What is Direct Marketing or Email Marketing or Interactive Marketing of Database Marketing?

Direct Marketing is a marketing process where companies market to carefully targeted individual consumers with an appropriate, relevant and timely offer or message using one or more advertising media to obtain an immediate and measurable response or transaction.

Direct Marketers communicate directly with customers, often on a one-to-one,interactive basis to build and cultivate long lasting customer relationships.

Direct Marketers use detailed databases where they understand customer’s demographics, attitudes, preferences and purchasing behaviors. With this knowledge, they tailor their marketing offers and communications to the needs of narrowly defined segments or even individual buyers.

Direct Marketing is also referred to as Interactive Marketing or Database Marketing, because it is expected to be two-way communication with the customer or prospect and it is database driven, where the database contains customer demographics, attitudes, preferences and purchasing history & behavior.

Beyond brand and image building, Direct Marketers usually seek a direct, immediate, and measurable customer response. With digital advertising mediums and e-commerce websites, it is possible to effectively track and measure customer responses, if the customer looked at the offer, responded to the offer by seeking more information, visited the marketer’s e-commerce website, or placed an order, etc.


Early direct marketers used catalogs, direct mailers and telephone calls. They gathered customer names and sold goods mainly by mail and telephone. Today, with the advance in database and computer technology, direct marketers are using new marketing media – the internet. Internet provides several mechanisms - email, web advertisements and affiliated websites to drive customers to marketer’s website or stores for sales.

Aghreni Technologies with many years of building direct marketing systems and managing them are bringing the benefits of measurable marketing campaigns to marketers in India for better managing their marketing investments for generating greater sales.



To learn more about Aghreni's direct marketing solutions, visit URL http://www.aghreni.com/business_solutions_em.html

Inbox by Gmail: 6 implicit facts for Marketers

Inbox by Gmail

“It’s a better way to get back to what matters… ” (Official Blog, Google)

An Explicitly correct statement that reflects what Inbox by Gmail is intended to impart to the users. But, what are the implicit rationales for marketers?

“The Inbox that works for you” essentially points towards the horizon where Email marketing is heading to. After the recent introduction of Grid view of Gmail promotion tab, this new development re-emphasizes the need of redevising the strategy that facilitates the way your brands talk to customers.

A snapshot of the new features:

Bundle of Emails: That’s how it sounds, it’s more about “Segmentation” of the huge number of Emails on the basis of certain selected criteria such as promos, Purchases, Trips etc. So, this is more about segmenting the emails based on actionable points (promos), undergoing actions (Purchases/delivery status) and custom actions-as labelled by users.

Important Highlights: It highlights important “Updates” from Emails such as delivery status, flight status etc. without having to open the mail. It is the Real-time feature of the Email.

Reminder: You will be able set your priorities by having a reminder in your inbox so as to avoid missing them out in the stipulated time. It will also provide required information for the same. For example, if you plan to have your dinner in a nearby restaurant, you can keep it as reminder in Inbox. It will also tell you whether it is open at any point of time. Once you book your seat online, you will also see a locational map of the restaurant in your confirmation mail.

Snooze your messages and reminders: This will facilitate in setting up your priorities to a later time or location. It will highlight your message as reminder at the stop in the assigned time.

And here are 6 Implicit Facts:

1)      Contextual: All emails are not equally important, so Gmail intends to help users in automated ways. Contextual marketing is becoming more and more important for a successful Email Marketing program.

2)      Urgency: In a fast moving world, marketers have to address the time factor associated with any live promotion/campaign. Catch the attention of your consumers before time expires.

3)      Priority: Amidst hundreds of tasks, actions awaiting user’s attention the inbox, Emails will now get prioritised as per the user. Thriving to get maximum priority through well-strategized email marketing effort will be the trigger to success.

4)      Real-time Marketing: This one is interesting and perhaps, the most significant aspect of Inbox. Live information feed from external resources such as external websites, data-base etc. implies arrival of live, fresh and dynamic features in Email marketing. Future marketing communications will happen on the fly.

5)      Perfect Content: Email automation is becoming more and more important. In fact, these new features of Inbox will ask for new Email Content Mechanism. Google is yet to reveal any specifications (if there is, at all) to remain contextual with well-developed HTML content.

