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Monday, November 9, 2009

Power of Email Communications

It has been a quite a while since I blogged about email marketing scenario in India. Lot has happened since then.

I was really amazed at the innovative ideas being put in place by Marketing departments at Media companies.

NDTV News http://www.ndtv.com recently launched breaking news alerts to deliver them into email inboxes of recipients as they happen instantly. I have subscribed to these alerts and found them amazing. It saved me much time in catching up with news without visiting their websites and check what is happenning! I can now visit the website to find more about it, when I am told what is happenning.

NDTV has really got into the front league compared to other news agencies in adopting technology to enable their readers to get what they need. I know most of the folks are quite addicted to news and spend lot of time visiting the news websites. The news alerts service from NDTV can deliver now the fresh news, rather stale at the website after being heard from someone.

One can subscribe to NDTV Breaking News alerts on their website http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/new/NDTVNewsAlert.aspx.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Email Marketing to Improve Customer Acquisition and Customer Loyalty

When it comes to marketing, traditional or web-based, “customer acquisition” is a key indicator when determining success and Return on Investment (ROI) from your marketing efforts. “Customer loyalty” is also very important as we know that the lifetime value of a customer is dependent on how well we communicate with and retain customers.

The following are published industry facts focused on web-based marketing and the effects on “customer acquisition” and “customer loyalty”.


Customer Acquisition Facts



  • Permission marketing yields 30% increase in conversion and a 10% increase in return on investment. (Permission Marketing, Seth Godin)
  • Traditional direct marketing costs $1.50 per item, while online direct marketing averages 15-30 cents. (Andersen)
  • Traditional direct mail averages 1-2% response rate. Permission marketing averages 10-15% response rates. (Direct Marketing Association)
  • 80% of your visitors will never return to your website. (eMarketer)
  • The odds of selling a product to a new customer are 15%, whereas the odds of selling a product to an existing customer are 50%.
  • Email click-throughs measure 3-10x that of banner ads at 2-20% CTR.
  • Internet users represent over 72% of the U.S. population and greater than 25% spend their time online using email. (UCLA Report 2001)

  • Customer Loyalty Facts

  • It costs 5 -10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. (Emarketer)
  • If you trail your competition by 20 points in customer loyalty you are out of business.
  • Improving customer interactions is one of the single largest impact areas, across all industries. (Accenture)
  • A 5% increase in customer retention yields an increase in profits between 25 -100%.
  • Customer Loyalty Fact - Repeat customers spend 67% more; After 10 purchases, a customer has referred up to 7 people. (Bain & Company)
  • Online promotions generate 2 to 5 times the customer response rates of traditional promotions.
  • 70% of complaining customers will do business with the company again if it quickly takes care of a service snafu.


  • For more information on email marketing solution and services, visit http://www.sprinklr.in

    Friday, July 17, 2009

    Sprinklr signs up several key clients for its email marketing platform

    Sprinklr tier 1 email marketing platform signs up several key clients in India for all their email communications.

    Sprinklr e-messenger is one of the top performing email marketing platform that can pump 4 million email messages per hour. This feature is very critical for companies to deliver messages just before their subscribers ready to read, instead of delivering in the middle of the night or the day.

    Sprinklr offers robust security features that makes client's customer data in safe hands, which can't be compromised at any cost. Sprinklr e-messenger in the only platform in the country that is worthy of being used by major brands and financial institutions, as it being certified by SAS 70 audits, the world's highest security audit methodology, only used by major global financial institutions.

    Sprinklr is the ideal bulk email solution for Indian major brands and agencies to manange their email communication needs, as it provides seperate and integrated views and controls for email communications for several of their businesses.

    Sprinklr provides higher deliverability and rich reporting metrics.

    Sprinklr will be launching email to social platform soon.

    For more visit http://www.sprinklr.in

    Friday, July 10, 2009

    Aghreni email marketing platform turns into Sprinklr e-messenger

    We are rebranding the Aghreni emailing platform, and your favourite service will be called Sprinklr from here on. We are going to introduce a lot many more features in the coming times which will make your email marketing experience much more sophisticated and advanced. With killer edge technology Sprinklr will bring in the same drip marketing phenomenon into your consumers social graph resulting in a much higher conversion rates and consumer's brand interaction.

    At Sprinklr we promise you to give a world class product at an Indian price. We will be soon ready with the new website and will be announcing the new board members.

    Sprinklr is confident to take the Indian market by a swipe in the recent coming days and would love to have you join the revolution. So make sure you realise the potential of this platform before your competition does.

