Right Email Marketing Strategies - Video

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!

Email Marketing to Improve Customer Acquisition and Customer Loyalty

When it comes to marketing, traditional or web-based, “customer acquisition” is a key indicator when determining success and Return on Investment (ROI) from your marketing efforts. “Customer loyalty” is also very important as we know that the lifetime value of a customer is dependent on how well we communicate with and retain customers.

The following are published industry facts focused on web-based marketing and the effects on “customer acquisition” and “customer loyalty”.

Customer Acquisition Facts

Permission marketing yields 30% increase in conversion and a 10% increase in return on investment. (Permission Marketing, Seth Godin) Traditional direct marketing costs $1.50 per item, while online direct marketing averages 15-30 cents. (Andersen) Traditional direct mail averages 1-2% response rate. Permission marketing averages 10-15% response rates. (Direct Marketing Association) 80% of your visitors will never return to your website. (eMarketer) The odds of selling a product to a new customer are 15%, whereas the odds of selling a product to an existing customer are 50%. Email click-throughs measure 3-10x that of banner ads at 2-20% CTR. Internet users represent over 72% of the U.S. population and greater than 25% spend their time online using email. (UCLA Report 2001) Customer Loyalty Facts It costs 5 -10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. (Emarketer) If you trail your competition by 20 points in customer loyalty you are out of business. Improving customer interactions is one of the single largest impact areas, across all industries. (Accenture) A 5% increase in customer retention yields an increase in profits between 25 -100%. Customer Loyalty Fact - Repeat customers spend 67% more; After 10 purchases, a customer has referred up to 7 people. (Bain & Company) Online promotions generate 2 to 5 times the customer response rates of traditional promotions. 70% of complaining customers will do business with the company again if it quickly takes care of a service snafu.

For more information on email marketing solution and services, visit http://www.sprinklr.in

Sprinklr signs up several key clients for its email marketing platform

Sprinklr tier 1 email marketing platform signs up several key clients in India for all their email communications.

Sprinklr e-messenger is one of the top performing email marketing platform that can pump 4 million email messages per hour. This feature is very critical for companies to deliver messages just before their subscribers ready to read, instead of delivering in the middle of the night or the day.

Sprinklr offers robust security features that makes client's customer data in safe hands, which can't be compromised at any cost. Sprinklr e-messenger in the only platform in the country that is worthy of being used by major brands and financial institutions, as it being certified by SAS 70 audits, the world's highest security audit methodology, only used by major global financial institutions.

Sprinklr is the ideal bulk email solution for Indian major brands and agencies to manange their email communication needs, as it provides seperate and integrated views and controls for email communications for several of their businesses.

Sprinklr provides higher deliverability and rich reporting metrics.

Sprinklr will be launching email to social platform soon.

For more visit http://www.sprinklr.in

Aghreni delivers 2 million emails for Indian Marketers in the month of March 2009 alone

Aghreni Technologies, leader in interactive email and mobile marketing recently published the numbers to the Industry.

It sent about 2,000,000 emails in the month of March 2009 alone, on behalf of its clients through its leading email and mobile marketing platform within 3 months of its operations in India.

Aghreni delivered these emails into recipients inboxes with 98% and above deliverability. The open rates exceeded marketers expectations at above 12%, which is way ahead of Industry benchmarks in India. The click through rates (CTR) are in excess of 25 to 30%. Its platform was able to deliver almost all the emails across all ISPs (including rediff, rediffmail.com, in.com, sify.com) without getting its emails rejected or blocked by the ISPs, which is a major issue for most of the Indian marketers. Indian Marketers are quite amazed at Aghreni's platform features, its ease of use, and powerful metrics. They were able to improve the quality of their database significantly over the campaigns and learn several best email practices to deliver the message to inbox. The platform demonstrated how marketing messages are getting delivered into all ISPs (blocked, rejected, delivered, and spam complaints). Some of the clients are quite excited with the viral marketing features in generating additional leads. The platform provides advanced features like which sections in the email message is getting clicks from recipients most, providing marketers with the knowledge about their offer positioning and creating interest. The platform also provides features on when the message is being read and clicked in real time, so that marketers can send the email message at the appropriate time.

Aghreni's clients include leading internet portals, software development companies, retail brands, education and training institutions and hotels and restaurants.

Aghreni has already 10+ clients in India and fast expanding its clients base across all verticals. Aghreni is very optimistic in delivering more emails on behalf of its client in the next few month and provide marketers with a compelling reason to use email marketing as one of the viable e-channel to reach out to their growing online customer database in India.

Aghreni Technologies is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business. Team Aghreni has many many years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world’s largest brands across the world. Aghreni brings a world class email marketing platform to the marketers to effectively measure their email marketing campaigns and reap success.

For more information on the product, please visit Aghreni's website at

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

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 delivers 1.5 million emails for Indian Marketers in less than 2 months of its operations

Aghreni Technologies, leader in interactive email and mobile marketing recently published the numbers to the Industry.

It sent about 1,450,000 emails on behalf of its clients through its leading email and mobile marketing platform in just less than 2 months of its operations in India.

Aghreni delivered these emails into recipients inboxes with 98% and above deliverability. The open rates exceeded marketers expectations at above 10 to 12%. The click through rates (CTR) are in excess of 25 to 30%. Indian Marketers are quite amazed at Aghreni's platform features, its ease of use, and powerful metrics. The platform demonstrated how marketing messages are getting delivered
into all ISPs (blocked, rejected, delivered, and spam complaints). Some of the clients are quite excited with the viral marketing features in generating additional leads. The platform provides advanced features like which sections in the email message is getting clicks from recipients most, providing marketers with the knowledge about their offer positioning and creating interest. The platform also provides features on when the message is being read and clicked in real time, so that marketers can send the email message at the appropriate time.

Aghreni's clients include leading internet portals, software development companies, retail brands, education and training institutions and hotels and restaurants.

Aghreni has already 10+ clients in India and fast expanding its clients base across all verticals.

Aghreni Technologies is part of a global email marketing giant whose competitors include the best names in the business. Team Aghreni has many many years of experience in email marketing working with some of the world’s largest brands across the world. Aghreni brings a world class email marketing platform to the marketers to effectively measure their email marketing campaigns and reap success.

For more information on the product, please visit Aghreni's website at

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

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