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.

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.

What is the worth of an email address?

What is the worth of an email address?

The value of an email address is Zero. Why? Read on.

Email marketers often speculate the value of an email address. You might hear compelling numbers backed by sober theories. Good email marketers spend time and money on acquiring an email address, where as not so good email marketers purchase email addresses from spammers at probably one fourth the cost (of genuinely acquiring an email address).

In addition there is revenue, conversions, ROI that email marketer’s measure against their email marketing efforts, all this should amount to something right?

Well it does, the value or the worth lies in the relationship and not the email address. You have a relationship with the person who owns that email address and not with the mere email address itself.

Why I’m highlighting this is because you can’t have a relationship with someone you do not know. So if you only have an email address your like a blindfolded chap in a dark room trying to have a conversation with an imaginary person. A real conversion requires engagement. Engagement requires you to know your subscribers, ask questions, find their opinions etc. Most importantly, engagement requires “two way conversation”, which cannot be initiated with just an email address.

An engaged subscriber is a valued subscriber. No engagement means zero value.

Right Email Marketing Strategies - Video

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!

The “do not reply” Paradox in email communication

I like surveys, more than surveys I like to share my opinion.

The other day I came across an email asking me to fill in a questionnaire. As I read through the mail, I reached the footer that opened with “Please do not reply to this email”. This completely put me off.

Email marketers fight for a very competitive inbox space. Even with the most engaged email list; email marketer can hardly think of obtaining 100% subscribers attention all the time. In other words emails sent to even  engaged subscribers are often left unread.

When email marketing is referred to as Interactive digital marketing, It beats me why some email marketers would cut interactions with their subscribers with a do not reply message. If anything they should encourage people to reply. This is valuable feedback and the best part is; it comes for free!

Some people might counter this with arguments on scale of mails sent, lack of resources, etc. Email communication is not a one way mass communication. It is a direct digital communication that needs to be interactive in nature.  I don’t think there is any excuse valid enough for trying to ignore replies.

Incoming mails can be easily filtered and sorted by mail clients. Furthermore, ticketing systems can scan messages and even automatically respond to general queries or redirect people to a FAQ section. If it is a long reply and cannot be automatically responded to, may be it is worthwhile to have it read by a person! The interactivity could be made even simple by letting the subscribers answer to a set of choices, which makes the marketers job simple to find the trends of their subscribers.

A two way interaction / conversation ensures an on going dialogue and an on going dialogue ensures sustainable success of email marketing campaigns. 

Do not reply message and donotreply@ email addresses suggest you don’t really care about your subscribers and that your communication flows one way. Such marketers usually end up with unengaged subscribers, or worse subscribers put an end to their subscription.

Timing is everything, when it comes to email marketing communications

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!

How are companies adopting email marketing in India

India is seeing a larger attention in digital marketing space as younger and older population are getting online and their spending habits online fuelled by already established online travel companies which made their life much easier. Indian online population is enjoying now the ease with which they can book their tickets, or buying things at much cheaper prices.

Email being one of the prime digital channels for companies to continuously engage with their large subscriber base, Indian companies have long attempted multiple solutions from in-house SMTP mailers to MTA boxes to Email Solution Providers (ESP) of all sizes. As the internet email regulations have evolved over time and often dictated by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like yahoo, hotmail, Gmail and such and their continued redefinition of the rules for accepting and delivering mails to the inboxes of the recipients, Indian companies are more and more trying to use the Email Service Providers.

This has provided an opportunity for several companies to jump into providing bulk email solutions.

Some of the Indian companies have attempted to easily take some open source solutions like PHP Mailer and such and modifying or building to the needs of the Indian companies. These solutions mostly lack the authentication features required by ISPs like DKIM and speed throttling. Most of the solutions are not built for managing entire email life cycle communication and the data privacies required. Their infrastructure is not scalable and can't be separated for each of their client. This will complicate issues like IP and domain reputation. A company which has very good email practices can easily get hurt by some other company which has no good practices if they use such email solutions. Indian companies still being very slow and averse to use confirmed opt-in practices, can easily get their domain blacklisted and ISPs can soon either put their mails in spam folder or start blocking their mails.