    For more insight on this please email jacob@sprinklr.in or, just call him @ +91 9886800993

    Visit Sprinklr website at http://sprinklr.in/sprinklr/

    Saturday, June 20, 2009

    Email Marketing Solutions and Services in India by World class company with International Expertise

    Indian Marketers can now get world class email marketing solution and services from Aghreni, a company with 5+ years of international experience in building email marketing solutions and supporting Fortune 500 clients for their email campaigns.

    Within a short span of five months starting the Indian operations, Aghreni has signed up 20 companies in it’s account, offering integrated email and mobile messaging services. The platform is currently being evaluated by another 15 companies including some of the leading Private sector Banks and Travel portals.

    The platform delivered more than 10 Million emails so far. The numbers are increasing 100% over each month. Aghreni is confident that the number of emails delivered through its platform will continue to increase exponentially over the next months, as it has increased its sales and focus on highly customer centric companies which have a potential to send out millions of emails.

    Aghreni also brings its own RupeeMail acquisition brand for companies to acquire customers. Rupeemail has a doubly opt-in list of 250,000 profiles across India, that can be profiled on 23 + different segments. Over 1 million plus RupeeMails were delivered in April 2009 and few of the RupeeMail campaigns for the month include Get Tata AIG Maharaksha (Tata AIG Insurance), The Unique Pension Planner ( Aegon Religare), Register, Play And Win Big ( Virgin Mobile), Jaldibid.com ( Tanla Solutions ) & Travelocity Special Offers. Aghreni has partnered with 10+ companies to offer email list rental services to Corporates looking for quality emails list rentals in India. Aghreni and its partners offer over 5 million doubly opt-in email profiles for companies to acquire customers. The profile includes consumers, IT/ITES employees, HNIs, CXOs, Small and Medium Business Enterprises, Distributors, Doctors, Finance Managers, Corporate Decision Makers etc. The profiles can be targeted based on age, city, industry, income group and other attributes.

    Aghreni's clients include leading Internet portals, Software product companies, Retail brands,Education and training institutions, Travel companies and Hotels and Restaurant chains. Aghreni’s email and mobile marketing platform provides a compelling reason for marketers to use email marketing as one of the most viable e-channels to reach out to the fast growing online customer database in India.

    For more information, visit http://www.aghreni.com

    Saturday, May 16, 2009

    Aghreni winning new strides as India’s Premier Interactive Email and Mobile Marketing Solutions and Services Provider

    Aghreni Technologies, the leader in interactive email and mobile marketing recently announced increased acceptance of its world class email and mobile marketing platform by Indian Corporates from various verticals. Within a short span of four months starting the Indian operations, Aghreni has signed up 15 companies in it’s account, offering integrated email and mobile messaging services. The platform is currently being evaluated by another 15 companies including some of the leading Private sector Banks and Travel portals.

    The platform delivered more than 5 Million emails in the month of April 2009. The numbers are 250% over the mails delivered in March 2009. Aghreni is confident that the number of emails delivered through its platform will continue to increase exponentially over the next months, as it has increased its sales and focus on highly customer centric companies which have a potential to send out millions of emails.

    Aghreni also brings its own RupeeMail acquisition brand for companies to acquire customers. Rupeemail has a doubly opt-in list of 250,000 profiles across India, that can be profiled on 23 + different segments. Over 1 million plus RupeeMails were delivered in April 2009 and few of the RupeeMail campaigns for the month include Get Tata AIG Maharaksha (Tata AIG Insurance), The Unique Pension Planner ( Aegon Religare), Register, Play And Win Big ( Virgin Mobile), Jaldibid.com ( Tanla Solutions ) & Travelocity Special Offers. Aghreni has partnered with 10+ companies to offer email list rental services to Corporates looking for quality emails list rentals in India. Aghreni and its partners offer over 5 million doubly opt-in email profiles for companies to acquire customers. The profile includes consumers, IT/ITES employees, HNIs, CXOs, Small and Medium Business Enterprises, Distributors, Doctors, Finance Managers, Corporate Decision Makers etc. The profiles can be targeted based on age, city, industry, income group and other attributes.

    Aghreni's clients include leading Internet portals, Software product companies, Retail brands,
    Education and training institutions, Travel companies and Hotels and Restaurant chains. Aghreni’s email and mobile marketing platform provides a compelling reason for marketers to use email marketing as one of the most viable e-channels to reach out to the fast growing online customer database in India.

    Aghreni Technologies is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names
    in the business. Team Aghreni has many years of experience in email marketing working with some
    of the world’s largest brands across the world. Aghreni brings a world class email marketing platform to the marketers to effectively measure their email marketing campaigns and reap success.