6)      Success Matrix: If the inbox itself reveals much of the information about the Email through Subject Lines/thumbnails, what will define the success rate? For example, if an E-commerce company runs a time bound campaign, subscribers will be able to see it on priority, or can snooze it for later. In that case, what will be the success matrix? One thing is for sure, open rate will be affected and would require additional information to assess the performance. After all, the inbox itself will reveal most of the important information for contextual mails.

Connect with us and explore in-depth about how Email Innovations are delivering excellence through real-time Email Marketing and Contextual Marketing.

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/10/27/inbox-by-gmail-6-implicit-facts-for-marketers/#sthash.vorkRunK.dpuf

Make your marketing email content more dynamic and contextual

Every one of us are receiving lots of promotional mailers each day. Have you ever wondered if these could be much more live with the content that is as fresh from an oven or with an event that just happened or with the offer that has not expired or with a point balance that is just as on my loyalty card or what my friends are speaking about on an offer!

All of the email marketing tools that are available in the market today can assist marketers with content assembly that is as stale when the data cut was made from the CRM system and dispatched through the email tool. It has no clue when the mail was read by the recipient. Several days have elapsed between the data and content that was assembled into the email and when read.

Do Recipients like these kind of stale and irrelevant content in the email? or you sent an email with the offer that expired when the recipient saw it and actioned on it? Do you see an unhappy customer?

or Do you want positively surprise your customers by keeping your email content that is live, fresh, social and contextual?

Find more of the article at https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140616144458-3292551-make-your-marketing-email-content-more-dynamic-and-contextual?trk=object-title

Real time, Contextual, Agile email marketing with live content in email campaigns

There is a lot of news today about email marketing campaigns which can deliver content live from websites and social media based on the recipient behaviour at the time of opening the email, location and device. Delivering such live content in real time and context provides exciting and engaging opportunities for marketers to connect with the recipients and drive them towards further actions.

With such engaging campaigns with live contextual real-time content in email, marketers are seeing higher CTR (click through rate is a measure of clicks generated over the impressions served). As the ROI is a direct measure of CTR, higher CTR will result in higher clicks for the same number of impressions.

From a simple count down or count up timer to drive urgency in recipients, to much more engaging real time or dynamic offers based on recipient behaviour, the email marketing is becoming is much agile in nature rather than static personalisation at the time of sending email.

Recommendations of the products based on location, weather, or offer on the site coupled with recipient behaviour is a much higher value proposition for marketers based on history of all aspects of the recipient data.  Earlier this was possible directly on the web, instead on email owing to complications in serving dynamic content in email.  Several companies are able to deliver this now, including Kenscio.

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/02/27/real-time-contextual-agile-email-marketing-with-live-content-in-campaigns/#sthash.koCyybCb.dpuf

Mobile email marketing Optimization Best Practices

Mobile devices have been increasingly becoming popular for both email and web consumption. In India, Mobile devices represent 62% of web consumption this month; an increase of 15% since the beginning of this year (Source: StatCounter).

In one of our own recent studies, we explored the market share for various devices when it comes to checking emails. Based on sample data, we discovered mobile devices to contribute to 43% of email opens in India.

Hence, it’s a no brainer to optimize (or start optimizing) email for mobile devices. While the task may seem daunting to some, we assure you that the rewards in form of better customer engagement will make it worth your efforts.

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/tag/best-practices/#sthash.QH5H5Ix1.dpuf

The all new Pinterest inspired Gmail’s Promotion Tab

Yes, you read that right! Gmail is reportedly making changes under the hood to transform the traditional looking rows of emails, with a sweet looking grid of images. This change only comes for the Promotions Tab, and this is what Gmail has posted in it’s official blog:

“Promotional mail has a lot of images, from pictures of snazzy new shoes to photos of that rock-climbing gym you’ve been wanting to try. But right now, those images are buried inside your messages—and with only subject lines to go on, it can be a challenge to quickly pick out the deals and offers that interest you most. To help you find what you’re looking for faster, you can now sign up for a new field trial for Gmail that lets you view the Promotions tab in a more visual way.”

