Who says email is dead?

At a tea break during a recent seminar on social media marketing, a friend said, "Email is surely dead".  He claimed that in the age of glamorous entities like content marketing and social media, email marketing was totally outdated.

He could not have been further away from truth. Neither is email dead nor outdated. It is true that content marketing and social media have become important players in the marketing landscape. However, that does not mean that emails have lost their sheen.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email has an ROI of around 4,300%.

As a smart marketer, you should combine -- social media, content marketing and email – to make your campaigns more powerful and effective. Make emails a part of your content marketing. The content in your emails should deliver value. Rather than always trying to sell, make your emails a platform to connect with your reader. Exchange valuable information for their attention and time. This kind of investment in your audience will definitely pay dividends. It will help build trust and a relationship with your prospect.

Compelling subject lines and valuable content can definitely make your subscriber open your mail. Make sure that the great content you provide impacts their life in some way or other. Great content always gets shared. Before you even know your content would be all over social media.

Changing your attitude towards email is the need of the moment. Batch and blast will not work anymore. You need to instil the values of content marketing into your emails. This will ensure a huge rise in the open rates and click through rates of your mails. This will mean that your content will be shared on social media. As a natural progression you’ll see an increase in referrals, conversions and revenue.

Have you made content marketing a part of your email marketing effort? Do let us know. We would love to share more information on email marketing techniques with you. 

Say no to spamming, opt for permission-based email marketing!

I had been getting unsolicited mails from an English-learning portal for the last one month. Though I ignored the unsought attention for a while, I got irritated in the end and blocked the sender.

This is a very usual scenario and most of us get bombarded by unwanted and unasked for correspondence every day. In this age of information explosion, no one has the time or patience for unnecessary information. That is why permission-based email marketing has become crucial.

So what is permission-based email marketing? Permission–based email marketing is defined simply by who you send email to. Permission-based emails are sent only to people that have requested or opted-in to receiving your emails. When emails are sent unsolicited it is called spam and can destroy a company’s reputation. Permission-based email stands out beyond spam as a valuable source of communication that allows businesses to reach thousands of clients purposely.

Email marketing has risen to be one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing, and creates the highest return on investment (ROI) than any other form of direct marketing. And to get the maximum out of this form of marketing, one has to ensure that it is done the proper way. And that is to go for a permission-based list.

Build your permission-based email list by creating and placing a sign-up form. Visitors to your site can then use the form to subscribe to your mailing list. Prepackaged Marketing Data ensures that each recipient of a campaign agrees to receive your communications.

Contact us to learn more about effective email marketing. 

Data Privacy is dead?

User data disclosure has always been a controversial issue. It is more than ever in the public eye after former US government contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of PRISM - a large program that saw nine companies hand over user data to the US National Security Agency. 

The current disclosure by Facebook that globally, 74 governments made 26,000 requests for access to information from 38,000 Facebook accounts in the first half of 2013 has again made internet users around the world really uncomfortable. 

According to Facebook's first Global Government Requests Report, the US demanded access to 20,000 accounts, with 79 per cent of those requests granted. India demanded access to 4144 accounts, followed by the UK (2337), Italy (2306), Germany (2068) and France (1598).

Twitter, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are among other companies that have recently published data disclosure logs.

The disclosures have made all worry about their data privacy. How safe is your personal information on the social media? The truth is though the companies fight the requests for information from the government; many-a-time there is not much they can do. Federal law gives government the authority to demand data without specific warrants, and while companies can fight requests in secret court hearings, it's difficult.

We at Prepackaged Marketing Data strongly believe in permission-based data collection. This kind of data provides you a win-win situation as it’s all true information which is validated and always updated.

Want to know more about our data services? Opt for a free consultation

Do you know the objective of your email campaign?

It is true that blogging and social media are attaining increasing prominence in B2B marketing. But that does not in any way mean that email marketing is losing out in the race. It remains an important and cost-effective solution to drive lead generation efforts and build long-lasting relationships with clients. A well-crafted marketing email can initiate sales conversation with valuable leads and also help you stay connected to your clients. So no marketer ever underestimates the value of email marketing.

The first thing to keep in mind while starting an email marketing strategy is to define the objectives of the whole exercise. This is the most important activity. Being very clear about what you want to accomplish through your email marketing campaign is very crucial in order to achieve success.

Being aware of your strengths and weaknesses is vital. If you have just started out, experimenting with email marketing, it is best to keep it simple. Give yourself a primary objective and build from there. Trying to do too much with a limited number of contacts runs the risk of abusing your list and turning off prospects before you even have a chance to win them over.

