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

Infographic on Real time personalization in email campaigns

Reference Sources

Real Time Marketing Report | Econsultancy & Monetate | February 2014

Real-time Marketing Insights Study | Adobe-DMA | July 2013

Five Keys to Success for Marketers | Neolane and DMA | July 2013

The Purchase Path Of Online Buyers |  Forrester Research | Year 2012

Fear of Missing Out | JWT |  March 2012

Mobile Path to Purchase |  Google Insights & Nielsen | November 2013

Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages| Nielsen | April 2012

To know more about Real-time Email Marketing, visit

Kenscio Digital

Real Time Personalisation (RTP)

Responsive Mailers Service

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/#sthash.FcAPq2y6.dpuf

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

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/02/27/real-time-contextual-agile-email-marketing-with-live-content-in-campaigns/#sthash.I3V5nQ2Z.dpuf

In Email Marketing, Timing is everything!

Our friends in the Indian eCommerce space are Gung Ho about the current boom!  Never before have so many Indians – both in India and overseas filled up their shopping carts and proceeded to check out. Never have Call to Action buttons seen so much action.

Which brings us to one of the most important communication vehicles these propositions ride on..........Daily Mailers!

Digital direct marketing communication - your one on ones with potential buyers are not  as easy as ABC, but if you have been following our blog, you would’ve picked up the juiciest bits on email template best practices  and  set up a fantastic email template. You know the importance of deliverability and other success metrics and you are sure your recipients are definitely receiving your email campaigns….there’s just one more question you need to ask yourself…. are they reading them?

Some of the key considerations which email marketers must take into mind while creating a “read & respond”  campaign are:

• Relevance:  making the content relevant to each recipient. If a recipient knows that when your brand arrives in their inbox, this email is definitely something they have expressed an interest in and want to read, they will act on that.
• Segmentation: The best way to implement relevance is to effectively segment your database so you know what your customers are interested in and therefore what content will be the most relevant. You read a lot more on relevance on our blog soon!

You are now ready with that killer content, a solid Email Service Provider (ESP) behind you - btw choosing an ESP  can be quite a task , here’s hoping you’ve done it right , what next?

Ask Usain Bolt,  what the importance of timing is? No seriously, a great proposition, even with A/B split  tested subject lines and creatives  can turn horribly wrong if the timing is off . Common sense – nope .......experience !!  ( The school of hard knocks third semester )

A well timed campaign – other criteria remaining the same -  can work wonders on the open rates and further on the ROI of the campaign. Unfortunately, there is no formula or overall ‘ideal time slot’ which you can follow to achieve this elusive ‘golden hour’.  There are a number of factors that go in to your decision: what time is best to hit the send button? ( btw with a good ESP – it would be the Schedule button )

Timing – Day and hour depends on the answers to the following questions.

Who are your audience?

For a B2B audience, it doesn’t take an Einstein  to work out that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the optimum days. As we all know, Mondays are spent getting back in to the swing of work after the weekend and Friday sees offices winding down for the next weekend. Saturday and Sunday are redundant as offices are closed. Days before holidays are = Fridays and days after holidays are = Mondays irrespective of what days they fall on !

For B2C email marketing, timings are very different.  Very dependant on the demographic of your audience.  One can safely assume most prospects will mainly be checking their personal emails in the evenings, during lunchtimes and over the weekends. However it is best to test which brings us back to segmenting!  B2C sending can be a bit of a gamble without thorough testing of your specific target audience. Homework must be done and learnings interpreted. A great ESP will be able to deliver dynamic content with different propositions scheduled at different times of a day or even different days.

Is your campaign seasonal?

For the B2B sector, marketers must avoid sending their campaigns over school vacation season, long weekends  and of course  the many holidays that we have !

Again advice for the B2C sector is entirely opposite. If relevant, a seasonal approach can boost additional sales and therefore revenue. Most campaigns are timed to address seasonal offers!

So much for planned marketing communication…


However, there is another aspect to timing in direct digital communication.

Timing can never be as important as it is when the ‘Prospect ‘is on the verge of becoming a ‘Paying Customer’ ...many a sales person have rued their chances – having communicated a little later than they should have.

The optimum time for any recipient to receive your communication is when they have shown an interest in your brand or product. Using Automated mails  or  trigger campaigns, based on browsing behaviour or when they last clicked on or opened an email gives you a clear indication as to when to send the email and what content to include.

A typical scenario of such lost opportunities would be apparent in a colleague’s recent experience  on a  very popular  online store. As he described it  “ I was on my way to check out and proceed to pay when I saw this dangling banner in the right column : Sign up for our newsletter and  get 10% off. I paused, thought I could save this 10% by signing up and using the voucher code. So I smartly opened another browser, signed up and waited for the voucher. About an hour later, neither my inbox nor my  spam folder had  any sign of  an email from these guys . I gave up hope and eventually had lost all interest in buying that item at 10% higher than I could’ve”.

A simple Triggered email could have, rather, should have been used here  to enable interest being converted to action  at the point when the customer is most engaged.

Another cyclic practice is communication with non responders. Winning back non responders should be taken up as a part of your communication calendar and a definite cog in your wheel .

While still on timing, or should I say while there is time - it would be good to remind you to look for patterns in your open and click-through rates or other email metrics. Whether certain offers work better when sent at some time or another? Are there any influences that make your campaigns more successful, like salary days ( beginning of the month ) ? Are you responding to your customers at the optimum moment?