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/03/26/the-all-new-pintrest-inspired-gmails-promotion-tab/#sthash.RBcX6rsu.dpuf

RTPersonalisation Platform Launched: Will Bring Live Content Into Emails

BANGALORE, MUMBAI and GURGAON, India, December 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ –

Kenscio Digital Marketing announces its platform RTPersonalisation, which will enable email marketers to actively change the content of the email post they send out. The content can be changed based upon time of open, recipient location, available inventory, weather, social media content and many more. The platform has been developed at its recent development centre in Hyderabad.

“We seemed to have been losing vibe, post the new Tabbed Gmail Mailbox-specially for one of our crucial ‘Midnight Deal’ communication going out. The communication is landing into the Promotion tab and by the time a user checks that, the deal has expired before he actually landed on our product page. RTPersonalisation helped us put a clock on the head of users with the help of the fantastic tool that dynamically shows the actual time remaining. They helped us create a sense of urgency by letting them miss the deals and they ensure they should not miss it the next time onwards,” says Mr. Mandeep Gulati of Indiatimes Shopping, one of the early adaptors of the platform.

“I am very excited with the results that the team had delivered and the momentum that we have gained. This is a moment of pride as this is our first major product release since our existence of 4 years in the market. This will be an independent offering and will have its own P&L. We are looking to join hands with creative partners and we also welcome Indian and International email marketing companies and agencies,” says Mr. Manjunath K G, CEO of Kenscio Digital Marketing.

“The platform will bring a new revolution into the email marketing space and has the potential to change the landscape drastically. It will be a convergence of email marketing, social media and real time interaction. These innovations will help our clients deliver richer and more meaningful experiences. It will not only enable email as a channel to play a more strategic role for the brand but also strengthen its ability to drive decision making amongst consumers,” said Mr. Vivek Das who is responsible for Digital and CRM at a leading WPP agency in India.
The platform is system agnostic and will work with every email service provider and email client (Gmail, Outlook, iPhone, Yahoo, etc.)

“We timed the launch of the platform in sync with the Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF – an initiative by Google India). The timing becomes very critical for each participating merchant, as they are already gearing up for the event in anticipation of churning out large volume of transactions over the 3 days of the festival. We will be offering special one-off pricing for all the participants of the festival where they will be not charged on the impressions/opens but a just flat fee Rs. 20,000 (till GOSF 2013 ends),” added Saurav Patnaik, Co-founder & CBO, Kenscio.

About RTPersonalisation
RTPersonalisation is an innovative platform developed by Kenscio Digital Marketing Pvt Ltd. to focus on bringing realtime content into emails. The clientele includes Ford India, Basiclife clothing, Indiatimes shopping, Firstcry, Rummy Circle and many more.
About Kenscio

Kenscio Digital Marketing Private Limited is a digital direct marketing solutions and services company. Founded in early 2009 – the 90 member team is located in offices across Bangalore, Delhi NCR, and Mumbai. Kenscio’s Development centre is based out of Hyderabad.

Today, Kenscio services more than 60 clients in India and provides them a complete array of end to end digital direct marketing services and solutions. Each client’s needs are different and Kenscio’s Solutions ranging from building a base, reaching out to the subscribers, optimizing by segmentation, analytics and real time personalization are tailor made for each need.

To a large number of clients in India, Australia, Indonesia, China, UK, Germany, France and GCC countries, Kenscio provides Automation and Integration, Custom Development, Reporting and Dashboarding, QA services, Reputation Monitoring, and Campaign Deployments.

Give Customers the Power of Choice

Nothing is permanent except change.
– Heraclitus (Greek Philosopher)          
  
People change and so do their interests, habits, hobbies etc. Hence, it’s safe to assume that your email subscribers will change. The question is whether you can adapt to this change. Acknowledging this change doesn’t require you to revamp your email strategy every time your subscribers profile changes, instead it requires your email program to be flexible enough to let them choose what is right for them.

Research shows that subscribers (customers) will choose to maintain a deeper and long lasting relationship with you, when they are given the power of choice.

Furthermore, enabling subscribers to make choices makes them feel that they are in control and that they have the ability to dictate what and when they wish to hear from you. This increases the likelihood that they’ll look forward to your email messages and increases the chances that they’ll respond. This is the power of preferences.

What are Preferences?
Preferences are what that differentiates your subscribers. These are information about your subscribers that allow you to tailor your communication to suit their needs. For example, some might eagerly look forward to a daily promotional mailer, where as other might find these annoying. Similarly, you may have various product or service to offer and your subscribers will prefer some over others.

