Google gmail image caching, why google didn't do it right

Both the gmail users and the marketers are seeing many things going wrong with Google gmail image caching through its proxy servers. The intentions were not mentioned by google and not convincing enough, why its users needed that change.  Is it simply a better user experience by serving image faster?  or preventing images from compromising the security of the user's computer? If so google has better techniques to cache those images on its servers without fetching them from their destination location as other streaming companies do! It doesn't require a google's proxy link.

Second, the implementation is so bad that google doesn't know whether the image is static or dynamic. As the content on web is going dynamic and personalised, how can google serve some stale content which it fetched when one gmail user opened it at some time and keep serving the old stuff again and again when the user opens.

Now from the past couple of days, their image proxy servers are failing to serve even static images. Here are some mailers from retailers, that have some images missing on gmail.

It looks like google tried to get control over email marketing landscape and failed to understand the eco system and goofed up in the process.  

It is better for google to restore the broken things first before attempting to do something funny.

More articles on the subject

1. Gmail Images Broken in our Marketing Emails
2. Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers
3. Thanks, Google: Cashing In On Gmail Caching
4. Gmail is back up, but strange problem persists

PS: The comments and remarks are of the blogger and not as a representative of any company.

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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.

The death of “Display all Images” and what it means for you

Last week Google took a bold step by letting images load by default (no more “Display all Images”). One might wonder why the option existed in the first place and there is (or was) a very good reason why it did.

Images used in an email message are most commonly stored at a hosting server; which serves the images on request i.e. when a reader opens the message. This mechanism however can be exploited by spammers to plant malicious code on the reader’s machine, making it a very good reason to block images from all senders by default, and letting the reader decide which ones to load.

Google claims to have found a way to close this loophole by creating a filtering layer between the reader’s machine and the image hosting server. In other words, Google will now use internal proxy servers to request for images, host these images on Google Servers and finally serve images to the customer via Google’s internal network (in case nothing fishy is returned from the original hosting server)

As a Gmail User, this means that your inbox will now load images in all messages on its own and you’ll no longer have to click on “Display all Images”. If you are an Email Marketer, the repercussions may be a slightly different.

For starters, customers will now immediately see the entire email content (and not bits of it as before), since both text and images will load automatically. This in theory should translate into a better email experience for customers and create more opportunities for marketers to further improve email engagement.

On the other hand, Google will now intercept all interaction between the customer and marketer’s server; and effectively create a layer between the marketer and the customer. As a result it will no longer be possible to identify the geographic location, device information or multiple open behaviors of customers.

While this may prevent marketers to dynamically change the email content after sending the email, it will still allow them to target customer with geographic and device friendly content. As far as basic email tracking goes; open, click and conversion tracking will continue to work as before, with an exception to tracking multiple opens, which may no longer be possible. However, this would also mean that all opens are actually tracked (and not left out if someone did not select “Display all Images”) removing the discrepancy in numbers of unique openers & clickers.

While these changes in how Google delivers emails to customers may restrict marketers; it also creates opportunities for marketers to improve engagement, by making clever use of text and images.

Get in touch with Kenscio to find how you can make the most out of engagement with Gmail based customers.

Boost customer engagement via CSAT campaigns

Other than solving world hunger or eradicating AIDS, if you are an online marketer, at some point of time you must have killed your brain cells over the deliverability of your email communication or pondered upon all that you could do to boost customer engagement.

Though we have covered deliverability and engagement as separate topics in several of our articles and whitepapers, in this article we’d like to explore how you could kill two birds (deliverability and engagement problems) with one stone (read on!).

Fundamentally, deliverability and engagement are intertwined. One cannot have good deliverability with poor engagement rates, and if deliverability is poor, you certainly cannot expect first-class engagement. It’s a cruel vicious circle.

Presuming you do everything by the book (have the right infrastructure, best practices in place, do not spam, etc), you could then initiate a CSAT survey program. Why? Because surveys are interactive in nature and require your customers to share their perceptions and opinions (something all customers love!). Hence, as a general rule CSAT surveys have the potential to obtain extremely high responses, some of our clients have obtained as much as over 40% open rates and easily a 60% of CTR (clicks over opens).

These surveys not only boost your engagement, make your email marketing interactive (like it should be) but also give a boost to your sender reputation (the score ISPs assign to you; the marketer). So just one program can:

1. Find out what your customers think of you, your products / services, and share their feedback
2. Give you bonus points in the books of your customers for caring to ask for their opinion
3. Empower you with knowledge that when used wisely can help improve customer retention and long term profitability of your company
4. Get you thumbs up from ISPs

If you think that all this is good, but you might not be able to manage it, think again. Email is the most flexible and powerful channel to manage such automations and Kenscio can get you started and setup in no time. It is possible to:

- Automate the survey campaign
- Automatically exclude customers who have completed the survey
- Only target a segment of customers who have actually bought something from you
- Dynamically populate survey questions based on customer demographics, behaviour or purchase history

Whether you are into e-commerce, publishing, travel, finance, real estate or any other industry for that matter; if you serve customers, you should identify customer perceptions about you. This could be in form of Customer Feedback, Product Review, Service Quality, Event Surveys etc.

Every time you send an email survey, you initiate another opportunity to engage with your customers. Surveys built within an email message have better chances of getting a response, and the more responses you get the better will be your sender reputation with ISPs

So what are you waiting for? Get in touch to kick start your survey campaign.

Subscribers are like Volcanoes

Subscribers come in all shapes and sizes, however, its not how they look and weigh that is important; but how they behave and interact (with you, the marketer). And it is in this respect that subscribers are very much like volcanoes.

Like volcanoes, subscribers can also be classified as: Erupting, Active, Dormant, and Extinct.

Erupting volcanoes burst with activity and are vital for life and earth’s ecology. Similarly, such subscribers are very important for the success of your email marketing campaigns. They engage, convert and respond to you with least effort.

Active volcanoes have great potential to erupt. Similarly, subscribers who seem calm but have been full of activity in the recent past can easily be re-ignited with the right communication and targeted content.

Dormant volcanoes are volcanoes that used to be active but haven’t shown any signs of activity in the recent past. Such subscribers are like a Question Mark, your efforts should be focused at trying not to lose them. With careful communication and re-engagement strategies you should be able to win some back.

Extinct volcanoes have no history of eruption in considerable past and are not expected to erupt in comparable time scale of future. Subscribers that fall under this category, unfortunately only add cosmetic value to your database (Size!). They are cost heads that hardly provide any return and worse; they can even affect your sender reputation and deliverability.

Identifying such segments is the first step towards defining your communication strategy for your subscribers. By classifying subscribers into appropriate buckets you’ll be able to channel your efforts to:

- Ensure Erupting subscribers stay Erupting
- Push Active subscribers to move to the Erupting state
- Convert the Dormant subscribers to become Active and consequently Erupting
- With careful and infrequent communication identify how many Extinct might still be Dormant.

On paper this approach looks simple and elegant, but how do we ensure that at a given time of day we have the most updated information on these segments? In other words, your subscribers will keep jumping from one category to another, how do we ensure that every jump is recorded and tagged in real time?

Well, we have a super awesome magic potion just for this very purpose, get in touch and one of our wizards will fix this up for you in no time.

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…
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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.