    For more information on the product, please visit Aghreni's website at
    http://www.aghreni.com/Aghreni_Digital.pdf

    Saturday, April 4, 2009

    Aghreni delivers 2 million emails for Indian Marketers in the month of March 2009 alone

    Aghreni Technologies, leader in interactive email and mobile marketing recently published the numbers to the Industry.

    It sent about 2,000,000 emails in the month of March 2009 alone, on behalf of its clients through its leading email and mobile marketing platform within 3 months of its operations in India.

    Aghreni delivered these emails into recipients inboxes with 98% and above deliverability. The open rates exceeded marketers expectations at above 12%, which is way ahead of Industry benchmarks in India. The click through rates (CTR) are in excess of 25 to 30%. Its platform was able to deliver almost all the emails across all ISPs (including rediff, rediffmail.com, in.com, sify.com) without getting its emails rejected or blocked by the ISPs, which is a major issue for most of the Indian marketers. Indian Marketers are quite amazed at Aghreni's platform features, its ease of use, and powerful metrics. They were able to improve the quality of their database significantly over the campaigns and learn several best email practices to deliver the message to inbox. The platform demonstrated how marketing messages are getting delivered into all ISPs (blocked, rejected, delivered, and spam complaints). Some of the clients are quite excited with the viral marketing features in generating additional leads. The platform provides advanced features like which sections in the email message is getting clicks from recipients most, providing marketers with the knowledge about their offer positioning and creating interest. The platform also provides features on when the message is being read and clicked in real time, so that marketers can send the email message at the appropriate time.

    Aghreni's clients include leading internet portals, software development companies, retail brands, education and training institutions and hotels and restaurants.

    Aghreni has already 10+ clients in India and fast expanding its clients base across all verticals. Aghreni is very optimistic in delivering more emails on behalf of its client in the next few month and provide marketers with a compelling reason to use email marketing as one of the viable e-channel to reach out to their growing online customer database in India.

    Aghreni Technologies is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business. Team Aghreni has many many years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world’s largest brands across the world. Aghreni brings a world class email marketing platform to the marketers to effectively measure their email marketing campaigns and reap success.

    For more information on the product, please visit Aghreni's website at

    http://www.aghreni.com/email_mobile_messaging_platform.html

    Friday, March 27, 2009

    How Indian political parties leverage the learnings from US President Obama's email campaigns to reach out to their supporters?

    The supporters of Presidential candidate Mr. Obama collected millions of email addresses through the enormous rallies and countless gatherings organized by them. Through out the period to election, the supporters reached out to the voters though email and phone. After Obama's victory, his campaign sent out a message, that more is yet to come. Today Obama's office is reaching out to the citizens in all round involvement in bringing the needed changes to America.

    Even though email is still at a nascent stage in India, directly reaching the voters in the country through online interactive mediums like email and mobile can't be ignored. It is a compelling reason for parties to engage the voters if they need to connect with them, just not for voting them, but to get their support for electing them and later engaging them to seek suggestions and push the changes that they need to implement.

    Mass politiical rallies, announcement over megaphone on the streets, one or two visit to voter's residences are just not enough to get the support of the voters. They have to be engaged in a much more direct and interactive way. And not just to lead them to vote, and now to engage them even after coming to power through direct interactive mediums.

    Some political parties have just started this effort. They may need an overall email and mobile campaign strategy to collect the email addresses, mobile numbers and other needed data to selectively target the citizens with their message, analyze the results and use the results their advantage.

    Read the entire article at
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/10/AR2008111000013.html?sid=ST2008111000071&s_pos=

    Aghreni Technologies is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business. Team Aghreni has many many years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world’s largest brands across the world. Aghreni brings a world class email and mobile marketing platform to the marketers to effectively measure their email marketing campaigns and reap success. Aghreni provides strategic email marketing consulting and end to end interactive marketing services to Companies worldwide.
    For more information about Aghreni, visit http://www.aghreni.com/email_mobile_messaging_platform.html

    Saturday, March 21, 2009

    High quality, low costs keep IT product companies ticking

    Aghreni Technologies, an e-mail and mobile marketing services company, has acquired more than half a dozen clients in the Indian market. Aghreni MD Manjunatha Kutarahalli said their differentiated offering with open source technologies has helped them bag clients in the past three months, which include large Indian business houses.



    Read the entire article on Economic Times website
    http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/no-downturn-in-it-product-cos/articleshow/4289757.cms

    Saturday, March 14, 2009

    Aghreni delivers 1.5 million emails for Indian Marketers in less than 2 months of its operations

    Aghreni Technologies, leader in interactive email and mobile marketing recently published the numbers to the Industry.

