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

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.

You can get the most out of email marketing by tailoring to target

A recent study by a team of computer scientists at the University of California looked at the response rates and profitability of professional spammers.

By hacking into the Storm network, which has control of over one million home PCs, to send out junk e-mail, the researchers took control of 75,869 hijacked machines to conduct their own fake spam campaigns.

The researchers used two popular ploys used by spammers, first offering a fake pharmacy site and, secondly, offering a Viagra-style remedy to boost libido. It seems the only way to measure spam is to become a spammer.

‘‘After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted,” said the research paper. That means a response rate of one in 12,500,000 people take up the offer of the scam, giving the fraudsters a conversion rate of less than 0.00001 per cent.

These response rates would seem to suggest ham-fisted spammers, but once you consider the scale on which some of the scams operate, it is clear that, in this case, quantity wins out over quality. The researchers estimate that the controllers of a network the size of Storm are still bringing in about $7,000 a day or $3.5 million over a year.

There are two lessons that marketers can learn. First, it is important that the intended consumer response is defined at the planning stage of a campaign - what do you want the consumer to do? It could be just seeing your brand and its message, perhaps a click through from a banner ad, an opening of an e-mail, time taken to read or watch a piece of content related to your brand, an opt-in to receive more information.

Each response should be given a relative weighting so that an overall value can be assigned to any campaign. This rarely happens, but is not difficult to do. Web and e-mail analytical tools, such as Google analytics, will provide a certain amount of information, but more qualitative methods - such as simply asking users and customers their opinion on the campaign - will provide more meaningful insights to their response.

So the second consideration is that people will respond only if they believe there is something in it for them, so brands must clearly define the consumer benefit attached to any response. What will they get in return for clicking, watching or registering?

Furthermore, by adding a level of personalisation to the communication can increase the likelihood of a response.

Aghreni Technologies is a provider of customer centric, ROI driven online marketing (direct email and mobile marketing) solutions and services to Indian clients. It has many years of working with leading global companies and clients in email marketing and lead generation.

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

Worsening economy sends marketers looking at online medium

Economic Times reports that, during this worsening economic period when both print and electronic mediums see a dip in advertisement revenues, google said it is still seeing money flowing into online marketing initiatives. Advertisers are now looking at cost effective mediums to reach the target audience.

Google said 'Usage of the online medium as an advertising platform is increasing in the economic turbulent time. One of the reasons is that the medium offers the advertisers the flexibility to reach the right kind of users. The slowdown in the economy has forced the advertisers to creatively use the medium to their advantages, not just branding, but also for generating leads'.

Aghreni Technologies is a provider of customer centric, ROI driven online marketing (direct email and mobile marketing) solutions and services to Indian clients. It has many years of working with leading global companies and clients in email marketing and lead generation.

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

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

Benefits of Direct Marketing, Database Marketing, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Permision based Marketing

Direct Marketing can bring many benefits to both buyers and sellers, whether it is employed as a complete business model (like in the case of Dell Computers) or as a supplement to a broader integrated marketing mix (like in the case of Hewlett-Packard of Sony).


For buyers, Direct Marketing provides convenience, easy to use, and private way of interacting with Sellers. Buyers from the comfort of their homes or offices can browse mail catalogs or company websites at any time of the day or night. Direct Marketing gives buyers ready access to a wealth of products and information, at home and around the globe. Direct Marketing is immediate and interactive – buyers can interact with sellers by phone, chat or emails or on the seller’s website to create exactly the configuration of information, products, or services they desire, and then order them on the spot.


For sellers, direct marketing is a powerful tool for building customer relationships. Using customer databases and insight into customer data, marketers can target small groups or individual consumers, tailor offers for individual needs, and promote these offers through personalized communications. Direct Marketing can also be timed to reach prospects at just the right moment. The internet is a great tool for direct marketing as it provides interactivity, one-to-one communication, access to global markets and measurability.


Direct Marketing is a low cost, efficient alternative for reaching to customers through its lower costs of media, and reaching to customers over internet.


Aghreni Technologies Private Limited, Bangalore, India has several years of experience in building Direct Marketing platforms and solutions and providing direct marketing services over email to global clients. Aghreni is bringing in the best practices of permission based email marketing to Indian Marketers at affordable costs.


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