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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