    It sent about 1,450,000 emails on behalf of its clients through its leading email and mobile marketing platform in just less than 2 months of its operations in India.

    Aghreni delivered these emails into recipients inboxes with 98% and above deliverability. The open rates exceeded marketers expectations at above 10 to 12%. The click through rates (CTR) are in excess of 25 to 30%. Indian Marketers are quite amazed at Aghreni's platform features, its ease of use, and powerful metrics. The platform demonstrated how marketing messages are getting delivered
    into all ISPs (blocked, rejected, delivered, and spam complaints). Some of the clients are quite excited with the viral marketing features in generating additional leads. The platform provides advanced features like which sections in the email message is getting clicks from recipients most, providing marketers with the knowledge about their offer positioning and creating interest. The platform also provides features on when the message is being read and clicked in real time, so that marketers can send the email message at the appropriate time.

    Aghreni's clients include leading internet portals, software development companies, retail brands, education and training institutions and hotels and restaurants.

    Aghreni has already 10+ clients in India and fast expanding its clients base across all verticals.

    Aghreni Technologies is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business. Team Aghreni has many many years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world’s largest brands across the world. Aghreni brings a world class email marketing platform to the marketers to effectively measure their email marketing campaigns and reap success.

    For more information on the product, please visit Aghreni's website at

    http://www.aghreni.com/email_mobile_messaging_platform.html

    Friday, February 27, 2009

    Aghreni's email and mobile messaging platform to deliver localised rich content for marketers to target vernacular demographics

    Aghreni's bulk email and mobile messaging platform can deliver rich HTML content in Indian languages for Indian Marketers to target the non-english speaking segments.

    Aghreni demonstrated the platform features to leading marketers in India and several have shown interest to target the non-english speaking segments in non-metro towns across the country.



    Aghreni's platform is an ideal choice for marketers to deliver marketing campaigns through rich HTML message on email and mobile messages through SMS channels. It has powerful reporting features to track the delivery (opens, clicks, bounces), inbox deliverability and spam complaints from ISPs (yahoo, gmail, hotmail, rediff).

    For more information, visit URL http://www.aghreni.com/email_mobile_messaging_platform.html

    Monday, February 23, 2009

    Does Your Email Marketing Software Provide You The Metrics For Measuring The Success Of Campaigns?

    Aghreni Technologies discusses on how working with an email marketing software or provider who provides all the relevant metrics for measuring the success of email marketing campaigns is absolutely essential.

    Peter Drucker, the father of ‘modern management’ said ‘If you can’t measure, you can’t control it; if you can’t control, you can’t manage it”.

    If you can’t manage, you are simply wasting your effort and money both.

    This is true with your email marketing campaigns. You are simply wasting your marketing budget down the drain, if you don’t measure the success of your email marketing campaigns! You may also be hurting your brand and reputation eventually!

    Let us look at the key metrics that you would need to understand and measure the success of your email marketing campaigns.

    1. Deliverability: This metric gives you the picture of how many emails were successfully sent out by your email marketing software or provider. Ideally you would need 100%. Practically no email marketing software or provider will guarantee 100% deliverability, because of many issues. The issues range from the hygiene of your list, ISP rejections and blockages, recipient’s inbox full, etc.

    If you are using a reputable email marketing solution or provider, you should be getting deliverability in excess of 95% to your opt-in list from the first campaign itself. The deliverability for successive campaigns should be in excess of 99%.

    If you are not getting these numbers, you should be seeking honest answers from your email marketing solution vendor or provider or the hygiene of your opt-in list.

    You should be checking if your email software marketing solution or provider

    a. Have capabilities to check the invalid email addresses even before sending them out?

    b. Allow defining policies for retrying sending again in case of soft bounce?

    c. Can export the hard bounce and soft bounce email addresses for further validation?

    2. Detailed Domain Report: Just getting a consolidated report of emails delivered across all of the domains is not enough for a marketer. Marketer has to get a detailed report of the performance of the email marketing software on how many emails were sent successfully to each of the domains or ISPs (gmail, yahoo, msn, aol, rediff, etc.), how many were rejected, how many were blocked, what was the number of spam complaints etc. This requires your email marketing software or provider has to work with the ISPs to get these. If they do not, they may not have a relation with the ISPs and have a feedback loop for you to take further action. If you don’t have visibility to abuse complaints of your ISPs and your email marketing provider doesn’t provide them, your reputation will be badly hurt as you can’t take action on those proactively.