Moreover these solutions that are not built for analytic driven marketing lack the analytic features. This makes the marketer not aware of his engaged audience by demographics, email behaviour and purchase behaviour. With no knowledge of such intelligence, Indian companies who are using such solutions are blindly shooting the mails to all subscribers, without knowing what their subscribers are doing with those emails. This can also treated by ISPs as bad senders and emails may be blocked or sent to spam folders by ISPs.

According to Reputation Authority, Indian Companies using home grown email communication platforms are sending more than 40% spam. It is very difficult for Indian email marketing solution providers to control the spam rate, as their solutions are not very sophisticated to handle all kinds of bounces, spam complaints and spam traps. Moreover there is no intelligence to analyse the active and inactive subscriber base over time.

They also lack the integration features for companies to manage their entire life cycle email communication with one solution and work with the company's portal and back end systems seamlessly.

Seeing the growth in the internet population and recent explosion in e-commerce and daily deals, several international email service providers (ESPs) have now entered the Indian market through sales team located elsewhere or in India and offering their more matured platforms to Indian companies. This is a most welcome trend.

Now there are more companies offering such solutions, the price competition is so much, International email service providers are competing with the Indian email service providers on price and dropping the account management, project management and integration features for Indian companies. When their minimum ticket size is more than 100K US Dollars per client in matured markets of USA and Europe, and they throw in a dedicated account manager, solutioning to automate the clients email communication and providing full services, the international email service providers are just providing a software tool to send bulk mails to Indian companies, with none of those needed services that are very much needed by Indian companies, as they are trying to adopt email as an effective medium.

According to Reputation Authority, even the international email service providers that are providing email platform as a tool for sending bulk email communications for Indian companies are not able to bring the spam to single digit, as they are not able to work with the Indian clients to strategise their email marketing efforts.

I see Indian companies as they trying to adopt email communication as a prime medium for their online business, is largely under served by both Indian companies who lack features and International email service providers who can't provide much needed strategy and expertise with local resources for companies to better engage their subscribers.

Email cost measured in CPM (cost per thousand) may be a deciding factor when you choose the email service provider. While each ESP may have a cost per CPM to compete, a self managed email platform may not be a single decisive factor.

Indian companies have to start looking at not only the platform, but also need to look at the expertise of the email service provider on their mailing infrastructure, security practices for their data, expertise in email marketing, though leadership, ability to do customizations, integrate their websites and backend systems for life cycle email communication and ability for managing their email campaigns.

I see some Indian companies have understood the importance of much needed services along with the email platform and are choosing the email service provider based on a broad spectrum and depth of services and expertise offered to better optimize the email medium.

I believe that most matured and smart Indian Companies are trying to stop blasting the emails to all in blind everyday and start using intelligent analytic driven customer engagement email communication in the days ahead.

This is most welcome news for the most spammed Indian Internet consumer.

Aghreni email marketing platform turns into Sprinklr e-messenger

We are rebranding the Aghreni emailing platform, and your favourite service will be called Sprinklr from here on. We are going to introduce a lot many more features in the coming times which will make your email marketing experience much more sophisticated and advanced. With killer edge technology Sprinklr will bring in the same drip marketing phenomenon into your consumers social graph resulting in a much higher conversion rates and consumer's brand interaction.

At Sprinklr we promise you to give a world class product at an Indian price. We will be soon ready with the new website and will be announcing the new board members.

Sprinklr is confident to take the Indian market by a swipe in the recent coming days and would love to have you join the revolution. So make sure you realise the potential of this platform before your competition does.

For more insight on this please email jacob@sprinklr.in or, just call him @ +91 9886800993

Visit Sprinklr website at http://sprinklr.in/sprinklr/

Email Marketing Solutions and Services in India by World class company with International Expertise

Indian Marketers can now get world class email marketing solution and services from Aghreni, a company with 5+ years of international experience in building email marketing solutions and supporting Fortune 500 clients for their email campaigns.

Within a short span of five months starting the Indian operations, Aghreni has signed up 20 companies in it’s account, offering integrated email and mobile messaging services. The platform is currently being evaluated by another 15 companies including some of the leading Private sector Banks and Travel portals.

The platform delivered more than 10 Million emails so far. The numbers are increasing 100% over each month. Aghreni is confident that the number of emails delivered through its platform will continue to increase exponentially over the next months, as it has increased its sales and focus on highly customer centric companies which have a potential to send out millions of emails.

