Based on the Online and Email Marketing Survey instituted by Experian and DMAI last year in India, on an average 6 per cent of the total marketing budget of the marketers polled is utilized by email marketing. This amounts to on an average of Rs 15 million per annum per company polled. Two out of every three brands surveyed had undertaken email marketing and 71 per cent plan email campaigns on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.

The key objective of email marketing for Indian marketers is creating “brand awareness” followed by new customer acquisition and customer retention. The least important objective is to send newsletters. All the above highlights the growing focus of using emails as an effective marketing channel but in India, brands still perceive email marketing as a one-to-many communication. This has changed in mature markets of North America and Europe where brands use email marketing as a one-to-one communication.

However, the end game in mind for every marketer anywhere in the world is the ROI. One of the many benefits of email marketing is the ability to use reporting data to precisely track and measure results. Despite its obvious importance in email marketing, there is significant disparity in marketers’ adoption of reporting and measurement tools.

Many marketers use campaign information to improve the response and therefore revenue of email marketing. On the reverse end of the scale, there are still many brands that miss valuable opportunities to learn from previous campaign successes or failures.

Almost one in five brands doesn’t receive or use reporting data at all. This is an alarming situation. A lack of reporting tools means that marketers have no idea whether campaigns achieve positive business outcomes. More importantly, as consumers continue to be deluged with opt-in emails and spam, there is an increasing danger of long term brand damage by sending out irrelevant content.

For those organizations that do use reporting data, the three reporting categories they value most are deliverability, conversion or sales and open rates.

Now let’s come to the point of increased danger of long term brand damage by sending out irrelevant content. As users struggle to digest the huge volumes of email they receive daily, it’s increasingly important to ensure that marketing messages are highly relevant to the audience by tailoring communications according to recipients’ interests and requirements.

What I can tell you about India is that it is certainly lagging behind North America and Europe in terms of sophistication of campaigns. We still see a large number of organizations using email marketing as an afterthought, using it to drive traffic to their microsites or as email blasts for corporate or product announcements. By blasting we mean sending the same email to the same groups of people. 

Depending on the call for action: 1. Creating brand awareness or customer acquisition or 2. Customer retention/up or cross-sell, or it may be 3. Dissemination of information through a simple news letter, more and more bands are now appreciating the need to be in a position to capture behavioral data and then use sophisticated segmenting techniques to make the content relevant. 

We at CheetahMail are working with brands in India and across the world to help them achieve Campaign Sophistication. By Campaign Sophistication we mean working with Brands on a journey from a Mass relationship with their subscribers to a group relationship and then eventually to a 1-to-1 relationship. A technology client, created a customer engagement strategy by working with their account team at Experian CheetahMail to analyze click through data and determine which members of their subscriber base were most likely to make high-value, large scale transactions.

By discovering who these large-scale shoppers were, the client was able to segment their list and send targeted emails with product sample offers to these high-quality leads. At the same time, they ceased direct mailing to the lower-value group and did not include them in sample-based promotion mailings. They also tested various times of day, days of week, and personalization elements for both groups to further intensify the relevance and effectiveness of their program. Subsequently increasing the amount of business generated as a direct result.

Not all customers are alike, and what appeals to one may not interest another. Therefore, it is essential that brands remember what resonates most with consumers when planning email campaigns. Email messages that are segmented, targeted, and relevant to the recipient are much more likely to be opened and acted upon. Every brand can segment its customer base at some basic level. The following are some examples:

-Behavioral segmentation (New users, active, inactive, browsers and buyers)

-Demographic segmentation (Gender, age, ethnicity, interests, education level, occupation, location, marital status etc.)

-Segment by acquisition channel (website sign-up, mail-in forms, call centers, co-registration pages etc.)

Therefore, marketers can improve the efficacy of their email marketing programs by undertaking targeted email campaigns; and also by customizing the communication message to the requirements and needs of the target recipient they can improve the success rate of their email marketing.