    3. Opening Rate: This metric gives you the number of recipients who opened the email message.

    Does your email marketing software or provider give you the measure of both total number of emails opened and unique number of recipient’ openings. You should be considering the total number unique openings more than the total openings because a recipient opening the same mail twice or thrice doesn’t mean anything for the marketer.

    The industry standard benchmarks for the open rates are between 8 to 10%. If you are getting better than these results through your current email marketing software or provider, you are doing great. If you are getting way too less, you should be seeking answers from your email marketing software or provider.

    4. Click Through Rate (CTR): This is a measure of the action of the recipient seeking more information by clicking the links embedded in the email message sent. This is a measure of the interest of the recipient. It doesn’t necessarily convert to a sale or registration, but it is a step closer.

    Does your email marketing software or provider give you the measure of both total number of link clicks (for all links, by each link) in the message and unique number of clicks for each link. You should be considering the total number of unique clicks more than the total clicks because a recipient may be clicking the same link twice or thrice doesn’t mean anything for the marketer.

    The industry standard benchmarks for the click through rates are between 2 to 3%. If you are getting better than these results through your current email marketing software or provider, you are doing great. If you are getting way too less, you should be seeking answers from your email marketing software or provider.

    5. Unsubscribe Rate: This is the number of unique email addresses that do not want further emails from you. They didn’t have an interest in your message so they unsubscribed.

    Does your email marketing software provide you the details of unsubscriptions? Does it provide policies for setting the limit on the emails sent to each recipient irrespective of how many campaigns you may be doing? Does it provide policies to unsubscribe across multiple lists? If not, you are dealing with lot of manual effort in unsubscription and may be not effectively taking actions on unsubscriptions. If you don’t take action on unsubscriptions quickly, your next email marketing campaign may be marked as SPAM by the recipient and complained to ISPs, which could hurt your reputation of being a good marketer.

    6. Viral Rate: Hopefully you’ve got some viral component to your emails where they can be forwarded and measured. Don’t dismiss your viral rate… it’s a great way to acquire subscribers who stick as well as add additional revenue to a great campaign.

    Your email marketing software or provider should provide a mechanism to capture all of the forwarded email addresses for later analysis and targeting.

    7. Conversions: This is the number of unique email addresses that ’registered’ or ‘bought’. For a retailer, this is pretty simple… it can be the actual registrations or dollar amount that resulted in a web site purchase. For other businesses, a conversion could be different, though. It might be how many people subscribed to your podcast if that’s the call to action. Watching your conversion rate will tell you how well you are ’selling’ your call to action.

    This metrics depends on the earlier metrics. If the earlier metrics are good, naturally this metric will improve. This metric also depends on the marketer’s value proposition, attractiveness of the offer and meeting the needs of the customer.

    8. Visual Reporting: Providing metrics like clicks visually on your HTML message itself, provides much greater visibility on the performance of your creative in the eyes of the recipients. The marketer can visualize where the interests of the recipients are more or appealing depending on the clicks. The marketer with this knowledge can optimize the creative further for future campaigns.

    9. Time Distribution: Do you get to know how are your recipients reading your message over the different hours of the day or days of the week after the message was sent out? Can you recognize a pattern?

    The marketing message is all about relevance and timing. Do you want send a campaign that sits in the recipient inbox for hours before they read? It would have lost its timing if it not sent at an appropriate time, when the recipient will have just an hour in the morning 10 AM to read all his personal mails. In today’s world, if your email is not in the first page, then it may not be read at all. With so much spam escaping filtering or irrelevant mails in the inbox, the marketer has to know the recipient reading and clicking behavior during the time of the day and day of the week. The marketer can appropriately time the message during the day or on a particular day.

    Hence working with an email marketing software or provider who provides all the relevant metrics for measuring the success of your email marketing campaigns is absolutely essential. The metrics provide you with all the data to measure the success and returns from your campaigns against the money you spent.

    In the recession economy, it doesn’t make sense to waste your money and effort on executing marketing campaigns that doesn’t yield results you need.

    # # #

    Aghreni Technologies is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business. Team Aghreni has many many years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world’s largest brands across the world. Aghreni brings a world class email marketing platform to the marketers to effectively measure their email marketing campaigns and reap success.

    For more information, visit URL http://www.aghreni.com/email_mobile_messaging_platform.html

    End to End Email and Mobile Marketing automation Solutions and Services for Marketers

    Aghreni Technologies, that is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business is offering e-messenger, email and mobile marketing automation platform that can send high volume emails and mobile messages with high deliverability.