Define your objectives. What do you want to get out of your campaign?

Do you want to inform and educate your audience?

Do you want to introduce your offerings or enhance your brand and reputation?

Do you want more leads?

Do you want to renew relationships with existing clients?

Do you want more sales?

Each of these objectives can be met using the right type of email marketing. Once you have your primary objective determined, you can easily select which email marketing message will best fit your needs.

With the right email marketing tools in place, you can build a comprehensive email marketing strategy capable of achieving a variety of objectives.

Now that the objective is decided, next what? We will help you with that. Contact us for a free consultation. 

Grow a healthy database!

Growing your database is the most basic requirement of a successful marketing campaign. A large list is often necessary for maximizing your ROI. However, large list full of ‘dead’ or irrelevant contacts will not lead to a great result. A balance between quality and quantity is especially important.

So how does one get hold of the right database? There are countless examples of marketers who have ‘taken the easy way out’ by purchasing a database. However, what these people quickly learn is that purchasing a database is not the easy option. The sender can receive countless bounces and complaints. A list bought in a hurry can result in the sender being blacklisted or even prosecuted if the contacts on the list were not legitimately obtained.

Growing your database with the right contacts will not only provide a better result, it will also ensure you remain SPAM compliant. So how do you build and maintain the perfect database without wasting time and resources? It is easier than you think. The main strategy is to develop methods of capturing contacts into your existing processes and assets. Even a small change such as setting up a laptop with a registration form at an industry event can generate great results for your business.

If you are really short of time or resources you should always approach a reliable data provider with proven track record and testimonials. Always seek a sample of the required data before making the final call.

Yes, you need Social Data!

We know right data is the foundation for an effective email marketing campaign. We also know that personalization is necessary to ensure good open and click through rates. Here is where social data comes into the picture. Impactful email marketing is not possible without social data.

Social data helps in audience segmentation, which is a crucial requirement for email marketing. The days of mass emailing are over. Social data helps in segmenting the audience into groups based on their tastes, preferences, backgrounds, networks etc. Audiences are never the same, so the same message for all is definitely not going to get you desired results. When you have so much personal information about your audience, you can list them into groups and send them emails or messages customized as per the attributes of the individual groups. You can tailor the email subject line and message keeping in mind the user’s profile. Social data improves the targeting, personalization and performance of all your email marketing efforts.

Crafting right messages to the right audiences is sure to attract more eyeballs to your email content. This means delivering email content that's so relevant to your subscribers' backgrounds, interests, and lifestyles that they're inclined to single it out among the heaps of other messages and actually read it.

Let us know if you are facing difficulty finding relevant data and learn more about how social data can drive email marketing performance and improve the targeting & personalization of all of your Marketing efforts.

Data Quality & Corporate Success go hand in hand

Organizations, more than ever, rely on business intelligence systems to make key decisions. There is a huge emphasis on creating applications that can improve organizational productivity and efficiency and generate customer loyalty, for example, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (CRM), and Business Intelligence (BI). 

Companies invest huge amounts of money on these technologies to ensure streamlined business processes. However these systems can only reach its potential if they work on valid data.  Inaccurate data can make the whole system ineffective and impact the decision process as well.  

Decision makers who formulate business plans and strategies based on analysis derived from these enterprise applications are at risk unless a data quality program can ensure data validity at the most basic level. Decisions based on faulty data can cause direct financial loss, undermine customer loyalty, and damage an organization’s credibility. Data quality experts estimate that bad data can cost a business as much as 10 to 20 percent of its total system implementation budgets.

Any business improves efficiency and reduces risk exposure through quality data. After all, the information applications that run the business run on data themselves.

Do not make the mistake of underestimating data. 

Email Marketing Stats 2013

We all know that email marketing is the most preferred internet marketing tool of marketers. Here are some email marketing related statistics (source-salesforce.com) that I think will help you see why:

• 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email. (Convinceandconvert.com)
• Roughly half of an email list will be active – either opening or clicking on emails. (Epsilon)
• 7 in 10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email in the prior week. (2012 Blue Kangaroo Study)
• 39% of marketers have no strategy for mobile email. (eConsultancy  2012 Email Marketing industry Census)
• 72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via email. (Earnest Agency)
• 56% of businesses say they plan to increase their use of email marketing in 2013. (The Small and Midsize Business Email Marketing Survey 2013)
• Monday emails had the highest revenue per email. (Experian 2012 Q4 Email Benchmark Report)
• 27% of consumers were more likely to say their favorite companies should invest in more email. (ExactTarget)
• 1 in 2 marketers use animated gifs in their email campaigns. (Experian Email Market Study)
• This year, about 84% of all email traffic will be spam. (The Radicati Group)
• Email ad revenue reached $156 million in 2012. (Interactive Advertising Bureau)
• Emails that include social sharing buttons have a 158% higher click-through rate. (GetResponse)
• Email marketing spend grows 10% year over year. (Forrester 2011)
• 40% of B2B marketers rated the leads generated by email marketing as high quality. (Software Advice Survey)
• For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on emailmarketing investment. (Experian)

We can help make your email marketing rock! 

