netCORE and IAMAI Partnered to come up with series of Email marketing Round table to bring in new thoughts and live cases of companies using email marketing as their marketing weapon. I really liked the content covered and new ideas shared.

3 Most important points I learnt this Friday were:

1- We see the world the way we are not the way it should be:

One of the Panel members of the Round table discussed his experience of his child receiving promotional email and feeling privileged about it, rather than getting irritated. Feeling young at heart will make you young rather than age said by another Panelist to the question of only youth being present on Social Media.

Multi–channel strategy which Indian companies are adopting specially e-commerce portals was another key thoughts of the eve. How subscribers are being updates about offers on email + sms to make it effective and increase ROIs to certain percentage. It was obvious to see the mature marketers talking about complementing ideas with each platform.

It was interesting to see various new perceptions with live scenarios making a difference in the space where everyone has no fact and data as Indian email marketing is still at nascent stage.

2-Did Indian email marketing really grow from batch & blast to Opt-in

Lot of ESPs and grown up marketer says that Indian email marketing industry has gone mature from Batch & Blast to Opt-in and moving slowly towards Profiled and segmented email targeting. Again a new perception came into picture when the Panel discussion said that we still do Batch & Blast its just that we have divided the batches into small segments and will call it refine batch & Blast rather than Opt-in or Profiled targeting. Till the time the ROIs are growing with such adjustments evolution of hygienic email marketing will be questionable.

3- Points we should Brain storm at?

One point which round table didn’t speak much about was how to Increase the Opt-in subscribers?

What is the future of Email marketing Industry in India?

How can we understand our subscriber more effectively and send content which they like?

Well I’m sure we have lot to talk and discuss so why don’t you write us back and let us know what are your thoughts on the above questions.

This is a debatable topic. The answer to this question is definitely “NO”. But yes as an Email Marketer steps can be taken to reduce Spam.

If you get an email from someone you don’t know, is that spam? Not necessarily. So what’s spam? Spam is when you send an unsolicited email to a whole list of people. Let’s say you just bought a list of email addresses from some local business organization. These are great prospects for your business, right? You want to send them an email with a relevant offer they can’t refuse. It’s spam if you upload that list and send that list an unsolicited email because these users have not registered with you to recevie emails.

Email should be sent to only those users who have opted to receive mails from you. For this either you should have a widget/registration page in website, where a user can provide details. But a confirmation mail shoudl be sent to these users to authenticate the email id. Alternately there are many other methods of collecting authenticated email id like workshop, seminars, socail networks and other, but that’s a totally different topic. So not getting much into data collection details, here the point to focus is why are mails being treated as Spam.

Some of the reasons why mails are treated as Spam:

• Domain is blacklisted.
• IP is blacklisted.
• Sometime its the problem with email content, sender id.

These are the baisc stuff which every email marketer is aware of. But what steps can be taken to avoid a mail being treated as Spam:

• Always use opt-in/double opt-in database.
• Keep the content relative to the user.
• Always give an option to opt-out from email.
• Don’t send heavy emails, try hosting some content in it.
• Check the domain and IP reputation.

Spam is the reason why the mailbox is flooded with emails. Although there are Anti-Spam bodies in many countries, but in India there is no such regulatory body.

Although Spamming can’t be stopped but it can be reduced!!

]]> http://blog.netcore.co.in/?feed=rss2&p=363 0 http://blog.netcore.co.in/?p=351 http://blog.netcore.co.in/?p=351#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2011 04:14:25 +0000 admin http://blog.netcore.co.in/?p=351 In case there is a possibility of Biggest Fight in the world, Email and Mobile will be 2 names whose egos have been tried, tested and executed against each other so many times by Marketers.

There is not much to share about their fights but will share one piece of their personal conversation.

“Email to mobile: what the F man I heard your market is going down since my existence has gain more prominence.

Mobile to email: With limited people on internet your presence has never been felt in my comparison where half of the world is using me you spacious pig!”

There is more to it but I’m sure you don’t want to get into too much Drama.

Combination of different channels empowers your communication

Smart Marketers realized that instead of using both the platforms individually what if it is combined and made it a multi-channel cross benefit strategy. The idea was worth the check as both the platforms have unique strengths.

Does your marketing tool has everything in it?

Email gives the highest conversion (42$ for every 1$ spent) and Mobile e-commerce market is growing and it is estimated that by 2015 it will be 8% of the total e-commerce market.

