
building you. Needless to say, you wouldn’t have been possible without
the brilliance of some of the most essential programmers, computer
scientists and engineers of all human history; people who are the 20th
century equivalent of an Einstein or a Newton or a Maxwell. While you
had been conceived way back in the late 60s, it was on January 1, 1983
that the USA’s Defense Agency decided to run all its computers on the
same network in a way that they could communicate with each other,
using a Transmission Control Protocol. You were born.

Soon enough, Sir Tim Berners-Lee had the genius of ‘linking’ one page of
information to another, a basic structure which still defines you today.
You must be proud of the fact that hundreds of innovators have led to
your creation. You are the backbone of the world’s communication,
information access, entertainment and advertising. You have also
combined the efforts of investors, educators, thinkers and writers all
over the world into a greater-than-1 trillion dollar industry which
shows no signs of abating anytime soon.

What’s going to happen to you next? To be honest, though everyone is
predicting, no one knows for sure. The potential of your growth and the
endless imagination that has led to you seems to have no limits in the
future. Some facts are for certain though: you’re going to be more
intelligent and semantic, thus geared towards user responses in a much
more responsible and automated way than ever before. You’re also going
to be present on literally every device and machine, from the simplest
phone to the biggest refrigerator, from classroom blackboards to even household TVs.

You’re going to enable machines and non-living things to communicate with each other
without human intervention. And nearly all of the world population
should soon be in touch with each other through you.

Hope you feel glad about how you’ve changed our world. From the bottom
of our hearts, we thank you.

Happy 30!

Sincerely,
netCORE Solutions

Video-in-Email – The Newer New Media

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Rachna Gopalan

Online video is an extremely fast growing trend with YouTube becoming the second most popular search engine of all time. This has opened an excellent opportunity to explore the possibility of video in mail.

One of the most exciting developments in recent times is the usage of video in email. When I say this, I am not referring to the playback buttons on a static image, no, not even gifs, but true audio visuals (AVs) played directly in the recipient’s inbox.

Video in email is a personal and powerful way to connect with people. Human beings are generally attracted to anything intriguing, and anything that moves frame-by-frame. Video-in-email is extremely intriguing. It gives a completely new look to your email with irresistible content. All that you have to do is create a gripping subject line and your click-through rates will simply sky rocket!

An AV goes a long way in explaining anything in elaborate style. Nothing helps people connect with the purpose of the content as quickly as an AV. It’s easy to understand and people instantly emotionally engage with it in a way they don’t often engage with text and images.

So how can you take advantage of this efficient platform?

Using video-in-email as a platform for your product demos is a brilliant way to save on your customer service and support. Teach and help your customers better understand your products through an AV. Create crisp video responses to FAQs. This will facilitate customer service and improve customer satisfaction.

Arguably, one of the best ways to sell is to utilize an informative tone with prospects. Make AVs of content that could possibly interest your ideals. You can use videos that accelerate your sales process. When you communicate with a prospect over the phone, ask for an email address and send them the video email instead of plain text. This will make you come across as a technologically advanced company while also helping you sell, by just hitting the “send” button.

Let’s all come to terms with the fact that traditional marketing is very expensive. Consequently, you have to pay a lot of money to market yourself on any traditional marketing platform, without any guarantee of who will be watching, reading or listening. Web video has the same advantage as video on TV. With video email marketing, your videos are On-Request without limitations on money and time.

Additionally, you save paper and money with video-in-email. With the world going digital, you can now make your e-brochure a video e-brochure. Videos will always WOW potential customers.

Like all digital marketing tools that comprise the modern marketer’s toolkit, video-in-email is most effective when used fittingly and in addition with other forms of new media marketing technology.

Common mistakes CIOs/CXOs make with Email Marketing

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Rahul Sawant

‘Mistakes’ is too harsh a word to be used in this context. Many a times certain decisions are made in time-crunching situations. Also, sometimes decisions are made not being entirely aware of their reasons, implications and consequences.