The Indispensable Database

“In the 21st century, the database is the marketplace.” - Stan Rapp, MRM Partners Worldwide

Midst all the emerging shiny new technologies and digital platforms, the relevance of database has only increased. Creating, maintaining and using a database of customers’ is utmost important. Database holds much relevance because all your marketing efforts are based on it.

Who exactly are your customers? What age are they? Where do they come from? What are their characteristics & lifestyles? These are the questions your database should answer. 

All relevant details about your customers are crucial to understand exactly who your target market is. It also ensures that future marketing activities are more relevant. Measuring the effectiveness & ROI of your marketing efforts cannot be achieved unless you capture, store and utilize the information from your database. 

Your customer details must be in one place so they’re easily accessible for speed and accuracy with the ability to collate and measure that data. The database should be carefully maintained and regularly updated, to make full and effective use of a database thus created.

A good database will help you understand:

• Cost Per Lead
• Cost Per Sale
• Conversion Ratios – Enquiries to Sales
• Customer trends & habits
• Customer location
• Customer demographics
• Customer lifestyle

We will be happy to tell you about our database marketing services.

Where do leads come from?

Lead generation is pivotal for any business and all marketing strategies begin with efforts to procure leads. So, how do marketers work towards achieving this goal? HubSpot’s 5th Annual State of Inbound Marketing Report gives a comprehensive review of the inbound industry, with data analysis from over 3,300 participants from 128 different countries, including CEOs, agencies, and marketers. Marketers are increasing their inbound spending nearly 50%.

This is the where marketers (B2B & B2C) get their leads:

• B2B companies get twice as many leads from telemarketing than B2C companies do (8% versus 4%).
• B2C companies get 3X more leads than B2B companies do through traditional advertising (9% versus 4%).
• The best three lead sources for B2B companies are SEO (14%), email marketing, (13%), and social media (12%).
• The best three lead sources for B2C companies are social media (17%), SEO (16%), and email marketing (15%).
• The worst three lead sources for B2B companies are traditional advertising (3%), PPC (6%), and direct mail (6%).
• The worst three lead sources for B2C companies are telemarketing (3%), trade shows (6%), and PPC (6%).

Get the best out of your email campaigns!

Email marketing remains an indispensable marketing channel for almost every company -- small or big. It has time and again proved to be a cost-effective marketing channel along with social media marketing.

Do not make the mistake of underestimating the importance of email marketing. Put your best foot
forward when it comes to email marketing. Your subscribers might forget when and how they subscribed for your newsletters or emails. Hence it is very important to keep a record of when and how each of your contact had given you permission.

For an effective email campaign it is crucial to have a ‘good list’. List building takes time but it is necessary. Compile it on your own or hire a list from an authentic list provider. Ensure that your data remains relevant. Also, provide a clear call to action at the end of your email, to help the reader take the right move.

Always include the ‘unsubscribe link’ and place it at a position in your email from where it is clearly visible. Keep the link active for 30 days from the sent date. Ensure it is active and the process is not misleading and confusing.

Provide your contact addresses and phone number in the sender’s address. Make your subscribers feel they are valuable for your business by providing exclusive offers and discounts. In your ‘welcome’ email always provide the timeline and the topic on which the subscribers are going to receive your emails. Always send personalized messages with the ‘recipients’ name.

Segment your list based on various parameters and personalize your email campaign accordingly. Remember one email cannot suit your entire list. Test test and test. Always run a test campaign before sending the final campaign. Testing gives you the idea on which email is going to work.

Finally, it is important that you are aware of the email marketing rules and regulation of your nation and the country you are going to do business with.

             Our data solutions can make your email campaigns deliver! 

A flawless email campaign

An effective email campaign has to start with a well-thought out plan. You need to spend quality time and effort for this. Batch and blast does not work! Planning your campaign is just not about sending out emphatic email marketing emails. There are many other aspects to consider in creating an effective email campaign.