What is an Email Preference Center?
An Email Preference Center allows your recipients to easily change their subscription details. This might include content type, frequency, interests in various offerings, ability to opt down or opt out etc.

Hidden Potential?
Preference Center gives you a means to know more about your subscribers. In addition to the basic information that is captured at the time of sign up, your preference center enables you to collect important information that will help improve and nurture your relationship with your subscribers.
Furthermore, marketers who use preference centers are more successful at retaining un-subscribers than the ones who don’t…
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Get in touch to obtain your copy of the complete whitepaper on Email Preference Center or speak to one of our consultants today to see how you can improve your email marketing programs with the power of Preference Center.

Guide to a Better HTML Email Design - Images in HTML

You can use as many images in an email message as you wish – the right number depends on the purpose, type and focus of the email. For instance, e-commerce emails often have more images than promotional emails.

Consider using graphic images and buttons to draw a reader’s attention. These images can convey concepts in combination with your copy. Make sure your call-to-action is not only supported by an image but also by text. This way, if the images are turned off, the call-to-action is still clear.

Images for emails should be hosted on a Website and not embedded within the email to ensure proper rendering and to minimize the email’s file size.

Make sure that the alt tags are properly described in text. If the images are suppressed, the recipients still get to see the description in text.

Important note:

Define the size and parameters (horizontal and vertical height in pixels) of each graphic in the tags.

For example:

Email Marketing Best Practices: Use of Buttons, Charts & Other Supporting Images in Email Newsletter

Buttons, charts, and other supporting images should use the colors of your design elements to pull the reader’s eye to the images. Make sure the text color used on your images stands out and is readable. Most importantly, make sure the recipient understands the action with the corresponding text or icons in the Buttons. 


See the examples below:  





    

Why a Fully Managed Email Service Provider (ESP) work best for your email marketing efforts?

Why Email Marketing?
Email is consistently rated as the world’s most popular and most widely used application on the internet and is now by far the leading means of business communication. It is second only to search in online marketing budgets with 97% of consumers and 94% of marketers using, piloting or planning email marketing programmes with 88% of people anticipating the effectiveness of email to increase in the next 3 years. In short, promoting your organization and its services via email is one of the most powerful, flexible and cost-efficient means of direct marketing and therefore it’s imperative that when choosing an Email Service Provider (ESP) that you select the right one who will match your needs perfectly.

What are the Different Types of ESP’s?
If you’re new to email marketing then embarking on your research can seem extremely daunting as initially there appears to be lots of organizations to choose from. One of the fundamental decisions you need to make is whether to outsource your email marketing or keep it in-house, and making this decision could have far-reaching consequences. There are a number of ESP’s on the market who provide a wide range of products, services and functionalities, so it’s imperative to understand the different types of ESP’s and their different areas of focus. To make things easier for you, we have analyzed the market and segmented it into four key categories as the following diagram shows:

Whilst each option has its merits, for the majority of organizations, an outsourced solution – whether a fully managed or ASP (Application Service Provider) solution – can be the most sensible option. ASP solutions are always up to date concerning any email marketing legalities and you automatically benefit from any system upgrades and new versions. Outsourcing will allow you to concentrate on your marketing strategy, letting your ESP take away some of the workload from you.


Solutions and Services Offered by ESP’s
Now you have seen a snapshot of the four different segments of the email market (Managed, ASP, Software License and In-House as seen in picture) you are now in a better position to take a look at the different solutions and services that each sector and ESP offer. These vary considerably from supplier to supplier so as always you need to make a hotlist of the most important services and solutions you are looking for. To point you in the right direction, take a look at the following guidelines, taking note of the solutions and services mentioned below which you feel are relevant to your organization:

• Types of solution offered: Look at whether the ESP offers one product or a range of services such as end-to-end services, a technology, media campaigns, lead generation campaigns and market research.
• Types of services offered: What types of services does the ESP offer. These can vary massively and can include some of the following: List provision; data management; data cleansing; best practice consultancy; broadcast, personalization and segmentation; real-time reporting; full campaign management; creative design and copywriting services; dynamic content solutions; hosting services; event triggered messaging and sequence messaging; integration with web analytics; if multicountry/ language campaigns can ESP support this – and so on!!
• Email Deliverability: Does the ESP have an ongoing commitment to deliverability? Are they able to set up email platform on your own domain? Are they able to provide a dedicated IPs?  Are their email  infrastructure compliant with ISP's authentication requirements?  Are their platform can receive spam or complaint feedback loops from ISPs? How do they ensure that they don’t appear on blacklists and do they have a relationship with all the major ISP’s for white listing? Do they have a dedicated deliverability team?
• Product Features: What features are important to you? E.g. rich media content capability, videomail, audio, integration, multi-channel capabilities, split testing, digital signatures to avoid phishing emails, management structure within the system, email receipts on online transactions etc. Build a list of all ESP’s who have these features as part of their solutions to aid your decision-making process.
• Product Flexibility: Can the ESP be your partner today and in the future providing you with advice on market trends and new product capabilities?
• Functionality: How comprehensive is the ESP’s functionality for planning, designing, executing and measuring email campaigns, compliance functionality.
• Technology Platform: How easy to use is the technology? Can someone with no HTML training or know-how use the technology easily?
• Email Data Security: Has your ESP taken all measures to secure your customer's email data? Is the technology infrastructure of your ESP has been hosted in a tier 4 data center? and policies are put in place for data security? and being audited by third parties? Is your ESP certified for Data security like DMA's Data Seal?
• Reporting Capabilities: Does the ESP provide you with reports in your desired format allowing you to measure the success of the campaign? Whether you’re opting for an ASP or in-house solution you should be able to get comprehensive reports including open rates, click rates and bounces as well as advanced functionalities such as complex real time reports and the ability to link revenues generated from a specific campaign to individual email addresses etc.
• Integration with Other Applications: Does the ESP easily integrate with your other applications like Web Analytics, CRM, E-Commerce, ERP and databases?
• Training: Will the ESP provide you with full training and support on their product or service which you will be adopting? Does the ESP has a dedicated trainer? Can they offer onsite comprehensive training on the platform and best practices?

What Now?
Now you have had the chance to do some research into the different types of ESP’s on the market and the solutions and services they offer, you are now in the position where you can make an informed selection.

Best Practices on Constructing an Email Newsletter and Improving its Performance

Many companies would like to send their subscribers a periodic email newsletter. The primary objective is to get their subscribers to read what the company has to say and keep the subscribers either informed about or take action.  How to keep the subscribers get hooked to the newsletter and make them act?

Here are some great ideas to improve your email newsletters for better performance.  

Subject line: Use concise subject lines, emphasizing the recipient’s benefit and prompt him/her to take action. Personalization and Individualization with Title, First Name (or Last Name), City, Login Id or Email Id will also greatly benefit.

Editorial for your readers: According to a recent survey, subscribers are engaged more by newsletters with an editorial, than a newsletter without a proper introduction. Another positive effect of the editorial is that you can highlight particular elements of your newsletter to your audience

Directory for a better orientation: If your newsletter consists of several articles, then a link directory is essential. This way your recipients can reach the article they are most interested in reading with one simple click. But make sure you don’t over burden them with too many articles.

Add to address book: Benefit from the positive effects an attractive image can bring you by ensuring that all images and illustrations are directly shown to your subscribers by simply asking your readers to add your email address to their address books. ISPs provides greater deliverability of your newsletter by directly putting them in the inbox of the recipient bypassing spam filters and enable images in the newsletter automatically.

Opportunity to subscribe: If a person receives a forwarded newsletter he/she should immediately have the opportunity to subscribe, so make sure you offer the possibility to subscribe after the obligatory unsubscribe link.

Show the recipient’s email address: State the recipient’s email address to raise the credibility of your email and facilitate readers who receive your newsletter several times to subscribe with the right email address.

Link to profile data: Your recipients should have the chance to update their profile. That way you are you able avoid unnecessary unsubscriptions.

Link to View Online link: Provide a view online link for subscribers whose email servers blocked the images, so that they can visit the landing page directly through their browser.

Engage with your audience: get people encouraged to share travel reviews/ advices / tips / pictures. Offer free reward points for people who help friends and family sign up for our newsletter.

Enable Social Media links: get your subscribers to interact with your social media accounts and share it with their networks.

Enable Forward to a Friend link: get your subscribers to share the email newsletter with their friends and also to invite them to join the newsletter subscription.

