Kalpit Jain is the Chief Operating Officer of netCore, which provides enterprise communication & digital marketing solutions for businesses. After finishing his B.E. in Production from Mumbai University, Kalpit chose the then burgeoning IT field and joined netCORE Solutions as Software Programmer.

Kalpit is a key contributor in shaping pre-sales, client servicing, technology, operations and product development functions, eventually leading business development during mid-2003. In 2003-04, Kalpit became the sales/ business head & for the next six years, he led re-inventions in product development & operations. He was also instrumental in the expansion of Mumbai-based netCORE to five other offices in India.

Since 2011, Kalpit has been handling technology & operations of all netCORE’s divisions as COO. Recently, he has redefined his designation as the chief customer officer as now Kalpit’s focus will be 100% on Customers. Kalpit’s goals is to ensure customer delight – with product, marketing, support and new ideas, thereby making client’s interaction with netCORE a wonderful experience.

Kalpit envisions building a completely integrated campaign management platform for E-mail, SMS and Voice. He plans to take EMM international and aims at innovations in digital communication to revolutionize the enterprises and consumers interaction. 

In this exclusive interview with Ratnika Swami for India Digital Review, Kalpit talks about enterprise communication & digital marketing space in India, changing trends in the industry and netCORE’s plans for the future. Excerpts:  

Q. How do you see the enterprise communication & digital marketing space in India evolving? And what are netCORE’s plans for the future?

The enterprise communication and digital marketing space in India is growing at a phenomenal pace due to the rapid adoption of smartphones and the increasing penetration of mobile internet. Digital marketing is no longer just about advertising on the web or SMS marketing. Smartphones are multi-channel devices offering SMS, Voice, email and push notifications on apps. Roughly 40-50% emails are now being viewed on mobile devices.

netCORE, being a leader in multi-channel communications, sees the market moving towards cross-channel automation. Marketers will slowly evolve from a spray-and-pray approach of push marketing to personalised and relevant content marketing. This will increase the adoption of marketing automation tools that offer a unified view of customers and cross-channel automated workflows.

Q. How can brands improve their customer conversion rates? And how does netCORE help in this?

A common agenda on every CMO’s list today will be how they can do better on conversions over and above what they already do. I see marketers pay a lot of attention to leads that are hot and try to convert them as soon as possible. But about 90% of the leads that don’t convert are usually overlooked. With little thought put to that, the focus is usually on new lead acquisitions every month.

netCORE is an expert in communication channels including email, mobile and voice. Its experienced consultancy team helps brands convert those 90% leads that are left untouched. There are lot of ways one can nurture leads and improve conversion ratios. Few important ones are:

1. Make your lead sales ready: Once a lead is captured, all attention is focused on closure. A lot of conversations with other potential leads are ignored. Not every prospect is sales-ready when they register themselves as a lead, thus understanding them and keeping them engaged till they are sales-ready is very important. netCORE’s marketing automation platform, Smartech is meant to help convert leads that were not sales-ready earlier.

 2. Build trust: Not every brand will be like an Amazon or LIC that your leads will trust you. Most conversion rates today are impacted by trust issues amongst prospects. Brands should in their communications maintain the best standards by following all the best practices. Our consultancy team provides these practices of email and mobile marketing to brands while creating campaigns that builds trust and also ensure inbox delivery, thereby building value for prospects.

3. Make the extra effort: Brands can go the extra mile to understand what works, using persuasion in the form of value and not just by giving discounts, by addressing the objections of prospects, removing distractions from their communication etc.

Q. Since netCORE started offering e-mail marketing services a few years back, a lot has changed - from Internet penetration, user consumption behavior, campaign techniques to advent of social media marketing. Could you elaborate on the changes you have observed in the industry?

netCORE started offering its services in 1998 from mail infra and then ventured into email services, a few years later, and since then we have seen the industry evolving round the clock. In the year 2001, India had 7 million internet users, this number has grown 25 times and at compound rate of 30 year-on-year according to a report launched by BCG and IAMAI in 2015. By 2018 we are expecting 580 million people to use the internet.

There has been a huge growth momentum of data usage in India on wireless networks driven by 3G traffic. The data usage grew by 74 per cent and 3G usage was up by 114 per cent at the end of 2014, compared to 2013, according to Nokia’s Vice President. With 140 million smartphone users, we see that a lot is changing in the Industry.

Some of the top notable changes in the industry that we have witnessed in last few years are:

1. Batch & blast to Single Opt-ins – From sending an email to anyone and everyone, now brands have realised that in order to get better ROI, they need to try reaching out to users with their permission. We see lot of start-ups respecting permission-based email marketing as the new mantra of building brands over how it used to be few years ago. We have observed that the Indian marketers are respecting single opt-in permissions and this can further evolve into a double opt-in approach.

2. Spamming to Inbox Delivery – Batch & blast leads to a mentality of procuring data and sending emails to everyone. This was even done by installing an in-house server and sending emails, day and night resulting in heavy spamming. Over the years this has changed and now the approach is more sincere as email marketers avoid acts of spamming and make use of best practices. They are all the more cautious about inbox delivery and have started sending relevant emails to a segmented lot of customers.

3. Everyone to Personalization – The evolution has been from spamming to reaching out to a segmented lot. What has also changed is that emails are now being sent with personalized content based on the behavioural data pheromones of every single user. A user in Delhi with a higher income will receive something different from their counterparts in Mumbai with an average income.

4. Desktop to Mobile – With more smartphones, choices are now available in the market at affordable prices. 25% of the mobile users now use smartphones. This is making mobile the primary device and thus checking emails on desktop is no longer a popular trend. Brands are now becoming mobile-centric and thus responsive emails and mobile-friendly communication is gaining value. We see that out of every 100 emails viewed, 50% of them are viewed on smartphones.