A good plan should answer the questions:

What is the purpose of the campaign: A clear objective will get you a clear path to success. If you send an email without a specific goal, you’ll end up sending generic and uninterested messages. Likewise, your recipients would just read and throw your emails into the trash without taking any action. Be it for acquiring new customers or retaining existing customers or cross-selling or nurturing or educating your recipients or build brand credibility or just to bring awareness, you need to be focused on a single objective.

Who is your target audience: You should know whom you are talking to. You cannot have an effective communication unless you know the receiver of your message. You can create an appropriate pitch based on the need of the target audience. To get niche audience, you need to segment them. Segmentation can be done based on their purchase behavior, sales cycle stages, demography, geography, interests, etc. Once you know the target audience, you can be clear of what can go into your message.

Download free list samples to find out what we can offer to boost your email marketing efforts.

Bad data is bad for business

According to a study by Econsultancy, 50% of surveyed marketers cited database quality as the biggest troublemaker in their email marketing strategies.

Data quality remains a big problem. Working with bad data is like writing on water – a futile effort! Marketers who work with outdated or unqualified databases have their chances at success handicapped from the start.

Over half of businesses (58%) state that clean and up-to-date lists have the biggest impact on improving deliverability.

Marketing Automation Solutions can help you tide over the problem of bad data. It allows you to automate nearly the entire sales process—including personalized touch-points to qualify and nurture leads, data uploads to your CRM system for a complete customer profile, sales rep assignments, and more!

Marketing Automation Solutions allows you to utilize form validation to only allow leads to convert with a valid business email address. With better sales intelligence data, your database will be cleaner and more efficient. The hard bounces you receive from invalid addresses will diminish and the engagement you receive from your prospects will increase.

Increase your chances at success by having the right database. 

Emails deliver!

Research shows that 60% of subscribers simply ignore emails

Marketers are constantly testing and trying new methods of Email Marketing to get the desired response from the target audience. The traditional way of blasting huge numbers of identical emails to relatively unknown subscribers, which is then analyzed by opens, clicks, conversions, and unsubscribes, is proving to be a big waste of time and effort. The need of the hour is a strategy to make your email campaign impactful.

Here are some tips that can make your email marketing rock:

Personalize your mails: Take full advantage of behavioral data. Based on eID digital identity files of users send different content and themes to different types of users to improve accuracy. Knowing user attributes, user sources, access times, browsing history and other information can take you a long way.

Get more interactive: Make your readers participate in the communication not only by clicking on the call to action but also by responding to your mail. Entice them to reply to your mail through tactics like asking for suggestions, offe
ring lucky draws, etc.

Reward loyal users: Give exclusive benefits to the users who have been active subscribers over a period of time. Offer coupons, discounts, and other incentives to reward them.

Always give opt-out option: Always remember to find out why the user wants to unsubscribe. Include this and also try to extract other relevant information like their specific mail preference in the unsubscribe confirmation page.

To make your emails deliver

Data-Driven Marketing Survey 2013

“71% of marketers plan to implement a Big Data analytics solution in the next two years”

Data-Driven Marketing Survey 2013 by Teradata offers in-depth look at some of the key issues pertaining to data-driven marketing. The survey results are based on responses from over 2200 marketers from around the world. The revenues of companies that took part in the survey are at least $100 million or above.

The survey revealed some interesting insights into the relationship between big data and the marketers. Surprisingly, 40% of marketers gave their department a grade of C or lower for using data to drive marketing. And marketers admitted to the truth that less than 10% of companies use the data they have in a systematic way. Demographic data (73%) took the top place with as the data that companies use most to drive marketing and transactional data was the least popular at 38%.

Today’s marketers have been able to harness and leverage big data to produce effective results.

58% of survey respondents see making more accurate decisions as a benefit of basing those decisions on data.

However, lack of funding proves to be a major impediment in implementing data-driven marketing with 35% of respondents listing it at the third biggest obstacle.

The fact that 30% of companies with revenue between $100 million and $500 million plan to add marketing data scientists in the next 2 years is a
positive development. 

The survey results are a mixed bag, pointing to the fact that marketers are definitely making inroads into taking steps towards adopting big data solutions, but one at a time…

Telemarketing works!

The advent of digitization has revolutionized our lives, which includes the methods we employ for marketing. However, certain means do not lose their value even with changing times. Telemarketing, a traditional way of reaching out to your audience, is still an effective tool for your business. It can be an easy and economical way to increase your profits and promote your product or service. The main benefit of using telemarketing is that it allows you to immediately connect with your customer and measure his/her level of interest in your product or service.