Thus, the time has come when marketers shift to multi-channel marketing strategy by combining strength of one tool with another. Email+SMS is one such combination,

So here is how you can use both platforms effectively:

People can easily and quickly register for your company’s email alerts

1.) A mobile shortcode system where people can register  themselves by sending sms on a shortcode & subscribe for company’s info  eg:  ABC NEWSLETTER @ 575758

2.)    Now ABC would ask for your email id and confirm your registration, this way you don’t have to go on their website to subscribe for info and can get it easily through mobile registration process

Email marketing is used for generating leads today and Mobile comes handy and have a better engagement features. This is one of the deadly combination when comes to marketing tools. With growing choices in the market, marketers will have to take a call on combining different tools to cook one good marketing & communication strategy.

Today most of the people access their emails through smart phones and this is where an email marketer has to get alert. In smart phones emails cannot be viewed properly if it’s a single image. It will increase the mailer size and also would take time to be downloaded. This can be overcome by:

• Keep it a combination of text and image. Because even if the subscriber is not able to view to the mailer properly then they can go through the text part and get an overview of the mailer and decide whether it is to be saved for further reference or not.
• Host some part of the mailer to keep the mailer size small and get better response.

This also points out that the mailer content should be informative and describe the purpose effectively.

Today most of the ESP’s also offer mobile view option, where the email can be viewed as per the mobile settings. This is an example where technology improves with time.

If you are having a smart phone so check out what works and what not and see this from a subscriber’s perspective and implement it as a marketer.

So check your mails and find out!

One of the important aspects is to keep updating your database regularly since:

• It helps you to maintain/improve your domain reputation on the web world.

• Also, helps save cost you incur, since their normally seem to be quite a few ID’s which are inactive from a long time but still mails happen to be sent.
  
  Now the question is how do we keep our database updated?

Firstly keep a regular track on your Hard Bounces and Unsubscribe’s and keep them away from your regular mailing list.

Secondly, one practice which should be followed for all your email campaigns is that there should be a link provided at the top of your creative saying “Update your preferences” which gives the end user a convenient option to update his new details. Since quite a few people keep changing their ID’s on a regular basis.

But, it becomes a two step process for the end user to update his new details.

Now how can we simplify this process??

Can we include a form in the content….??

I am sure all of us have heard of the fact that the form doesn’t work when included in the content  Well it’s not true anymore….

Now Email marketing also gives us an option to include forms in the content in the “Get method” (data is collected from a URL) rather than the “Post inside method“(data is collected through a script which doesn’t work most of the Email Service Providers) and they would work properly in Yahoo and Gmail which are the two of the majorly used domains.

So, we can carry out a direct “Update your preferences” campaign where they can update or modify the details in the content itself rather than doing the changes after being directed to a page.

Now feel free to include forms in the content (don’t forget, in the “Get” method) and keep updating your database regularly.

Email Marketing is moving in fast these days. Emails are now considered as a black & white document for many forms of business – Egs are Credit Card Statements, Online Bills, Contract Notes etc. With the government now giving air to the “Go Green” Revolution, company’s have to start sending the Annual Reports and even the Contracts via email. More this revolution of Go Green gains momentum, Importance of emails will grow and we would see that the email will take the face of a signed hand written document.

Emails have already picked up speed in India. See for your regular Facebook notifications, if someone will mentioned your name in a comment or any page, you will receive an email notification and believe it or not, we do want such notifications in our mailbox just to show people – “Yes! I do receive emails daily.” Same checks out for Twitter (which is already becoming one of the most powerful tools of promotion), you get alert via email for name in tweets or for your re-tweets.

So, when people are now inquisitive to read emails, happiness among email marketers is there. But with this happiness comes a very important message – Frequency of change in the content of emails has to increase. No wonder the number of unread emails would increase, email marketers will now have to make their communications more innovative and ways to engage users have to be changed to a higher level.

The point to note here is even though you have been sending solicited content to your users, the users will not respond to your emails and the Open Rates and click through rates will come down. There is no rocket science behind the reason – its just users have got bored with the same content and email format and they need something new. New – I know is always a mystery for the Content Manager and the Marketing Team but this has to be the crux of your successful email campaigns.

We have seen many types of emails reaching our inbox – promotional offers from e-commerce and online portals, Merchandise offers with watch, wallet or a pen, sports gear accompanied by accessory, online movie tickets with combos and what not. What if users have got bugged off from all these emails. There are two things to this fact – either the offers have to become more tempting such that users feel compelled to buy online or the creatives and design of the mailer makes them open the emails regularly. You cannot have your business run only on offers as providing offers compromises your net year revenue, so the content and mailer design has be made better.