Take advantage of every single touch point: Think about every way you can increase subscribers, taking advantage of every contact you have with your customers and prospects. Have a subscription box on every page of your website; at events or in-store promotions ask if the interested person would like to receive the newsletter and preferably obtain permission there and then; add a footer to all staff emails; promote the benefits of signing up by enhancing the subscription value with customer testimonials and offering incentives for sign.

Email Marketing Best Practices: Use of Colours in HTML Emails

In everything from images to fonts, colors play an important role in the email design process but can also create problems. For example, don’t choose a font color such as a muted gray on a gray background that makes your headlines and calls-to-action difficult to read. And don’t run the risk of hiding valuable information in your emails by blending the content into the background. Men and women react differently to colors, but several polls on color preferences by gender and age yield interesting results:  

Target Audience	Favorite Colors	Least Favorite Colors
Females	Blue, Purple, Green (all "cool" colors)	Orange, Brown, Gray ("warm" and "neutral" colors)
Males	Blue, Green, Black (two "cool" and one "neutral" color)	Brown, Orange, Purple ("neutral", "warm" and "mixed" colors)
All Genders	Preferences for Green decrease with age; Preferences for purple increase with age	Dislike of Orange increases with age

 
For more information on color preferences and perceptions, check out these resources:

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/color/a/symbolism.htm

http://desktoppub.about.com/od/howcolorworks/l/aa_colorsee.htm  

For Background Color, Use a white or very light-colored background with a dark to medium font color to make it easy for recipients to read your email message. Also, if you use background colors in sidebar boxes contain them within tables and avoid using a body background color, because Web-based clients remove the body tag and typically place its attributes within a table. Email clients such as Microsoft Outlook might retain the specified background color when replying to or forwarding the email, but other clients use their colors, making message text difficult to read in some instances.    

Email Marketing Services - Inbox Delivery Optimization Techniques - Dos and Donts

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 and domains (blacklists). They provide various companies the blacklisted IPs and domain names, to block the email senders from those IPs and Domains. 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 blacklists.

Hence Marketers need to understand the challenges if they are using their own bulk mailing solutions and constantly monitor if their IPs or Domains are blacklisted by any service providers. They should take immediate action, if needed with those service providers and get their IPs an Domains 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 ISP 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?
3. 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 and fine tune your email marketing stategy not to blast, but use it to engage with your subscribers with relevant offers and deals.

Email Marketing - Using Forms in HTML Emails

We generally discourage the use of forms in email to prevent delivery or usability problems. However, at times you might still need to use a form in an email instead of directing readers to your Website. Consider these factors before you use a form in your next email message.

Those recipients of your email who use Hotmail or those who use Outlook will not be able to use the form because:

• Hotmail displays the form but strips all values from your
  tag and removes the name values of all form elements, rendering the form useless.
• Hotmail recipients can complete the form, but nothing will happen when they hit the submit button so they will not know it has not been received .
• Outlook has limitations when viewing forms in the mail client. Outlook can not see data in a "form tag", when a form is passed via email and viewed in Outlook as outlook strips out form elements.

You can refer to these articles:

http://help.isu.edu/index.php?action=knowledgebase&catid=38&subcatid=39&docid=1058
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/01/10/microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/

Some email clients do not support forms that use “POST” method, which allows form data to appear within the message body. Instead you will need to replace it with the “GET” method, which will write all form content to the query string of the page to which the form is posted.

For example:

Most email clients that provide a preview pane don’t allow you to tab between form elements. This means that when a recipient completes the first field in your form and clicks the TAB key, the focus is automatically shifted to another part of the software. This hinders usability and can confuse your recipient.

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

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

Marketing for Corporate Training

Running training like a business implies marketing training like a business. But a recent study of 75 training leaders by expertus reports that a minority of corporate training departments have written or formal marketing plans, budgets or promotions that go beyond general awareness of their courses. This study reveals what those with more sophisticated marketing do to target their audience and measure their reach, and which marketing activities they find to be most effective and favorably-received by employees.

Email blasts have been the most effective marketing activity followed closely by phone calls and recommendations.

Not surprisingly, print newsletters and mail are at the bottom of the list, which seems to be a direct result of the increased reliance on email and websites. In fact, anything that requires paper or printing is at the bottom half of the list.



