Live & Exclusive:”15^th December-17^th December”

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever” —Lot many of you would support this idea but what are the parameters to calculate beauty? All hands down — O_o —Never thought!

Well Beauty is where you don’t have to apply your brain with boozers blossoming like a fresh red rose.

Same goes for the Jim Corbett National Park which i  s to be conquered by the Alexanders and  Cleopatras of Kenscio.

Just to poise the intensity of the battle-Jim Corbett Park—No introduction required—the name itself depicts the glory,the beauty and the adventure of the fairy tales of wildlife destination. Rising Sun saluting you, Beautiful nature pleasing your eyes–energetic activities enhancing the spirit to live life like a bravo—deep green dense forest offering you to come across with some unique celestial creatures & a group of rivers- washing all your sins without your confessions.

Get Up the boozer Warriors (Kenscians)-Let’s join hands facing these beasts.

Catch you guys over the next blog post conquering the fun battle  :)

Yours Sincerely

Vinny (Media Team)

Now this is just the flat-out funniest blog I’ve ever been privileged to write dedicating a young lass Called Richa: Our campaign management Specialist (Refer to the girl in frame), a bagful of enormous talent with the gift of the gab deeply rooted in her blood. It never fails to make me laugh. And when I say laugh, I mean it almost never fails to make me double over laughing.

Not even a single incident on the planet have managed to escape her and every time she has got some links attached to the bits occurring in the world irrespective of the kinds of Barrack Obama to Rakesh Bhaiya serving tea in the red cup (Our Office Boy) and the icing on the cake is happenings of things on places like Chandigarh or Ambala more often than not.

“Han Han meri Na 1 didi hai WO v laal cup me hi chai deti hai sabo ko” or Mera na ek dost hai wo bhi America me rehta hai as if uske bol dene se Her didi would be deputed as our Office Girl or referring her friend as the Potential President of U.S”

In times to come, a declaration is floating in the air “All the words uttered by Richa(Refer to the girl in frame) are completely fictitious and have no resemblance to the real life”

But as the saying goes, “In the end its the end what matters the most”. With full of entertainment stuffs and coolness she is the one who helps us reduce the stress and make the workplace more enjoyable.

Kudos to the Sense of Humour in you !!Keep the tempo Going J

Vinni Abhishek

Media Team

Nothing is permanent except change.

– Heraclitus (Greek Philosopher)           

People change and so do their interests, habits, hobbies etc. Hence, it’s safe to assume that your email subscribers will change. The question is whether you can adapt to this change.

Acknowledging this change doesn’t require you to revamp your email strategy every time your subscribers profile changes, instead it requires your email program to be flexible enough to let them choose what is right for them.

Research shows that subscribers (customers) will choose to maintain a deeper and long lasting relationship with you, when they are given the power of choice.

Furthermore, enabling subscribers to make choices makes them feel that they are in control and that they have the ability to dictate what and when they wish to hear from you. This increases the likelihood that they’ll look forward to your email messages and increases the chances that they’ll respond.

This is the power of preferences.

What are Preferences?

Preferences are what that differentiates your subscribers. These are information about your subscribers that allow you to tailor your communication to suit their needs. For example, some might eagerly look forward to a daily promotional mailer, where as other might find these annoying. Similarly, you may have various product or service to offer and your subscribers will prefer some over others.

Customer Preferences

What is an Email Preference Center?

An Email Preference Center allows your recipients to easily change their subscription details. This might include content type, frequency, interests in various offerings, ability to opt down or opt out etc.

Hidden Potential?

Preference Center gives you a means to know more about your subscribers. In addition to the basic information that is captured at the time of sign up, your preference center enables you to collect important information that will help improve and nurture your relationship with your subscribers.

Furthermore, marketers who use preference centers are more successful at retaining un-subscribers than the ones who don’t…

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Get in touch to obtain your copy of the complete whitepaper on Email Preference Center or speak to one of our consultants today to see how you can improve your email marketing programs with the power of Preference Center.

Honestly I get a lot of emails today, but this one completely pissed me off to the core. No one calls me a zero. I dont know if people like to be called zero- its their preference.  But I mind  it, especially when this particular marketeer has been sending me emails left right and centre from so many days.

This is our “classic” case of personalization going bad. I would not know how many unsubscription the marketeer would have fetched on this but from a consumer’s point of view when he/ she is being targeted from all directions to get its attention( positive attention). When they are use to of getting email communication super personalized and super individualized, this would definitely surprise them.

Email is a critical medium and has worked wonders for a lot of business. But then today when there are so many people who are on this medium relevancy and addressing the recipient  becomes all the more important.

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.

Why it is needed?

It is because ISPs like yahoo, gmail, hotmail dictate it!  Look at their bulk mailing guidelines, which must be followed by all email marketers and their email marketing solution providers.

https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81126#authentication

http://mail.live.com/mail/policies.aspx

http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?page=content&y=PROD_MAIL_ML&locale=en_US&id=SLN3435&impressions=true

If your bulk or mass email marketing solution provider doesn’t provide it, it is time for you to ask for it. If they are unable to do it, look for other email service providers who can provide it.

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!

Spike in search for "Holi"

As we can clearly see that, there is an obvious spike in the search for “Holi” across India. So the first question is that are you putting Holi in your subject lines, if not you could- attracts more clicks and opens in this week.

The next thing is that who all it will work for?