    Team Aghreni has over 4 years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world's largest brands. Aghreni's email and mobile messaging platform called e-messenger services over a 900clients in Europe, Asia and the USA.

    Aghreni's platform is a hosted solution and it takes less than 48 hours to get on the platform for the first campaign.

    Moreover Aghreni's platform is the most economical to use. The platform guarantees inbox deliverability with major ISPs (hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.). The platform is easy to use, integrate with Clients backend CRM, ERP and other systems and moreover, Aghreni is the only large scale professional company to provide local support in India.

    In addition, Clients will be working one of the most advanced and feature rich platform and deriving benefits like high quality of email deliverability, which only the biggest global email service providers can guarantee.

    Aghreni with its partner RupeeMail (http://www.rupeemail.in) brings in doubly opted-in customer database of customer profiles across India to Marketers in India for acquiring customers.

    For more details, visit URL http://www.aghreni.com/email_mobile_messaging_platform.html

    # # #

    Aghreni Technologies Private Limited is a provider of email and mobile marketing automation solutions and services to clients world-wide. Aghreni Technologies has many years of experience with leading global companies in the world and managing marketing campaigns for global brands. Aghreni is spear-headed by a senior team of highly qualified and experienced professionals from online marketing industry including Manjunatha KG (Managing Director), Ram Krishnaswamy (Head Business Solutions) and Raghunandan Mysore (Head Infrastructure and Operations). The company aims to provide end to end solutions and services for marketers for customer acquisition, rentention and loyalty.

    Email Delivery Optimization Techniques from Email Marketing Solutions Provider - Aghreni Technology

    There is a misconception with marketers and providers that email marketing software is a bulk mailing solution. When the emails are blasted out of a bulk mailer, they are assured that it will reach the recipient’s inboxes. Is that so simple?

    Does your email marketing software or service provider guarantee email delivery optimization?

    Certainly most do not!

    There is a misconception with marketers and providers that email marketing software is a bulk mailing solution. When the emails are blasted out of a bulk mailer, they are assured that it will reach the recipient’s inboxes. Is that so simple?

    Let us look at some of the email deliverability myths that most marketers seem to have.

    1. We don’t spam!

    2. We send emails only to opt-in lists

    3. Someone has blacklisted us for no reason

    4. ISPs (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL) treat us badly

    5. If our emails reach recipient’s junk folders, we will request recipient to add us to safe lists



    We don’t send Spam!

    The marketers first need understand the definition of Spam! It is not just the Viagra or the porn stuff! Any message that doesn’t suit the need of the customer is spam, whether it is the message subject line, content, broken or dodgy HTML code, relevance, frequency of the emails, etc. Moreover, messages that do not comply with CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003) act may be classified as SPAM by receiving ISPs.

    Marketers have to stop sending messages that are boring, mundane and uninteresting. Marketers need to check if their messages are CAN-SPAM compliant. Marketers have to monitor their campaigns reports like opens, clicks, spam complaints, and abuses from their customers and ISPs. If they don’t, they may be surprised to see sometime later, their messages are being categorized as SPAM and lying in junk folders or being blocked by ISPs.



    We send emails only to opt-in lists

    Sending email campaigns to opt-in lists is a good practice, because you are assured of good deliverability. But have you given control to your opt-in customers, the power to opt-out or unsubscribe in each campaign? If you haven’t, start doing it now. Even if you have given the power to opt-out or unsubscribe, are you acting promptly within a reasonable time (with one week) to stop sending further email campaigns? Have you opted them again, after a reasonable amount of time through another promotional campaign? Are you acting on bounces and taking action to get your list cleaned out of bounced email addresses? Are you educating your opt-in subscribers, to opt-out instead of complaining to ISPs about abuses from you? Are you capturing the opt-in subscriber preferences to send relevant campaigns that suit their interests and the frequency of email campaigns in a given period?

    The success of keeping your list clean and emails reaching out to your opt-in customers lies in understanding the needs of the opt-in subscribers, measuring the success of each email campaign and working to address the issues above. If you don’t, even your opt-in customers will soon be opting out or complaining you to ISPs on email campaigns as SPAMs.



    Someone has blacklisted us for no reason

    Emails Marketers have to understand that email communication is being heavily abused by spammers around the world. For every genuine email sent, there are 90 others which are spam. Most of the email service providers and companies are putting tough measures to block spam emails reaching their infrastructure or for processing and storing Spam emails and damaging their employee productivity. There are service providers who constantly scout for spammers, monitor their activities on the web and maintain a list of their IP addresses (blacklist). They provide various companies the blacklisted IPs, to block the email senders from that IPs. The black list service providers employ various complex and advance techniques to monitor increased email sending, patterns, and their web crawlers checking various things on their servers, and etc. to collect lot of statistics to classify them into the blacklist.