Three important points that email marketers have to always keep in mind:

1. Content holds the most important key to Customer Engagement. If you have to take the end user time and money, then first give the user some interesting or entertaining content which would compel them to get in regular communication with you and finally become your customer
2. Giving only offers will make users always OFFER-Centric and they will see you only if you have offer. You don’t give them 2 good deals in a row and you will loose the customer.
3. User Engagement has always been the game changer for email marketers and will always be.

Designing the email campaign is the most difficult task, but if the campaign is not executed correctly then what’s the use of putting such efforts. Before executing any email campaign test mailer should always be done. There are some points, which need to be considered, like:

• Check whether the mail is landing to inbox or not.
• Is the mailer having proper indexing?
• Does it serve the purpose for which it will be executed?
• If the mailer is having a form in it, then is that form working in all domains?

Checking some of these points would help achieve better response to the campaigns. If it’s a promotional mail and any social networking link is also there, then check for the content that would be posted on these websites, as this would impact your viral marketing. Check the mailer preview for different domains and also for different browser. Also smartphones shouldn’t be ignored in this case.

Testing is a long process but its effectiveness can’t be ignored. So test before the executing any email campaign!

]]> http://blog.netcore.co.in/?feed=rss2&p=308 0 http://blog.netcore.co.in/?p=302 http://blog.netcore.co.in/?p=302#comments Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:06:58 +0000 admin http://blog.netcore.co.in/?p=302 Human mind is basically judgmental. Each & every incidents, people, places, food are automatically assessed by human mind. Our mind will have an answer for each & every evaluations: like or dislike, yes or no etc. Likewise each & every individual has predetermined judgment about the hundreds of emails racing to his or her inbox per day. Each individual has an expectation that ”this will be this” or “that will be that”. So the Success of an email marketer is to break this expectations or evaluations and make that person go through our mail.

HOW???… Big Question… But Simple Answerssss…

The first thing that should be kept in mind is make  the subject line simple & attractive… a very interesting example can be: while doing the promotions for Father’s day the common subject lines seen were “Go ahead. Make your Father’s day”, “Make it a Super Father’s Day” etc.. these type of subject line is evaluated by customers as a normal promotional campaign, which have more probability of being not viewed. So try something different, “Give your Father a Loving Surprise”, “love your father- Gift him a   fantastic Father’s day” can be some substitutes which will make customers curious to know, What is there in this Mail?…

The Second point that should be kept in mind is sender name, A positive impact should be created in the customers mind, when they see our Brand Name. A feeling that this mail will be useful or informative for me, should be created in customers mind through the standards of mails that are used for the campaigns. So that brand name will make the customer read that mail. Keeping info@, marketing@ etc.. will create an impact of promotions which may increase the probability of being not viewed, so the best way can be use your brands simple mail I.d which will be simple and create a impact which will create results. Like Dominos pizza & Aditya Birla which are brand images tempting customers to know more about the mail.

The Third but most important point is the content, just imagine if we are busy with our works, what will be the maximum time that will be  allotted for viewing per mails: 5 seconds, 10 seconds or 1 minute. Will we prefer a large text document mail in this speculated time, the majority of the answers will be, No. So always keep in mind that the mails have to be short & cute which covey the content. Even it is newsletters or Educational content try to convey the message in a simple template which will include the usp’s of that peculiar product/ service and a call to action on the same, so that interested customers can visit the respective websites and get the details.

So no more speech, One can lead the market of email marketing through Regular workouts(market Research)& Healthy Diets(efficient mails) which will provide a great look and a bigger range of Fans(customers).Thus leading to greater profitability to our Business.

If you don’t have an email account, then what do you do? Just go and register with any of the ISP’s. Or if you want to receive newsletters from a particular website then you register for receiving newsletters. But while providing the personal details how many of you go through the terms and conditions which is written there. I suppose none. We just check the “I accept the above mentioned terms and conditions”. Then after getting registered we receive many promotional emails. Even you might have not registered to receive that promotion then why are you receiving it?

Here if you check the terms for which you have agreed while registering either for getting an email account or receiving newsletters, there is a point mentioned that you also agree to receive promotional offers from this vendor. Only few give options to opt-out for not receiving other promotional offers apart from which you have registered.

This is also one of the reasons why spam is increasing, as even though don’t want to receive an email still they are receiving it and lead the user to mark it as SPAM. Thus, resulting is bringing down the reputation of the vendor. So what’s the solution for this? Give your subscribers an option to opt-out of a particular promotion. Always include an unsubscribe link in your email. Don’t make subscribers to mark you as SPAM, just give a chance to opt-out also.

So even you have not opted intentionally to receive other promotions but still you are a subscribed user to it. So check before you opt!!!!

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