The top spike is seen in Bihar Jamshedpur and Patna

Rajasthan-Jaipur and Udaipur come second

Gurgaon shows a great volume of searches

Gurgaon comes third and follows the rest of the northern states like Delhi, UP, Punjab, and States like Gujarat, Assam, Madhya Pradesh. Surprisingly the other states did not seem to have much traction about the festival- well none of them are actively looking for the things that they would want to do or, looking at things related to Holi. There could be multiple reasons for it- this time Holi is coming on a weekday being one of it, or, it comes right in the middle of the exam season for them.

Well beside all the factors and after analyzing the results with last year people are eagerly waiting for Holi messages in their mail boxes and Facebook walls. However, this year as there are more smart marketers the empowered consumer is looking beyond elementary propositioning- So dont just write Holi Celebrations or, XY% off on Holi or, any such vague lines. Discuss it with your Client Success Manager or , just tell them what you want to sell or, what inventory is in excess this season .

For other marketers who are serious about their business but yet not with us- There is no excuse for missing an opportunity or, a bad job.

Things to consider:

• What is a number of audience that fall in the category of states mentioned above?
• Are they male or, female?
• What are the cultural factors that affect their decisions?
• What do you want them to feel reading you subject line?
• And last but the most importantly why your Holi message?

So go ahead and make some killers sales this festive season .

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.

Have you heard about DMARC?

Last week, a group of some of the largest email service providers (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL), together with organizations like Facebook and Paypal, jointly announced the release of a new method of email authentication. The new standard, called DMARC, is a way for email senders and receivers to better work together to increase email security by protecting email recipients from malicious phishing attacks and domain spoofing.

How does it work?

Essentially, email senders can now publish a DMARC record that indicates

1. which authentication tests they have in place (i.e. DKIM, SPF) and

2. what action the email service provider should undertake when an incoming email fails these tests (i.e. spam folder or outright rejection).

This provides the mailbox provider with greater certainty about the origin and identity of messages, thus taking the guesswork out of filtering incoming email. The mailbox provider sends a report back to the email sender containing information about all incoming emails claiming to be from that sender, and whether or not they were actually delivered to recipients.

What are the implications for Kenscio clients?

There are no immediate consequences for clients who do not yet have a DMARC record in place. However, given the size and importance of the players involved in the development of this standard (Gmail! Facebook!), its consequences on the email industry are likely to be of growing importance.

The new standard provides many clear benefits, especially for Kenscio clients where data security is a high priority, such as banks. However, in effect any company can benefit from publishing a DMARC record, if for no other reason than to receive the DMARC reports, which provide visibility and information about a domain’s email and any potential authentication issues.

We are currently beta-testing this with selected client systems, to get a better understanding about the impact this has. Also note, there are some circumstances in which it will not be possible to support DMARC (multi-domain systems, in some cases personalized from-addresses).

What is DMARC?

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. DMARC is a new  technical specification that was created in order to help reduce email abuse, especially Phishing attacks. DMARC standardizes how email receivers perform email authentication using the existing SPF and DKIM mechanisms.

When a sender publishes a DMARC policy, the sender clearly indicates to the mailbox provider whether the sender’s emails are protected by SPF and/or DKIM. The sender also specifically tells the mailbox provider what to do if an incoming email fails the SPF and DKIM authentication tests – i.e.  block the message or divert it to the spam folder. The mailbox provider  no longer has to guess how to respond to incoming mail that fails authentication tests, because DMARC clearly tells the mailbox provider  how to handle such messages. Furthermore, the mailbox provider can report back to the email sender about whether incoming emails pass or fail the evaluation process.

As a result of DMARC, email senders will experience consistent authentication results for their messages at AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and any other email receiver implementing DMARC.

How does it work?

A DMARC policy for a particular sender is published in the DNS as text (TXT) resource records (RR).

When the mailbox provider receives an incoming mail, it checks the results of the SPF and DKIM tests. It also accesses the DMARC policy for that sender. This policy defines what an email receiver should do with incoming mail when that mail does not pass the SPF and DKIM tests.

If the mailbox provider  determines that the results of the SPF and DKIM authentication tests do not correspond to the standards of the published DMARC, it either rejects the incoming message or categorize it as spam, depending on the instructions of the sender as defined in the DMARC. In DMARC terms, this is referred to as a “non-aligned” email.

The mailbox provider reports back to the email sender about all non-aligned incoming emails.

Important Information

DMARC focuses its analysis on the domain in the “from address”. This identifier is used in conjunction with the results of the underlying authentication technologies (at the moment SPF and DKIM).

The most critical factor is that the domain used for DKIM and SPF must have the same “organisation domain” as the domain in the “from address”.

With DMARC, there is essentially no difference between an email signed with the wrong DKIM and an email with no DKIM signature! (For more information on DKIM, please see DKIM signature).

Using DMARC: Set-up steps

If you are interested in creating and publishing a DMARC policy for your Kenscio’s eC-m system, please contact your Kenscio representative. The DMARC policy for your system will be created together with our team of dedicated, in-house deliverability experts.

The basic steps for setting up a DMARC process for your system are:

1. It is first necessary to have DKIM and/or SPF policies in place!
2. Publish a DMARC record indicating which policies you use and requesting reports from mailbox provider.
3. Analyze the data and modify your mail streams as appropriate.
4. Gradually modify your DMARC policy flags from “monitor” to “quarantine” to “reject” to improve control.