Kenscio is looking for Senior Software (Java) Developers

Kenscio is looking for a core Java Developer with 3 to 5 years experience in SaaS product development & from premier engineering institutes like NIT/IITs.This candidate will be joining a team of highly efficient developers & responsible for development of Cloud Based products. The products revolve around Mobile, Social Media, Digital Marketing, Web Analytics, Big-Data Analytics, and etc., using cloud based technology. He/She will be working of all latest technologies, should bring innovative and analytical thinking to the table.

Job Location: Bangalore

More details on desired skills and application process at 

http://www.kenscio.com/careers.php#java

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.

Digital marketing is built on the core principles of traditional marketing

Kenscio Digital Marketing Pvt Ltd is among India's early pioneers and a leading provider of Digital Direct Marketing solutions and services. It is among the few players to effectively plan, develop, manage and execute digital one to one communication campaigns for a large number of reputed companies in India.

Mr. Manjunatha Kutarahalli is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kenscio. He has over 28 years of experience in technology and product management. He has vast experience in large-scale operations, building competencies in niche technology areas, turnaround and high growth companies that develop leading-edge applications for diverse industry channels and client needs.

In 2009, Mr. Manjunatha co-founded Kenscio Digital Marketing, a digital direct marketing company, catering services to world's largest players and managed to get 50 clients in its very first year. He did his M.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Madras and then one-year senior management programme from IIM Kolkata. He is an electronic gadgets freak and enjoys writing blogs.

Mr. Manjunatha spoke to The Hindu Opportunities on careers in digital marketing field.

What propelled the digital marketing boom in India?

India's Internet population is growing at an exponential rate propelled by factors like de-regulation in the telecom sector, increased use of social networking sites, adoption of e-commerce, and daily deals portals trading goods and services in economical way, etc. So, to tap the growing Internet audience, marketers are now exploring opportunities to connect to them through digital mediums like the Internet, search engines, email, social, mobile, video etc.

Who constitute the typical audience of a digital marketing strategy?

The primary audience is from metros and tier 1 cities who are tech-savvy and want the convenience and comfort of shopping online from their offices or homes. There is a considerable increase in audience from tier 2 and 3 cities. Age group from 20 to 45 years is the most active audience, and they are also aiding their parents who are above 50s. Male shoppers are still the largest audience for online marketers, while women centric portals continue to expand.

How is a career in digital marketing different from a career in traditional marketing?

Digital marketing career covers the basics of traditional marketing and marketing in a new internet environment. A career in digital marketing would cover internet marketing paradigm, web analytics and intelligence – a quantitative way to interpret data and create market intelligence for decision makers, market research to include internet mediums, digital marketing issues, consumer behaviour and internet laws.

What are the unique roles available in digital marketing field? What are the skills required to assume those roles?

Digital media provides a variety of career roles. Content Marketing, SEO, SEM, Email Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Blog and Article Marketing, Reputation Management, Web Design, Video Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Media Planning are some specialised areas.

Each of these roles requires unique skill sets; sometime these are pure technical roles. For instance, a SEO marketing professional has to know how to optimise the website for better organic ranking in various search engines for key words consumers may be querying. An email-marketing specialist should possess email-marketing skills and be aware of relevant laws governing email-marketing communication. He should have an insight to consumer behaviour and analytics, and marketing spends and returns.

Should every aspirant of a career in digital marketing possess both technology and marketing skills?

Understanding of the Internet technology is a must for a successful career in digital marketing along with the core traditional marketing skills. An understanding of the Internet consumer behaviour, web analytics, consumer engagement with different digital channels, applicable rules and regulations governing each digital channels and for protecting consumers, are very important for a digital marketer.

Can professionals from traditional marketing upgrade to digital marketing? What does the transition involve?

Yes, digital marketing techniques and expertise is built on the core principles of traditional marketing. For those who have a basic degree in computers, transition is very easy. For those who don't have a basic degree in computers it would be a little difficult. Also, there are several certification, diploma and postgraduate courses on digital marketing from several institutes, industry, organisations and universities.

What does it take to be at the top in this field?