Aghreni also brings its own RupeeMail acquisition brand for companies to acquire customers. Rupeemail has a doubly opt-in list of 250,000 profiles across India, that can be profiled on 23 + different segments. Over 1 million plus RupeeMails were delivered in April 2009 and few of the RupeeMail campaigns for the month include Get Tata AIG Maharaksha (Tata AIG Insurance), The Unique Pension Planner ( Aegon Religare), Register, Play And Win Big ( Virgin Mobile), Jaldibid.com ( Tanla Solutions ) & Travelocity Special Offers. Aghreni has partnered with 10+ companies to offer email list rental services to Corporates looking for quality emails list rentals in India. Aghreni and its partners offer over 5 million doubly opt-in email profiles for companies to acquire customers. The profile includes consumers, IT/ITES employees, HNIs, CXOs, Small and Medium Business Enterprises, Distributors, Doctors, Finance Managers, Corporate Decision Makers etc. The profiles can be targeted based on age, city, industry, income group and other attributes.

Aghreni's clients include leading Internet portals, Software product companies, Retail brands,Education and training institutions, Travel companies and Hotels and Restaurant chains. Aghreni’s email and mobile marketing platform provides a compelling reason for marketers to use email marketing as one of the most viable e-channels to reach out to the fast growing online customer database in India.

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

High quality, low costs keep IT product companies ticking

Aghreni Technologies, an e-mail and mobile marketing services company, has acquired more than half a dozen clients in the Indian market. Aghreni MD Manjunatha Kutarahalli said their differentiated offering with open source technologies has helped them bag clients in the past three months, which include large Indian business houses.



Read the entire article on Economic Times website
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/no-downturn-in-it-product-cos/articleshow/4289757.cms

Aghreni's email and mobile messaging platform to deliver localised rich content for marketers to target vernacular demographics

Aghreni's bulk email and mobile messaging platform can deliver rich HTML content in Indian languages for Indian Marketers to target the non-english speaking segments.

Aghreni demonstrated the platform features to leading marketers in India and several have shown interest to target the non-english speaking segments in non-metro towns across the country.



Aghreni's platform is an ideal choice for marketers to deliver marketing campaigns through rich HTML message on email and mobile messages through SMS channels. It has powerful reporting features to track the delivery (opens, clicks, bounces), inbox deliverability and spam complaints from ISPs (yahoo, gmail, hotmail, rediff).

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

End to End Email and Mobile Marketing automation Solutions and Services for Marketers

Aghreni Technologies, that is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business is offering e-messenger, email and mobile marketing automation platform that can send high volume emails and mobile messages with high deliverability.

Team Aghreni has over 4 years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world's largest brands. Aghreni's email and mobile messaging platform called e-messenger services over a 900clients in Europe, Asia and the USA.

Aghreni's platform is a hosted solution and it takes less than 48 hours to get on the platform for the first campaign.

Moreover Aghreni's platform is the most economical to use. The platform guarantees inbox deliverability with major ISPs (hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.). The platform is easy to use, integrate with Clients backend CRM, ERP and other systems and moreover, Aghreni is the only large scale professional company to provide local support in India.

In addition, Clients will be working one of the most advanced and feature rich platform and deriving benefits like high quality of email deliverability, which only the biggest global email service providers can guarantee.

Aghreni with its partner RupeeMail (http://www.rupeemail.in) brings in doubly opted-in customer database of customer profiles across India to Marketers in India for acquiring customers.

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

# # #

Aghreni Technologies Private Limited is a provider of email and mobile marketing automation solutions and services to clients world-wide. Aghreni Technologies has many years of experience with leading global companies in the world and managing marketing campaigns for global brands. Aghreni is spear-headed by a senior team of highly qualified and experienced professionals from online marketing industry including Manjunatha KG (Managing Director), Ram Krishnaswamy (Head Business Solutions) and Raghunandan Mysore (Head Infrastructure and Operations). The company aims to provide end to end solutions and services for marketers for customer acquisition, rentention and loyalty.

Email Delivery Optimization Techniques from Email Marketing Solutions Provider - Aghreni Technology

There is a misconception with marketers and providers that email marketing software is a bulk mailing solution. When the emails are blasted out of a bulk mailer, they are assured that it will reach the recipient’s inboxes. Is that so simple?

Does your email marketing software or service provider guarantee email delivery optimization?

Certainly most do not!