Given our decade and half’s experience of the email marketing landscape, we have observed the following areas being overlooked in most cases:

1. Using purchased/referred databases

By databases we mean list of email ids used for email marketing. Growing the business Year-on-Year is every key stakeholder’s motto. And hence many go for the ‘Spray and Pray’ approach with being aware of the consequences. While this approach may reap short-term benefits, this will hamper business in the long run. It very important to understand that people would only continue patronizing your brand and the emails being received if they have given you prior consent to be in touch with them. Also, what works for someone else might not necessarily work for you. The same principle applies to ‘referred databases’.

2. Choose the right ESP

While budgets are crucial when planning for one’s marketing activities for the year ahead, it is even more crucial to ensure that one is spending on the right resource. Choose an ESP who has the proper infrastructure, manpower and experience in the Email Marketing domain. This will ensure that you are getting your money’s worth as opposed to opting for the minimum price bidder.

3. Not abiding to recommended best practices.

We have come across several cases where certain recommended best practices have been rubbished on the basis of ‘Company Policy’. Today, when everybody chants the ‘Think outside the box’ mantra when it comes to organizational growth, why are they still in orthodox shackles? It’s time that today’s organizations realize it is high time to change certain pre-historic policies. They need to change the way things were being done to be able to ride the Digital Marketing wave. Look at recommendations as essentials for speedy business growth and sustenance. Speed-up internal approval processes.

The Reason Why Mobile Marketing Matters

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Rachna Gopalan

Marketers are always in search of high-impact, cost-effective methods of increasing revenue. Mobile Marketing is one such platform that complies with every marketer’s needs.

Mobile Marketing involves the usage of interactive wireless media to provide customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information that promotes products and ideas, thereby generating value for all stakeholders. Mobile Marketing provides the ability to target, increase response, and track results. Here are some of the top benefits of using Mobile Marketing to promote your business.

One of the main reasons a mobile marketing campaign is highly influential is because it reaps instant results. The phone is always with the user, at least in most cases, thus the messages are delivered and checked within minutes. This makes the response and conversion rate very high.

Personalized and direct targeting is the most useful advantage of Mobile Marketing. The mobile platform interacts directly with users on their mobile phones. This allows personalized interaction to a great extent. Also, this allows direct interaction between the marketer and the consumer making way for quicker feedback.

Text, images and videos for mobile are simpler and less expensive compared to other forms of marketing. They have to be simple, precise and catchy. This involves less effort and less expenditure.

Marketing orthodoxy has evolved to meet the new formidable changes of the new technonomy. Mobile Marketing itself is a relatively new marketing platform and with the advent of smartphones, newer features like geo tagging, microblogging (twitter), social networking and accessing the internet from mobile instruments , campaigning has become more personalized and more creative.

Mobile Marketing grants a great platform for viral marketing, and how! Mobile content can be very easily shared among users. People invariably share information or offers that seem interesting to them with the people around them, thus companies get a lot more exposure with not as much extra effort. Not just in those terms, viral mobile marketing works best in rural areas where access to traditional media, computers and internet is fairly less. Interesting content coupled with word-of-mouth works wonders in this field. netCORE’s industrially acclaimed campaigns for Hindustan Unilever’s Active Wheel, Colgate Active Salt Taste Challenge 2012 and India Against Corruption campaigns are good examples of viral mobile marketing.

The biggest ever advantage of Mobile Marketing is the fact that your consumers are always online. Almost all mobile users carry their phones wherever they go and are accessible at any given point. This gives marketers a huge advantage of timing and targeting their campaigns in such a way that the impact is maximum.

In conclusion, mobile marketing gives the consumer many advantages like customization, lower cost, easy tracking etc; thereby reducing manpower and also giving the marketer better business benefits and profits.

In & Around Digital Marketing

The official blog of netCORE Solutions

netCORE is shortlisted for GSMA’s 18th Global Mobile Awards!

Featured

netCORE bags two awards at the 3rd India Digital Awards

Featured

netCORE bags 2 Awards @ Mobby’s

Featured

netCORE wins Gold at Smarties India 2012

Featured

Why move your Email to the cloud?

ISP Conference Meet for 2013 – Gmail dominates the session

What’s so special about ‘Welcome Email Programs’?

How well do you know your email?

Email Marketing lessons from Railway TCs

Thirty years of the net : what’s next?

Video-in-Email – The Newer New Media

Common mistakes CIOs/CXOs make with Email Marketing

The Reason Why Mobile Marketing Matters