The only way for you to determine what works best for you is to, as always, test, test, test!

24 Dos and 8 Don'ts for a better HTML based Email Newsletters

Ever wondered if you had a quick guide of Dos and Don'ts for an HTML based email newsletter. Here we have compiled one that serves as a ready reckoner.

HTML Coding Do’s

1. Code HTML emails as a single Web page with the basic <HTML>, <HEAD>, <TITLE>, and <BODY> tags.
2. Code emails by hand where possible, as WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors typically add extra code that creates havoc with certain email clients. If you must use an editor, use Dreamweaver or Homesite, which do not add extra code to the design process.
3. Use HTML tables for the design layout.
4. Keep emails at a fixed width of between 500-620 pixels wide.
5. Instead of defining percentage widths use fixed widths. While this is not optimal, because people can and do resize their email windows when reading, sometimes using a fixed width is the only way for a layout to display properly in multiple email software.
6. Use only the ASCII character set. More advanced word-processing software often inserts odd characters, such as the trailing dot characters or smart quotes (curly instead of straight), which can hamper display or create delivery problems in some email software.
7. If you use CSS, include inline styles. Do not link to an external style sheet nor use embedded styles, as this code is often stripped out by email clients, creating display problems.
8. Make sure all tags have supporting closing tags. The most common HTML errors come from not having a closing </FONT> tag or having open <TD> or <TR> tags in the HTML. While your HTML might render properly in a browser, these errors can cause problems with many email clients.
9. Use the HTML table attributes within the TABLE and TD tags.
10. For example: to set the table border=0, valign=top, align=left (or center, if that is the design), cellpadding=0, cellspacing=0, and so on. This primarily helps older email readers to display the html email in a minimally-acceptable way.
11. Put general font style information in the table TD or DIV or P tags closest to the content. This can mean repetitive style declarations in multiple TD cells or DIV’s or P tag. Put font style definitions into heading (e.g. H1, H2), P, or A tags only when necessary.
12. Use DIVs sparingly to float small boxes of content and links to the right or left inside a table TD cell. Google Mail appears to ignore the CSS Float property but Yahoo! and Hotmail work fine. Outlook 2007 ignores floats.
13. Sometimes it is better to code a more complex table layout than rely on the Float property. Since email is easy to clutter, ask that the design put the floated content in the narrow side column. Floats are the one part of an email design that might require the design be reworked.
14. Animated GIF files are acceptable, but use them sparingly.
15. Use of images maps is acceptable.
16. If there is a spacing issue with the columns in the email design, first tweak the cellpadding and cellspacing attributes of the HTML tables. If that does not work, use CSS margin and padding attributes. HTML spacing works better with older email software than spacing with CSS.
17. If an image is cut up and spread across several HTML table cells, test the email with many test accounts. Sometimes it looks great in Outlook but shifts by 1 pixel or more in Hotmail and other services. Also consider putting the image as a background image on a new html table that encases all the table rows and columns that would display parts of your background image. sometimes this achieves the same effect as cutting an image up but with less code and better results.

Note that Outlook 2007 does not display background images. Be sure to test your email code with your target email client software.

1. If you use background images, use the HTML table attribute background= instead of CSS. It works more consistently across email software except Outlook. Define appropriate bgcolor for the TD’s so that the color is displayed when the images are blocked.
2. Be sure all your images use the alt tags, height, and width parameters. This helps with Google Mail as well as when a reader has their images turned off. However, Outlook 2007 does not recognize the alt= parameter.
3. Use the target=”_blank” attribute for the HTML A tags so that people reading with a webmail service don’t have the requested page appear within their webmail interface.
4. Avoid a big image above the fold in the email. This is another classic spammer practice and can increase the likelihood an email will be tagged as spam.
5. Make sure your email content displays fine without images.

For example: if you use a background image to provide a background color with white font color over it, make sure the default background color for that part of the HTML table is dark, not white. Also be sure your alt=, height=, and width= parameters are set for images so they can help readers understand your content without images. Turning off your images will help you catch these issues and ensure the HTML email will display effectively if people see your email with images off.

1. Test your HTML code. Make sure your code conforms to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML standards
2. When sending a multi-part message, remember to create the text version. Most email clients send HTML as a multi-part alternative by default. Failing to include the text part of the message can cause some filters to treat your email as spam.

 
HTML Coding don’ts

1. HTML should not contain any JavaScript or any other script embedded in it. Some email clients do not support JavaScript, and others view it as a security risk.
2. Avoid using CSS for positioning. The support is very limited and will, more than likely, result in a broken layout for most of your recipients.
3. Avoid nested tables if possible. Some email clients, especially Lotus Notes and Netscape Messenger, might not render them correctly.
4. Do not use canvas background images. Most email clients do not display canvas background images. Background images for individual table cells are generally acceptable but might not appear in some clients such as Lotus Notes.
5. Do not apply attributes to the <BODY> tag. Attributes placed in the <BODY> tag are often flagged by spam filters and increase the likelihood of your message getting bulked or blocked.
6. With multiple embedded images, which also might cause the email to be blocked
7. Do not use EMBED tags.
8. Avoid embedding forms, such as surveys, into emails. Some email clients such as Hotmail might not pass the data through to the collection point. Instead, link to a Web form through which the recipient can complete the survey.

   

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