Other than solving world hunger or eradicating AIDS, if you are an online marketer, at some point of time you must have killed your brain cells over the deliverability of your email communication or pondered upon all that you could do to boost customer engagement.

Though we have covered deliverability and engagement as separate topics in several of our articles and whitepapers, in this article we’d like to explore how you could kill two birds (deliverability and engagement problems) with one stone (read on!).

Fundamentally, deliverability and engagement are intertwined. One cannot have good deliverability with poor engagement rates, and if deliverability is poor, you certainly cannot expect first-class engagement. It’s a cruel vicious circle.

Presuming you do everything by the book (have the right infrastructure, best practices in place, do not spam, etc), you could then initiate a CSAT survey program. Why? Because surveys are interactive in nature and require your customers to share their perceptions and opinions (something all customers love!). Hence, as a general rule CSAT surveys have the potential to obtain extremely high responses, some of our clients have obtained as much as over 40% open rates and easily a 60% of CTR (clicks over opens).

These surveys not only boost your engagement, make your email marketing interactive (like it should be) but also give a boost to your sender reputation (the score ISPs assign to you; the marketer). So just one program can:

1. Find out what your customers think of you, your products / services, and share their feedback

2. Give you bonus points in the books of your customers for caring to ask for their opinion

3. Empower you with knowledge that when used wisely can help improve customer retention and long term profitability of your company

4. Get you thumbs up from ISPs

If you think that all this is good, but you might not be able to manage it, think again. Email is the most flexible and powerful channel to manage such automations and Kenscio can get you started and setup in no time. It is possible to:

- Automate the survey campaign

- Automatically exclude customers who have completed the survey

- Only target a segment of customers who have actually bought something from you

- Dynamically populate survey questions based on customer demographics, behaviour or purchase history

Whether you are into e-commerce, publishing, travel, finance, real estate or any other industry for that matter; if you serve customers, you should identify customer perceptions about you. This could be in form of Customer Feedback, Product Review, Service Quality, Event Surveys etc.

Every time you send an email survey, you initiate another opportunity to engage with your customers. Surveys built within an email message have better chances of getting a response, and the more responses you get the better will be your sender reputation with ISPs

So what are you waiting for? Get in touch to kick start your survey campaign.

Nothing says “It’s Spring!” like Holi. The ancient festival not only celebrates the beginning of a new season (while it farewells winter), but Holi also suggests that its time to enjoy spring’s abundant colors. The tradition represents something even deeper; it bridges social gaps, celebrates the triumph of good over bad, and most importantly renews relationships!

While the populace gears up for this exhilarating festival, you the marketer, can work on replenishing your engagement with your customers. Using the spirit of the festival, you can:

•         Show your appreciation for loyal customers and may be offer them some rewards in form of redeemable coupons, gift vouchers etc. (and boost your festive sales!)

•         Kick start engagement with new customers with the right tone and bring vivid colors

•         Ask the active non buying lot to figure out what might persuade them to start buying from you

•         Work on activating dormant customers

•         Don’t wait for customers to come to you for complaints or appreciation, go ahead and ask them! Even better send out a customer satisfaction survey mailer and gauge the feedback!

Furthermore, you can add a lot of relevant personalization to your communication. For instance, if you know the city / region of your customers, you can target them with region specific Holi offers or greetings (the rituals and celebrations vary from state to state!).  You can encourage your customers to play safe and environment friendly Holi and get bonus points for caring for the environment, in addition to improving customer engagement.

Whatever industry you represent, or type of customers you cater to (B2B or B2C), this is the time to reinforce existing relationships or re bond broken ones.

Though, before you can start thinking about improving engagement, you must identify who your customers are (as individuals), what is the level of their actual engagement with you, and how they prefer engaging with you. The second step is to target them appropriately with the right message via the right channel.

Get in touch to discover how you can identify and target: loyal, active, non-active, and other complex customer segments based on multi channel customer data (purchase history, web behaviour, email behaviour, demographics etc); without having to hire data scientists or loosing your sanity.

Make this Holi festival count!

Kenscio Digital Marketing Pvt Ltd, a digital direct marketing company, today announced leading names like HDFC Life, Pearson Group and Intuit as its new clients, among others. With a world class technology platform and in depth expertise in digital direct marketing solutions and analytics, Kenscio’s clientele now covers India’s leading companies across sectors. Since its inception four years ago, Kenscio has increasingly proven its exponential growth and potential in the digital direct marketing segment and is keen on foraying into the financial sector as a part of its strategy.

Manjunatha K.G, Co-founder and CEO, Kenscio Digital, said, “Having names like HDFC, Pearson Group and Intuitas as our clients is a part of Kenscio’s growth strategy plan which make us stronger in the market as well. This reflects our thriving business and financial performance y-o-y”.