There is a misconception with marketers and providers that email marketing software is a bulk mailing solution. When the emails are blasted out of a bulk mailer, they are assured that it will reach the recipient’s inboxes. Is that so simple?

Let us look at some of the email deliverability myths that most marketers seem to have.

1. We don’t spam!

2. We send emails only to opt-in lists

3. Someone has blacklisted us for no reason

4. ISPs (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL) treat us badly

5. If our emails reach recipient’s junk folders, we will request recipient to add us to safe lists



We don’t send Spam!

The marketers first need understand the definition of Spam! It is not just the Viagra or the porn stuff! Any message that doesn’t suit the need of the customer is spam, whether it is the message subject line, content, broken or dodgy HTML code, relevance, frequency of the emails, etc. Moreover, messages that do not comply with CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003) act may be classified as SPAM by receiving ISPs.

Marketers have to stop sending messages that are boring, mundane and uninteresting. Marketers need to check if their messages are CAN-SPAM compliant. Marketers have to monitor their campaigns reports like opens, clicks, spam complaints, and abuses from their customers and ISPs. If they don’t, they may be surprised to see sometime later, their messages are being categorized as SPAM and lying in junk folders or being blocked by ISPs.



We send emails only to opt-in lists

Sending email campaigns to opt-in lists is a good practice, because you are assured of good deliverability. But have you given control to your opt-in customers, the power to opt-out or unsubscribe in each campaign? If you haven’t, start doing it now. Even if you have given the power to opt-out or unsubscribe, are you acting promptly within a reasonable time (with one week) to stop sending further email campaigns? Have you opted them again, after a reasonable amount of time through another promotional campaign? Are you acting on bounces and taking action to get your list cleaned out of bounced email addresses? Are you educating your opt-in subscribers, to opt-out instead of complaining to ISPs about abuses from you? Are you capturing the opt-in subscriber preferences to send relevant campaigns that suit their interests and the frequency of email campaigns in a given period?

The success of keeping your list clean and emails reaching out to your opt-in customers lies in understanding the needs of the opt-in subscribers, measuring the success of each email campaign and working to address the issues above. If you don’t, even your opt-in customers will soon be opting out or complaining you to ISPs on email campaigns as SPAMs.



Someone has blacklisted us for no reason

Emails Marketers have to understand that email communication is being heavily abused by spammers around the world. For every genuine email sent, there are 90 others which are spam. Most of the email service providers and companies are putting tough measures to block spam emails reaching their infrastructure or for processing and storing Spam emails and damaging their employee productivity. There are service providers who constantly scout for spammers, monitor their activities on the web and maintain a list of their IP addresses (blacklist). They provide various companies the blacklisted IPs, to block the email senders from that IPs. The black list service providers employ various complex and advance techniques to monitor increased email sending, patterns, and their web crawlers checking various things on their servers, and etc. to collect lot of statistics to classify them into the blacklist.

Hence Marketers need to understand the challenges if they are using their own bulk mailing solutions and constantly monitor if their IPs are blacklisted by any service providers. They should take immediate action, if needed with those service providers and get their IPs white listed.



ISPs (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL) treat us badly

Most of the opt-in customers have their email addresses on the major 4 ISPs Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Hence Marketers will be sending a bulk of their emails to these 4 ISPs. They have to ensure that their emails are getting delivered to recipient’s inboxes on these ISPs. Why should these ISPs block the marketer’s emails? They have several reasons and some of them have been stated earlier. Most of the ISPs provide free email infrastructure to their customers and hence they need to optimize their email infrastructure. They have to protect their recipient’s privacies and their reputation as the best ESP in the world.

The emails in those ISPs may also bounce for various reasons like account deletion, inbox full, etc. The sender email server or the email service provider has to remove these bounced addresses from the next mailing; else the ISPs may treat you as a spammer and deny service.

Major ISPs such as Google, AOL and MSN/Hotmail provide their users to complain on the sender of the emails or domains. The ISPs also have strong authentication and dynamic filtering mechanisms that your email software and service provider have to deal with.

If your email marketing software or email service provider doesn’t implement the authentication response mechanisms, adjusting to the filtering policies of the ISPs and dealing with the abuse complaints, there is no reason to complain against their unfair treatment!



If our emails reach recipient’s junk folders, we will request recipient to add us to safe lists

This is a myth that marketers have! If they request the recipients to add the sender email address into the recipient’s safe list, then the messages will be reaching the inbox. While this may be true, it still doesn’t address the deliverability of the sender emails.

