Digital Direct Marketing without Insights and Actions

Real Time Personalisation (RTP),Product Video

Real time, Contextual, Agile marketing with live content in email campaigns

There is a lot of news today about email marketing campaigns which can deliver content live from websites and social media based on the recipient behaviour at the time of opening the email, location and device. Delivering such live content in real time and context provides exciting and engaging opportunities for marketers to connect with the recipients and drive them towards further actions.

With such engaging campaigns with live contextual real-time content in email, marketers are seeing higher CTR (click through rate is a measure of clicks generated over the impressions served). As the ROI is a direct measure of CTR, higher CTR will result in higher clicks for the same number of impressions.

From a simple count down or count up timer to drive urgency in recipients, to much more engaging real time or dynamic offers based on recipient behaviour, the email marketing is becoming is much agile in nature rather than static personalisation at the time of sending email.

- See more at: http://kenscio.com/blog/2014/02/27/real-time-contextual-agile-email-marketing-with-live-content-in-campaigns/

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.