The success for any marketing function is to assist the business. Marketing spend is directly related to sales. As digital marketing is more measurable, the performance of digital marketing professional is easily assessed. So he has to master the marketing medium and show results. He has to experiment with different digital marketing mediums, and find where the customers are most engaged and which medium provides the best returns on the investment both for acquisition of new customers or influencing existing customers to buy more.

What are the challenges professionals in digital marketing face?

There are two kinds of challenges. Technical challenges include how each digital channel works, and the corresponding expertise required in those, implementation and day to day execution. Marketing challenge is to understand the consumer behaviour and assimilating marketing analytics and ROI from different mediums.

How is the future for digital marketing professionals?

The future for digital marketing professionals is bright. The country's Internet population is predicted to reach 25% of the population, and e-commerce industry to reach 100 crores in revenues by 2015. There is a big need of skilled manpower in this industry. So, traditional marketers should acquire digital marketing skills and new marketing professionals can take up digital marketing courses and pursue a bright career here.

Source: THE HINDU: » FEATURES » OPPORTUNITIES
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-opportunities/article3548483.ece

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.

Digital Media Marketing is Directly Measurable

Companies are increasingly turning to digital media marketing for marketing their brands as it is cost-effective and has maximum reach, since people spend a lot of time online. EFYTimes spoke exclusively to Manjunatha Kutarahalli, co-founder and CEO, Kenscio Digital Marketing Pvt Ltd about the scope and future of digital marketing.

What is the main difference between digital media marketing and social media marketing?

Digital media marketing is marketing using a broad set of digital media, which also includes social media. Digital Media marketing encompasses all digital media like websites, search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), video advertising, viral marketing, e-mail marketing and social media marketing.

How much have businesses started considering the seriousness and importance of social/ digital media marketing?

Businesses have understood the consumer behaviour for a long time and are using those channels where consumers are spending time, whether at home, or out of home or the places they are in or the newspapers, magazine they read, etc. As Consumer behavior and time is being spent more and more online, businesses are soon realising this and using the digital mediums (website visits, searches, e-mail, social, etc.) to reach, influence and engage with them. While in the West most of the people are online, businesses are spending more of their marketing budgets online, Indian business trend will soon follow the footsteps of Western businesses as Indian consumers are going online.


How and when was Kenscio Digital Pvt Ltd rolled out? Why the name Kenscio?

Kenscio started its roots as Sprinklr India in mid of 2009 and got its present name as Kenscio in mid of 2010, when it became a full-fledged company focusing on marketing solutions and services using digital direct mediums. It was founded by enterprising hard core experienced global digital media experts from e-mail and social background.

Ken means an expert or a guide and Scio is for social and e-mails or the social graph of consumers on internet. Hence, Kenscio was formed to assist marketers in reaching out to the social graph of the customers through digital direct mediums of e-mail and social with the expert knowledge and solutions from Kenscio.

Everyone is online these days. How do you filter the right target audience? What is the most challenging task in your business?

People are getting online and spending much of the time online. Hence, businesses are trying to utilise the online medium in reaching out to them. Kenscio is focused on serving emerging high growth Internet based companies and large enterprises, which have successful digital marketing channels. The most challenging campaign for us is to get the marketers to send their campaigns to the right customer segments and measure the success by analytics beyond opens and clicks.

What is the importance of digital media marketing for SMBs? How can they leverage its benefits without spending too much?

Digital Marketing offers the most cost effective medium for SMBs, who don’t have big marketing budgets. Moreover, the digital media is directly measurable. From building a website, optimising it for Search engines, collecting the footprints of the visitors, communicating with the visitors, branding on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, YouTube and articles, case studies on blogs etc are very cost effective.

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter allow companies to set up their own marketing pages. Do you see it as diluting the effects of the medium or is it viewed as an emerging trend for the industry?

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and YouTube have more than several hundred online audiences and people spend considerable time on these mediums. Hence, companies are setting up their marketing pages on these social networking sites to get the audience that are hooked to these networks and build brand engagement, recall and sales. Facebook commerce is already happening now and now companies may not need a website as they can do everything on the Facebook itself from building a microsite, getting visitors and selling stuff. This makes the SMBs to get to market quickly without spending too much.

Can you share your clients and popular campaigns that received overwhelming response?