5. Single image emails to live content in emails – Creating an image which is like a print advertisement and sending them via emails was the trend, a few years ago. Such emails were not only heavy, but they also used to defy the laws of inboxing and thus most of these mails were sent to the spam folders of the users. Now brands want to give their users an absolutely personalized, engaging experience. Live content like the countdown timer, web crop from websites, content based on weather and time have become the key highlights in 2015.

Q. With the advent of social media, one would say that e-mail, as a medium, has somewhat taken a back seat. Do you agree? If not, briefly mention the reasons why.  

One of the most popular debates and the top question in digital marketing circles and forums currently is with regards to what is better, social media or emails? It is a billion dollar question and the answer is neither as well as both. In the current era of modern marketing, both the channels play an important role and they in fact become stronger if used hand-in-hand. I see brands launching a Facebook strategy and promoting to users via emails, host contests and Tweetinars are announced via emails.

Emails allow smart integration and tracking capabilities with social media and that’s why it works more as allies than as foes. The content that can be seen on emails can also be shared on social media. Brands are now also promoting registration widgets on their social media pages to ensure that they are able to reach out to their followers over email as well.

Social is a good medium to engage with users but emails become handy to drive better conversions. Email as a channel still gives Rs. 40+ for every Rupee spent. If we compare users online and applications, email stands tall in terms of its utility. I see great synergies in both the mediums and I think in the future, we will see smart integrations and ways to work hand in hand with marketing.

Q. Today, an increasing number of consumers are using their smartphones to access their e-mails. How has that affected the way you market campaigns on e-mail?

With 40-50% emails being opened on smartphones today, emails are no more made for just one device. Email marketers are cautious when creating emails as the performance of the campaigns largely depend on how the email will appear on different devices. In year 2013 we observed 70% of emails being opened on the mobile were deleted due to the fact that emails were not responsive or because of bad display quality on mobile device.

Several marketers have also adopted text-based emails, as they are more mobile-friendly. The top 5 things to keep in mind when designing emails for smartphones are:

1.    Avoid single images or large sized files

2.    Restrict the scrolling to a bare minimum

3.    Keep the layout simple

4.    Call to action button should be neat and clear

5.    Use flexible images, layout and

6.    Media queries must be responsive

Q. What would you say are the most important factors to consider when deciding on an email marketing strategy?

Email with its vast utility is becoming an important part of the overall marketing strategy for every online business. Email channels have been in use for a decade in India, however it has been the talk of the town since the beginning of the e-commerce boom.

The most important factors while deciding an email marketing strategy are:

1. Right Audience – The first step in making your email plan is identifying the right audience. Do you want to batch & blast it to all your customers? Do you want to segment it to active users? Choosing the right audience helps you ensure that the email reaches specific users for whom it is meant for.

2. Personalize and Relevant Content – We receive a lot emails that have “Dear Name” mentioned. Nowadays even that is not considered as personalization. When creating an email strategy, we need to make sure that ‘one size for all’ approach is not adopted. Based on what your users have been responding to and interested in, create personalized and relevant content. Consider behavioural data when making the next content for users.

3. Engagement – Engagement is one of the factors that help in better inboxing and being in the good-books of MSPs i.e. Gmail, Yahoo etc. Engagement would mean how many users open your emails, visit the enclosed links or even reply to them. We have seen campaigns where the users are asked to comment or are asked to choose a right answer to induce a reply, these campaigns drive a lot of replies and hence returns the highest rate of engagement over emails and hence ends up building a great sender reputation.

4. Metrics to measure success – Most email marketers refer to the opened emails as metrics to measure success of campaigns. There are various metrics to choose from including open rate, click-through rate, website visits, conversion rate and click to open ratio. With the objective of the campaign appropriate measures of success is selected from the above mentioned KPIs.

Q. Currently, how big is the total market for email marketing in India? And how do you see it grow in the future?

According to internetlivestats.com, internet penetration in India is at 30 crores plus and every user receives at least 10 emails (promo + trans) in a day. There are 300 crore emails that float in a day and around 9000 crore in a month in India.

Now with digital droplets of a user (email + mobile + social) becoming key to reaching the user, brands in India have taken email as a channel very seriously. Right from going paperless to having a tech savvy Prime Minister, we are now witnessing everything contributing to interactions between the people online and those on the go.

Sectors like as BFSI, e-commerce, hospitality, education and retail have become cautious about emails. They now want to send out offers and begin conversations via emails. We are currently witnessing a lot of brands that only have mobile numbers of their customers but not their email ids. This differs from vertical to vertical but on an average brands do not have access to more than 50 % of the customers’ email ids. In the next two years, brands will try to bridge this gap and ensure that they have access to more than 80% of their customers’ email ids.

E-commerce boost, go green initiatives, financial regulations and guidelines have resulted in the increasing use of email marketing in India. netCORE has in itself seen the rise of 10 billion emails in a year, with an average of 2.5 billion mails per month in the last financial year to an average of 3.5 billion emails a month currently. India with a staggering growth market is estimated to witness at least 10 billion emails a month.

Q. Last year, netCORE launched an Internet of Things platform called Cloud4One. Could you elaborate on this?

Cloud4One was launched last year to provide an integrated device & server ITO platform for enterprises.

The focus is on helping organisations to use sensors to acquire data using our device and then measuring , monitoring & analysing the data coming from various ambient sources (temperature, humidity, energy, smoke or machine data), which will help the organization leverage data and make it more efficient.