ISPs will deliver the email to the recipient’s inbox after their server has successfully received the email, passing through white listed sender IP reputation, authentication mechanisms, dynamic filters (which are changing every moment).

Then there are other questions that marketers need to understand?

1. Does the marketer always use the same send email id for sending different promotions? Is there a need to use different email ids for different e-mail communications like newsletters, campaigns, promotions? What about from different brands or departments in the company?

2. Do you see a recipient adding every marketer’s email ids into the safe list? What is the guarantee that you will not start sending irrelevant and innumerable email communications to the recipient?

If you don’t have answers for most of these questions, then this trick will not work in most of the cases. The marketer is back to seeing his email moved to junk folders and soon deliverability takes a hit.



Email Marketing is a disciplined process and in order to get it right and realize the benefits, Marketers have to work with companies and agencies who really understand the science and art of email marketing.

If not, there will no differentiation between your marketing campaigns and the spammer’ campaigns. Ultimately the recipient’s and the ISP’s are the better judges.

Hence it is very important to measure the success of each of your email marketing campaigns.



Aghreni Technologies is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business. Team Aghreni has over 4 years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world’s largest brands across the world.

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

Email Marketing Trends

Every business using email marketing is trying to improve the relevance of using the media for managing the returns on the investment made towards email campaigns. Email marketing itself is finding its relevance by more targeted communications, moving away from email blasts.

The key trends are:

1. Targeting: Email list segmentation is increasingly being used as the best practice to improve the relevance and targeting of selected customers. The businesses are making a conscious effort to capture increase demographics and purchase behavior information of customers to create multiple, highly customized lists.

2. Personalization: Businesses have understood the value of personalizing their email marketing communications, using salutations, first and last names and personalizing the messages using the stored demographic and purchase behavior attributes of the individual.

3. Deliverability: Deliverability concerns persist among businesses of all sizes. Leading Email Service Providers continued to address the deliverability of the email communications of the businesses, by including automated CAN SPAM compliance checks, dedicated deliverability personnel, relationships with third party deliverability services such as Return Path, employing Dynamic Message Transfer Agents (MTAs) and working with ISPs closely to integrate authentication mechanisms.

In addition, the email marketing service providers worked with businesses in supporting and advancing email marketing best practices, by maintaining clean lists and improving email relevance with better targeting and personalization tactics.

4. Email Automation: Businesses are looking for designing, creating and conducting automated trigger email campaigns. Leading email service providers are providing life cycle based event and time based triggered email communication to consumers. This will greatly enhance the experience of the consumers through relevance and timing.

5. Integrated Campaigns: The rise of SEO, SEM, Mobile, Social Media and Social Networking have made business to look for closer integration with email marketing campaigns with SEO, SEM, Mobile and Social media tactics. With businesses adopting CRM and lead generation systems, email marketing is getting integrated into these systems for better targeting and personalization of email communications.

6. Hygiene Lists: Lingering concerns about deliverability will make businesses to scrub their email lists and subscriber data. Economic pressures for improving performance across all marketing channels will contribute to this trend, in addition to the need for clean when integrating email marketing with CRM and lead generation systems.

Aghreni Technologies is a customer centric, ROI driven provider of integrated email and mobile marketing solutions and services to indian businesses.

Online advertising is the biggest driver of brand engagement for retailers

IAB research shows online ad spend achieves 40% of the communications effect within the media mix for retail brands. Online, press and TV are the strongest drivers of brand engagement within this market.

The latest Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) cross-media Brand Engagement study has found that online advertising for retail brands delivers the biggest effect in the media mix, driving 40% of brand engagement, compared with press (31%) and TV (19%).

The average online ad spend for all five brands in the study was just 2.5% of total media budget, which suggests that internet advertising – which delivered 40% of brand engagement across all communications – is around 16 times more effective than the monetary investment would suggest. To put this into perspective, in the second half of 2007, the retail sector accounted for just 5% of all internet advertising expenditure, whilst total consumer spending on products, goods and services online for 2007 was £47 billion.

Aghreni Technologies is customer centric ROI driven provider of email and mobile marketing solutions and services to Indian Marketers.

Aghreni brings in several years of working experience with global leaders in email and mobile marketing and marketing campaigns for leading brands.