All of our client campaigns are receiving better responses through our expert advises and better targeting. One campaign can perform better than the other campaign of the same client, as the offer is better or timelier. Hence, it is very difficult to classify in general. One of our clients, Rupeemail recently launched the first newsletter which received an overwhelming response, with a CTR (Click-through rate, a measure of clicks to opens as a percentage) in excess of 200 per cent which is phenomenal for any campaign.

Original article at efytimes.com

What is a DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signature? Why it is required for your mailing server infrastructure?

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a possibility to make an email sender more easily identifiable for the email service providers (ESPs) who receive and filter email. The message is identified by the domain it is sent from, that is, the part of the address after the @.

If the delivery address differs from that that has been registered with the DNS server (Domain Name Server), there is an increased likelihood that the email will be classified as Spam by the email service provider.

DKIM signatures are created, in consultation with you, when your Kenscio mailing system is first set up. The DKIM signatures may differ from the actual domains of your Kenscio mailing system.

Example:

The domain of your Kenscio mailing system is:
news.mybrand.com

You send email messages using the domains:
@mybrand.com
@mybrand.in

The sender domains @mybrand.com and @mybrand.in must be registered with the DNS server. The registered domains should be the domains used for sendout.

This means that, if possible, all domains that will be used for email sendout should receive DKIM signatures.

The part of the address before the @ can be freely set (eg. newsletter@mybrand.com, orders@mybrand.com). This part of the address is not a part of the DKIM signature.

Hint:
If you would like to add a DKIM signature to more sendout domains, or if you need information about which of your domains already have the DKIM signature, please contact your Kenscio representative.

The sendout process with a DKIM signature (simplified):

The sender (that is, the domains) are registered with the DNS server. A special encrypted signature is created that makes these domains clearly identifiable.

During email sendout, the signature and sender information are embedded in the email header.

When an email provider receives an email that contains a DKIM signature, it obtains the key to decipher the signature from the DNS server.

If the sender is correctly identified by the DKIM signature, this increases the chances of delivery in the inbox.

If the DKIM signature does not match the sender identity, the email is probably marked as Spam.

Advantages

The primary advantage for e-mail recipients is it allows the signing domain to reliably identify a stream of legitimate email, thereby allowing domain-based blacklists and whitelists to be more effective. This is also likely to make some kinds of phishing attacks easier to detect.
Use with spam filtering

DKIM is a method of labeling a message, and it does not itself filter or identify spam. However, widespread use of DKIM can prevent spammers from forging the source address of their messages, a technique they commonly employ today. If spammers are forced to show a correct source domain, other filtering techniques can work more effectively. In particular, the source domain can feed into a reputation system to better identify spam. Conversely, DKIM can make it easier to identify mail that is known not to be spam and need not be filtered. If a receiving system has a whitelist of known good sending domains, either locally maintained or from third party certifiers, it can skip the filtering on signed mail from those domains, and perhaps filter the remaining mail more aggressively.
Anti-Phishing

DKIM can be useful as an anti-phishing technology. Mailers in heavily phished domains can sign their mail to show that it is genuine. Recipients can take the absence of a valid signature on mail from those domains to be an indication that the mail is probably forged. The best way to determine the set of domains that merit this degree of scrutiny remains an open question; DKIM will likely have an optional feature called ADSP that lets authors that sign all their mail self-identify, but the effectiveness of this approach remains to be tested.

Working with eBay and PayPal, Google has effectively utilized DKIM in GMail in such a way that any e-mail that claims to be coming from ebay.com or paypal.com will not be accepted at all if they cannot be verified successfully with DKIM. Such messages won’t even appear in the Spam folder.
Feedback Loops (FBLs)

Most of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like gmail, yahoo, hotmail and etc. now demand the Email Service Providers (ESPs) to set up DKIM for the sending mailing infrastructure in order that they receive a copy of a message that one of their subscribers has reported as spam — usually by hitting a “report spam” button in that ISP’s mail interface. Feedback Loop recipients are generally expected to remove any subscriber from their mailing lists to prevent similar “spam complaints” — but the core requirement is simply that they fix whichever problems within their network caused the complaints.

Does your email marketing campaigns surprise you?

Surprises are over rated, more often than not they back fire. Getting a surprise birthday party or winning the lottery can be fun, but they happen rarely.