    Hence Marketers need to understand the challenges if they are using their own bulk mailing solutions and constantly monitor if their IPs are blacklisted by any service providers. They should take immediate action, if needed with those service providers and get their IPs white listed.



    ISPs (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL) treat us badly

    Most of the opt-in customers have their email addresses on the major 4 ISPs Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Hence Marketers will be sending a bulk of their emails to these 4 ISPs. They have to ensure that their emails are getting delivered to recipient’s inboxes on these ISPs. Why should these ISPs block the marketer’s emails? They have several reasons and some of them have been stated earlier. Most of the ISPs provide free email infrastructure to their customers and hence they need to optimize their email infrastructure. They have to protect their recipient’s privacies and their reputation as the best ESP in the world.

    The emails in those ISPs may also bounce for various reasons like account deletion, inbox full, etc. The sender email server or the email service provider has to remove these bounced addresses from the next mailing; else the ISPs may treat you as a spammer and deny service.

    Major ISPs such as Google, AOL and MSN/Hotmail provide their users to complain on the sender of the emails or domains. The ISPs also have strong authentication and dynamic filtering mechanisms that your email software and service provider have to deal with.

    If your email marketing software or email service provider doesn’t implement the authentication response mechanisms, adjusting to the filtering policies of the ISPs and dealing with the abuse complaints, there is no reason to complain against their unfair treatment!



    If our emails reach recipient’s junk folders, we will request recipient to add us to safe lists

    This is a myth that marketers have! If they request the recipients to add the sender email address into the recipient’s safe list, then the messages will be reaching the inbox. While this may be true, it still doesn’t address the deliverability of the sender emails.

    ISPs will deliver the email to the recipient’s inbox after their server has successfully received the email, passing through white listed sender IP reputation, authentication mechanisms, dynamic filters (which are changing every moment).

    Then there are other questions that marketers need to understand?

    1. Does the marketer always use the same send email id for sending different promotions? Is there a need to use different email ids for different e-mail communications like newsletters, campaigns, promotions? What about from different brands or departments in the company?

    2. Do you see a recipient adding every marketer’s email ids into the safe list? What is the guarantee that you will not start sending irrelevant and innumerable email communications to the recipient?

    If you don’t have answers for most of these questions, then this trick will not work in most of the cases. The marketer is back to seeing his email moved to junk folders and soon deliverability takes a hit.



    Email Marketing is a disciplined process and in order to get it right and realize the benefits, Marketers have to work with companies and agencies who really understand the science and art of email marketing.

    If not, there will no differentiation between your marketing campaigns and the spammer’ campaigns. Ultimately the recipient’s and the ISP’s are the better judges.

    Hence it is very important to measure the success of each of your email marketing campaigns.



    Aghreni Technologies is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business. Team Aghreni has over 4 years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world’s largest brands across the world.

    For more information, visit URL http://www.aghreni.com/email_mobile_messaging_platform.html

    Tuesday, January 13, 2009

    The Internet Audience in India can't be ignored

    In a Panel discussion under Campaign India at Bombay, leading marketers, media and agency heads discussed the internet as the medium of marketing, when the economic slowdown is squeezing the marketing budgets.

    The interesting things to take note were that financial services, travel, and FMCG sectors are already using the digital marketing. The digital marketing has been a great hit with these sectors and they will increase the spend.

    The internet medium provides a measurable and action oriented performance and accountability for the marketing investment. It also provides a deeper engagement with the consumers.

    Automobile sector is shifting to digital media from the traditional mass media.

    The panelists noted that the target specific data is still not available in India and the performance is being captured at the campaign level.

    For more details on the panel discussion, please visit URL http://www.campaignindia.in/news/the_internet_audience_cannot_be_ignored

    Saturday, January 10, 2009

    Use Email and Mobile Marketing to increase Customer Loyalty

    It is increasingly becoming a necessity to keep customers informed on your business to gain their loyalty for repeat business and recommendations, in the face of current economy. While there are traditional mediums for marketing the business in local newspapers, magazines, billboards, television or radio spots, these mediums are very expensive costing several lakhs of Rupees every month or year.

    There are online tools like email and mobile communication mediums that provide cost effective media for marketing campaigns, from limited-time specials, new product or service offerings, coupons, birthday or anniversary offers, seasonal items, newsletters, customer surveys and special or discounted pricing to entice customers to return. It is also a conduit for data collection - the more information a company has about its customer base, the more clearly it will understand its client demographics, purchase behaviors and shopping habits. In turn, the company can utilize the knowledge to market more effectively in the future.

