Email Marketing in India – For Marketing Managers

I was reading the ‘India e-Marketing Outlook 2012‘ report by Octane Reasearch and found the publication highly interesting. For those of you who are active bloggers, social media junkies and spend 18 hours daily online surfing; this update may NOT interest you. But for those of you who belong to Traditional Marketing backgrounds, working for brands in developing countries like India, the below facts that were seen in this report will be rather amusing…

 

  1. In a country where the online population is easily over 121 million and 76% of the population of close to 2 billion people own mobile phones, TRAI has limited the sms limit to 200 per day!
  2. The top two online trends witnessed in India  are Email Marketing and Social Media
  3. Close to 16% of the research participants mentioned that more than 50% of their sales is generated from Email Marketing However majority of the companies are allocating less than 10% of their annual marketing budgets to e-Marketing initiatives.
  4.  Yet only 35% of the marketers send out daily mails for various initiatives, while a startling 28% of respondents send mailers only Once a week!
  5. According to Industry Data India is rated is 3rd largest spam generator in the world.
  6. Thankfully close to 49% of respondents believe in Behavioral Targeting while using email marketing and 62% of them agree to the importance of Email Marketing and Social Media initiatives.

Considering India is the 3rd largest country with respect to the number of internet users (second to China and USA), the above findings show a delay in the process of Email Marketing occupying board room discussions and daily metrics that Marketeers should ideally be using to achieve their Marketing Goals.

 

Long way to go for India and Email Marketing!

Google PLAs.. Missing the action in India

While Adwords have rocked the digital marketing arena for some time now, Google has gone one step ahead with its Product Listing Ads integrated with its Free Shopping listings. While I am still gathering more data on how the PLA and its CPC works out, its sure that integrating product listings with adwords is benefiting and mostly only some eCommerce websites (eBay and Amazon). Below are some graphical representations I found interesting..

 

 

 

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But when you do google search for high ranking keywords in India there are no PLAs or great ads to display:

 

The PLAs are being heavily budgeted for in the marketing spends for the western nations where eCommerce markets contribute to 80% of all Retail Sales like in USA an UK (based on monetary value). How ever they are yet to see surface in the Indian subcontinent where Adwords and traditional PPC prevails.

 

 

Reference Links :

http://www.google.com/ads/shopping/getstarted.html#tab=tab-2

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/google-shopping-no-longer-free/31052012/

http://blog.solidcactus.com/how-nice-will-google-shopping-google-adwords-play-together/

Interesting excerpts from ‘Social Media Marketing – An Hour a Day’ by Dave Evans

Below are points from the book that I found most remarkable, some what focus areas for traditional Marketeers and the young tech savvy Agencies handling online marketing. .. 

Will keep updating the post as and when I get around to completing the book. 

  • “Your customers are already talking about you. The fact that you aren’t participating is your implicit endorsement of whatever it is that they are saying.”
  • social media is driving interconnectedness to a whole new level!
  • Trust is essential to any form of conversation on the Social Web.
  • It is the democratization of information on the internet space; by the people, of the people and for the people
  • So how do you influence a crowd? Well, given that you can’t tell “it” what to think, going the direct control route is probably a loser. Instead, listen to it. Tap it.Learn from it. And then “do that.” One of the characteristics of social media is that you can listen to it, measure it, and track it over time. You can use what you learn to modify and improve what you offer, and in so doing influence the online conversation.
  • It is Participatory in nature
  • Recent studies have shown that of the estimated 3.5 billion word-of-mouth conversations that occur around the world each day, about 2.3 billion of them — roughly two out of three —make a reference to a brand, product, or service. Word of mouth is increasingly manifesting itself through digital social media, where it spreads both farther and faster. This use of the Social Web is increasingly important to marketers.
  • Communities — whether formally built around a specific interest or cause, or informally built through more casual connections — sit at the center of the Social Web.
  • Step back and look at most traditional forms of media: They are “push” and“tell” oriented. They place the marketer in control of the message and dictate for the consumer a subservient role. Social media tips this balance: On the Social Web, both the consumer and the marketer have an equal voice in terms of permission to speak.This not the same as implied trust, which is something else altogether, but it does serve to support the notion that as a marketer you need to participate in the communities of which your audience is a part in order to gain trust.
  • Your existing customers are — or should be — among your strongest evangelists. After all, they are buying your product Tip: The addition of consideration-phase marketing bridges a critical gap for marketers between awareness and purchase while opening the channel for effective word-of-mouth.
  • Consideration and the Purchase Funnel again and again…they must like it! Your objective should be to get them to talk about their positive experiences. This gives you the double benefit of making the current sale — to them — and a future sale to the new customer that they create for you.
  • These two developments — the realization of a global network and the digitization of content —multiplied each other, driving the growth in the use of the Web as an information and fulfillment platform.