When it comes to your business, the less the surprises, the better. It’s quite like driving a race car. You’d want to be sure that: you know the track, the tires are correctly inflated, the engine won’t explode if you rev it on the red line, the breaks work, etc.

Similarly, when you execute an email marketing campaign, you ensure that the content is relevant, it has a strong value proposition and your subscribers know why they have received the email. The last thing you would want is that your email campaign did not perform as you had expected.

Although, the success of an email marketing campaign depends on a lot of factors, content surely plays a very important role. As strange as it may sound, relevance is not all that you need to worry about when it comes to content.

Email marketers operate in the realms of ISPs who scrutinize email content not just in terms of relevance but also in terms of quality.

What is quality? Quality here is the degree or the grade that helps differentiate a genuine email from spam.

Who defines this quality? ISPs do. They guard the interest of their users and have complex set of rules that automatically filter incoming emails.

What can you do about quality? To begin with, you should follow the best practices defined by ISPs. These are standard set of guidelines that establish a broad framework for genuine email marketers. Can anything else be done?

Kenscio Labs has been secretly working on a powerful tool that will analyse and score the quality of email content. Our geeks are working hard because like you, they dislike nasty surprises. They know what its like to see a well planned and executed campaign crumble, simply because it couldn’t meet the stringent quality standards defined by the ISPs.

In simple words, this secret tool will let you test the quality of your email campaign, before you execute it.

More Control, less surprises, smarter strategies, better performance.

Stay tuned on the blog!

Why Add-to-Address book instruction is very important in your email communication?

You might have seen in the email newsletters you receive that there is a message at the top asking you  “please add our sender address info@xyz.com to your address book”. Do you know the importance of this message?

It is known that ISPs like yahoo, gmail, hotmail, and etc. have spam filters which will filter mails from reaching your inbox.  These junk or spam filters as often called run a variety of algorithms to check if the mail is needed by you and hence should be put in inbox. If not, they should be placed in junk or spam folder thereby saving your time and botheration.

These spam or junk filters work on message content, sender's reputation, and your own actions on such messages in the past based on who sent it, subject line of the message, or whether the sender id of the message is in your address book etc.These filters sometime give higher priority to your actions than their generic rules.

Moreover some ISPs like Yahoo and AOL display images in the messages automatically if the sender address is in your address book. Spam email killer Services like Boxbee which works with several ISPs automatically deliver emails to inbox, if the message sender address is in your address book, else the mail will end up either in junk or spam folder.

Gmail spam filter work on how do you interact with the sender message in the past from opening, clicking, responding to the message and seeing the sender address in your address book or contact list to prioritize the message delivery to inbox vis-a-vis to junk or spam folder.

Understanding these issues, most of the smart marketers today have a strong call to action to advice their customers to add their sender address to their address books, so that their messages will be seen more in inbox.  The customers can then take subsequent actions of opening and clicking.

However there is a bigger challenge in educating the customers on how to add the sender address to their address books or contact lists. Each of the ISPs has their own ways to adding the sender address to the address book or contact list.

Kenscio Digital has come with an exhaustive guide to assist customers to add the sender address to the address book or contact list.  Click the link below to find the detailed instructions.  Marketers can insert this link in the message to advice their customers on how to add their sender address to their address book or contact list.

http://www.kenscio.com/whitelist-safe-sender-instructions.php

Also, if you find email from senderaddress@senderdomain.com in your spam or junk folder, please take that opportunity to tell your mail program that it is not spam by hitting the "not spam", "not junk" or similar button, as that will train your program to whitelist it.

Happy inboxing!

Email Marketing Data Security

Recent events that mined the data from Email Service Providers has affected the credibility of the industry and has increased the importance of email data security and protection of subscriber's personally identifiable information.

There are several ways the email data can be compromised or breached. From employees to information security of the email systems and server infrastructure to policies and permissions in the system.

How does your Email Service provider can prove you that they have taken adequate measures in assuring you the security of the data and protection against the above breaches? Are they getting audited for such measures? Do they have a history of such protection?

For more details, read our presentation at http://www.kenscio.com/resource-center/Email_Marketing_Data_security_april_2011_Kenscio_V2.pdf