That’s not all.

 

Telemarketing has more benefits:

Expand sales territory: You can increase your sales territory by selling to customers in other sales territories, locally, nationwide or globally.

Less Cost: Telemarketing involves lower overhead costs than employing an outside sales force. You can also cut down on the costs of sales visits.

More interactive and personal service:  You can immediately respond to feedback from prospects while you're engaged in the sales process.

Build relationship with customers:  You can use the phone to stay in touch with existing customers, introduce new products to them and make additional sales. Staying in contact with your customers gives you an opportunity to find out more about the client’s needs and build a better relationship. In the end, improved customer satisfaction can have a significant impact on the profitability of your business.

Increases efficiency:  You can reach more prospects per hour, day and week by phone than you can with in-person sales calls.

Additionally, Telemarketing helps

• explain technical issues more clearly
• generate leads and appointments
• achieve results that are measurable

Take Big Data by its horns

The huge amount of data at our disposal is a colossal problem. However, investing in the right tools can give you the power to deal with the ‘Big Data’ predicament.  Companies are currently doing their best to harness the available data – which is humongous – to drive their marketing campaigns.  Big data makes their task difficult.

However, there are ways to deal with the overload of available information. The most important method is to identify the most relevant information required to get you what you want to achieve.

The biggest hurdle is to find the right data from the big data. You cannot utilize data to your advantage unless you have the relevant data with you. All your marketing efforts will bear no fruits if they are based on irrelevant data.

Investing in big data technology is the right way to go. Software such as business intelligence tools can help you in identifying right data. The sorting and analysis process can be accomplished manually after that. So, a combination of automated and manual effort is crucial. Machine and man together can defeat the monster called ‘Big Data’.

Analyzing big data as opposed to simply using data mining tools can be beneficial in several ways, such as enabling decisions based on hard evidence across an organization and knowing that all data assets are being used to their best possible effect.

Better data = Better conversion rate

The returns on your marketing efforts depend on the success rate of your marketing messages. It is pertinent that it reaches the right people. Email marketing is an effective and viable method to reach maximum number of people. However, the effectiveness of your campaign depends on the quality of the data.

Along with effective content, Data Quality is also one of the most crucial requirements in achieving effective email marketing. Your interesting and engaging content for your email can be an utter waste if you end up sending it to a ‘bad’ list.

What components make a bad list?

• Duplicate email addresses
• Dead email addresses e.g. address of a person who is no longer the employee of a company
• Wrong email addresses
• Incorrect email formats
• Spacing errors

So, it is essential to remove bad elements in the data before sending email marketing campaigns. For this, the database has to be cleansed.  This cleansing can be achieved using two methods:

• Software
• Manual

Software is more effective as manual cleaning only eliminates spelling and spacing errors and duplicate emails. However, some data must be removed manually – such as returned and bounced emails.

Uncleansed data can only lead to futile marketing efforts, both in the form of the salespeople following invalid leads and unnecessary expenditure over irrelevant emails. The best practice is to cleanse the data before starting a new campaign. Make sure to remove any incorrect or unsuccessful email addresses from previous campaigns.

If you fail to clean your data it could result in you being blacklisted from both your email marketing provider and also from email providers, which is bad for your brand, reputation and also your marketing.

Having a clean database will improve efficiency and will likely improve your response rates, as a more focused and relevant database is used.  

One size does not fit all!

The primary requisite of any email marketing is list segmentation. Unfortunately, this requirement is overlooked many-a-time with the end result that the email either remains unopened or the click-through rate is very low. Generic content can mean doom to your company.
The content in your email should be relevant to your audience. And that cannot happen without a well-researched and credible segmented list. The same content cannot be sent to everybody on your email list!

Before sending an email one should think ‘who is this for and what will he/she like?’ And based on this information the content has to be focused. Generic content is a definite no-no.
Your email newsletter should only go out to those recipients who are interested in the subject matter of the newsletter. You cannot send email newsletters about your new range of maternity wear to all the customers who have shopped at your online store.  Many in your email list would not be interested in this range; however a section of your customers might be more inclined towards sportswear. So, if you know exactly what content to present to whom, you can hit the nail on its head with your highly relevant message.

Identify groups of similar customers and potential customers, prioritize the groups, target based on behavior patterns, and respond with appropriate marketing strategies that satisfy the different preferences of each chosen segment. Take advantage of segmented lists and enjoy higher click-through rates, better deliverability, and generate more ROI.