Saurav Patnaik, Co-founder & Vice President, Marketing, Kenscio Digital, added, “Kenscio today provides best-in-class products, solutions and expertise needed to create a successful multi-channel marketing campaign and segmentation strategy that connects strongly with your consumers. With the help of our stronger presence and expanding teams, we are getting the best talent on board in terms of strategists, retailists, etc, to provide support to customers across India.”

About Kenscio:

In today’s world, consumers have their own preferences to various channels to interact and buy with. A channel may be a retail store, a direct visit to a website, a mail order catalog, an agent waiting to take an order on the phone after you have seen an ad on TV or heard on Radio, or direct personal communication by letter, email or text message or through a landing page served through a banner ad or social media.

The objective of the companies doing the marketing is to make it easy for a consumer to buy from them in whatever most appropriate channel. And understand their consumer choices of channels. An other important aim for the companies is to optimize the costs and maximize the returns knowing the behavior of their consumers, their interactions and purchases across the channels.

Delivering an integrated consumer experience across channels requires a partner who can understand the complexities of delivering the communications across the channels and the gathering intelligence gathered from the consumer’s behavior.  It would require your partner to offer a full suite of marketing services.

Kenscio today provides best in class products, solutions and expertise needed to create a successful multi-channel marketing campaign and communication strategy that connects strongly with your consumers.

You can easily integrate all your direct digital communications through email, SMS, transactional communications (for upsell, cross sell and missed opportunities), surveys, landing pages and web forms, social media marketing and automate your mult-channel marketing campaigns with the right message at the right time to the right audience through powerful segmentation and analytics based on your consumer demographics, past behavior and purchases.

Kenscio understands these challenges and can empower you to obtain a single view of your customers, but more so, it can also help identify the truth about your relationship with them. To learn more about our multi channel marketing services get in touch!

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.

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just departing on the horizon, they mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the west. However, in India this coincidentally lines up with the auspicious wedding dates.

While gold traders look forward to this time with childish glee, smart marketers plan and strategise to get their share of the festive action!

If you haven’t yet started, your first step is to define what you want out of the festive season?

Whether it is increasing order sizes, acquiring more customers, or turning the non transacting subscribers into customers; now is the time for you to plan to achieve your goals and deliver a strong finish to the year end.

Let us look at some of the possible goals you might pursue (among other things):

1. Sell to more of your prospects (increase conversion rates)

2. Sell more to your existing customers (increase order size)

3. Get more subscribers you can market to (Increase your list size)

4. Maximise the opportunity to talk to your customers as they shop

Whatever it is that your heart (or shareholders) desires; Kenscio is here to help you achieve that. So why not get in touch and ask for your free copy of our Christmas / 2012 year end marketing tips and tricks?

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.

For SMEs in India and abroad looking to make their mark online and connect to millions of potential customers, the Internet represents a golden opportunity. Developing a web presence is a natural extension for any business. However, Saurav Patnaik, Co-Founder and VP Marketing, Kenscio Digital Marketing Private Limited, an internet marketing company tells ITBizFocus.com that building a website is not enough and that small companies need good

(SEO) strategy in place to ensure that their websites generate a high quality traffic that can be converted into paying customers.

Why is email marketing important? How does it help a business generate revenue?

Emails help the businesses to reach the audience directly. It is measurable, economical and can be done faster compared to other traditional ways of doing marketing. Now, going back to the basics, to earn revenue, these businesses need to understand who are the people which are interested in buying proposition, what time can they be contacted, whether or not they qualify to buy your product and how are they willing to make a purchase. All this information can be captured analyzed and acted upon using emails… Once you know all this, businesses will be able to send individualized, relevant communications to generate revenue.

How important is branding to SMEs and startups? Is small business branding efforts wasted in direct marketing and sales?

It is very important for an SME or, a startup as it becomes all the more important for them to be in the minds of their customers and take communication to a much higher level (super personalized and individualized). So that their customers know that these companies really care and understand the needs.

What are your thoughts on small businesses relying on SEO?  How important it is for them to outsource their email marketing and social media marketing to specialists?

Search Marketing does help to get traffic on your website, however in the long run we need to engage them in the meaningful conversions. Thus, relying on SEO only will actually result in footfalls but to get these conversations you need emails and social media.

What are some emerging marketing opportunities in social media advertising? Could you kindly elaborate?

To be able to start the conversations over social media, businesses will need to provide clear call for actions….It need not necessarily be a Like or a follow on Facebook and Twitter respectively, it can also be an invitation to join the CEO for breakfast. I see an opportunity for Advertisements on Fan pages, cross promotional tweets, Email campaigns and lot more. The market in the US has already started doing such Social Advertising campaigns; you can see players like Daily Candy doing it over Facebook.

What advice would you give entrepreneurs looking to use email marketing and also to small business owners who are just starting on the Internet?

My only advice is that focus on your audience, be relevant (talk about your customers, not what you sell) and be aware of where your target audience is over internet to know which tool to use.

Original article posted at itbizfocus.com

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.