Aghreni Technologies is an offshore provider of email and mobile marketing automation solutions and services to clients in India and world-wide. Some of the best global companies utilise the depth and breadth of marketing automation software, solutions and services of Aghreni.

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

Aghreni Technologies will offer Best of Email and Mobile Messaging solutions and end to end services to Indian Companies

Aghreni Technologies Private Limited, a leading Email and Mobile service provider based out of Bangalore, India is bringing a top selling european email and messaging platform to Indian Marketers.

Team Aghreni has over 5 years of experience in email marketing, working with some of the world’s largest brands. Aghreni’s email platform called e-messenger services over a 1000 clients in Europe, Asia and the USA.

Aghreni is one of the focused Email Marketing Solutions and Services provider, serving reputed clients from various industry verticals both in India and abroad.

Aghreni works with world leaders in Email marketing and Mobile Marketing companies in the world to bring best of the practices in marketing communications to its clients.

Aghreni Technologies has its development and registered officeoffices in Bangalore, India, and business development offices in NY and NJ, USA.

Aghreni's e-messenger platform provides a flexible and reliable solution for clients to professionally plan, implement and control their bulk mailing to subscriber base.

e-messenger has an easy to use interface and can be easily integrated into client's CRM and web site.

The platform has over 900 clients systems and more than 800 million emails and SMS messages sent monthly. Leading companies with high email and SMS broadcast volumes trust the performance and reliability of e-messenger, web based email marketing communications software.

By taking advantage of Aghreni email marketing software, clients will benefit by receiving detailed real time reports, the option to personalize message and current best practice advice from experts. With features that include comprehensive ‘Bounce Management’ and automatic de-duplication, Aghreni can ensure client’s emails always reach the inbox safely. In addition, Aghreni also have a specialist team dedicated to taking care of all aspects of ISP relations.

For more details, please visit Aghreni's website http://www.aghreni.com/email_mobile_messaging_platform.html

Mobile Advertising is Surrounded by Myths

According to eMarketer, mobile advertising is a huge growth area with a global compound annual growth rate of 48%. However, despite the rapid growth forecasts there are still a few industry concerns about mobile advertising.

Shaun Gregory, CEO, Blyk UK, shares his views about the mobile advertising industry, consumer preferences, content and context of ads etc., in an article in the mobile reseller magazine Mobile Today. A summary of what Shaun wrote in their blog in presented below.

Shaun believes that the various concerns related to mobile advertising, such as optimum quality and delivery through small mobile screens, lack adequate support for rich media, mobile push advertising considered spam, and choice of technology, etc. are all myths surrounding the mobile advertising space. Citing the example of Blyk, the ad-funded UK-based MVNO that has more than 2,000 campaigns to its credit in just over one year of business, Shaun writes that they have learned some valuable lessons about how to be successful in mobile advertising.


Shaun Gregory, CEO, Blyk UK
He wrote that relevance and predictability make the difference when it comes to effectively using push communications strategies. Push strategies used as an initial conversation entry point are effective as they open up a dialogue.

When it comes to advertising on mobile brands, Shaun writes, the following should be considered:

- Put the consumer first – mobile advertising has to take basic user experience into consideration, since mobile phones are functional and personal devices.
- Consider timing and context – one of the beauties of mobile advertising is the timing element.
- Do not plan mobile advertising on a reach and frequency basis. Instead, build frequency through engagement, re-engagement and relevance.
- Mobile advertising works alongside other channels as part of an integrated campaign and should be built into media plans.
- Value exchange – I will cite Blyk as an amazing example of value for both brands and members. For brands, we offer an effective and efficient channel to create awareness, build engagement, drive sales and gather insight. For members, we offer free communication, entertainment, social currency, exclusive content and an opportunity for them to give an opinion.

For more details, please visit URL
http://mobile2mobility.com/mobile-advertising-is-surrounded-by-myths-says-blyk-ceo/

Aghreni Technologies Private Limited is a leading Email and Mobile service provider based out of Bangalore, India. Team Aghreni has over 4+ years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world’s largest brands. Aghreni’s email platform called e-messenger services over a 900+ clients in Europe, Asia and the USA.


The email platform has over 900+ clients systems and more than 800 million emails and SMS messages sent monthly. Leading companies around the world, with high email and SMS broadcast volumes trust the performance and reliability of e-messenger, web based email marketing communications software.

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