    Email and Mobile marketing can provide excellent benefits to business.

    1. It Increases customer loyalty: E-mail marketing can grow brand awareness, strengthen customer relationships and encourage trust.

    2. It Saves money: E-mail marketing eliminates the costs associated with traditional direct mail—such as printing and postage—and costs significantly less than other forms of traditional advertising.

    3. It Improves customer contact: Since e-mail marketing is turn-key, a business owner can send messages and updates to customers more frequently.

    4. It Provides trackable results: The number of individuals who open and read the e-mail, and the number of e-mails forwarded, are only a few examples of what statistics can be tracked.

    5. It Offers targeted content: Businesses are able to segment their database to provide specific clients with targeted messages based on their tracked results.

    6. It Generates action: E-mail promotions and offers generate immediate action, whether through sales, click-throughs, inquiries, registrations, etc.

    Some tech-savvy business owners elect to do email or mobile marketing on their own, however, there are many firms that specialize in email and mobile marketing as well. The benefit to outsourcing your campaign is that companies specializing in email and mobile marketing are able to provide superior technology (such as a custom graphic design and detailed tracking results) and better results. Simply stated, if an individual uses their own mail engine or a mobile gateway to deploy an email or mobile campaign, they can encounter problems with deliverability, tracking, creativity and design capability.

    With an email or mobile marketing specialty firm, you are assured that:

    Your emails and SMS messages are delivered. What is the sense in sending out an email or SMS campaign if it does not reach the end-user? With spam continuing to rise, specialty e-mail marketing firms provide advanced deliverability tools to ensure that an e-mail campaign has high deliverability rates and is less likely to be categorized as spam or junk mail. In addition, e-mail marketing companies have relationships with various mail engines (such as AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, MSN, Comcast, etc.) to help get your message to an inbox. Also your providers works with mobile gateway providers and telecom operators to ensure that the SMS messages are received by the mobile phones.

    Your mailing list is segmented. E-mail marketing specialty firms have the ability to segment a list based on the information you provide, whether it’s the date of a client’s last visit, his/her birthday, etc. This function is critical because it allows you to target specific segments of your list, which enhances the likelihood of a return.

    * Your e-mails are custom-designed. E-mail marketing firms can design a template that is creative and appeals to the look and feel of your salon. It is important to provide a consistent image to clients.

    * Your campaign is automated. Each e-mail provides the end-user with an opportunity to unsubscribe automatically—requiring little to no maintenance for you. Moreover, new clients will be automatically included on the master e-mail list.

    * Your e-mails are tracked. E-mail marketing firms provide comprehensive tracking reports, including details such as who is opening the e-mail, what is being clicked, who is unsubscribing, who is subscribing and more. Tracking is critical because it gathers data that will help pinpoint which campaigns and promotions are most effective.

    If you do decide to hire a firm to take care of your e-mail marketing needs, be aware that there are two types of companies available—full-service and DIY. A full-service firm handles all aspects of an e-mail campaign from custom design to list management to detailed tracking reports. The DIY model gives you, the salon owner, more control because you are in charge of choosing from among the e-mail template designs provided by the company as well as maintaining your own client lists. Of course, there are benefits to both models and it is suggested that a business owner finds the company that is best suited for his or her specific salon needs.

    Aghreni is a full service provider of email and mobile marketing software, solutions and services to Indian business.

    Top Ten Mobile Marketing Predictions for 2009

    On ZdNet, Mark Brill posted a blog about the future of Mobile Marketing. He predicts top 10 trends in mobile marketing for 2009.

    Asian Countries like India and China are leading the world in adoption of mobile phones. The next revolution after internet adoption in the world, is the adoption of cell phones. Emerging economies of India, China, Brazil and Russia provide the biggest opportunities for marketers using mobile as the next medium of targeting consumers.

    1. SMS will continue to grow both for alerts and short message marketing.

    2. Bluetooth Marketing will grow for proximity marketing in malls or busy shopping areas.

    3. More QR (Quick Recognition) of bar codes through cell phones

    4. MMS will grow, through the use of rich marketing content through pictures and video advertisements.

    5. Mobile couponing and Ticketing will increase

    6. Location based services with SMS will take off

    7. Mobile internet overtakes PC based internet use, with the availability of faster speeds through 3G services

    8. Mobile Payments will take off

    9. Mobile security will become an important issue

    10. Targeted and Niche Advertising will grow.

    Aghreni is a customer centric ROI driven provider of email and mobile marketing software, solutions and services.