Online (e-Commerce) and Offline (Brick & Mortar Stores) retailers are responding to these changes in their own ways and to observe how they are evolving, we decided to do a little research. Partnering with the Retailer’s Association of India (RAI) & the Management Institute for Leadership & Excellence (MILE) in Pune, we conducted a detailed survey around the use of technology in retail marketing over a 2 month period.

Covering 110 retailers across the country and industry verticals, the resulting report, called India Retail e-Marketing study 2013, uncovers some interesting insights and data about how the use of technology by retailers in their marketing activities. Some of those findings and highlights are as follows:

• Primary Marketing Goal:

  Customer Acquisition was revealed to be the primary marketing goal for retailers with 54% of them choosing this option. Customer retention and brand awareness have fallen behind at 22% and 19% respectively according to the inputs of both online (e-Commerce) and offline (brick & mortar stores) retailers.

• Going Online:

  32% of all retailers surveyed intend to expand their online presence while 14% opined that they are going to initiate online services this year. Thus, in all, 46% of retailers are looking to develop their online presence. This is on par (at 46%) with the number of retailers looking to increase their offline retail presence for our sample. The digital medium is thus surely on an upward curve and is soon to catch up with offline marketing in terms of importance to retail marketing significance.

• Engagement:

  For customer engagement, offline retailers and online retailers did present starkly different opinions. While 58% of offline retailers feel sales & special offers get them maximum engagement only 20% of online retailers feel the same way. For 60% of the online retailers surveyed, email marketing is the more preferred platform for customer engagement while (surprisingly) only 10% went in favour of social media.

• Email vs. Social:

  For offline retailers and their investments into online marketing, 71% of them chose social media while 34% chose email marketing. At the same time, when looking at online companies, we see that a good 70% of them will invest in social media marketing but an equal number (again at 70%) will also invest in email marketing. Mobile/SMS marketing features at a much lower 32% for all retail marketers surveyed.

• Using Analytics:

  Demographics (age, gender, location etc.) and average basket value were the top metrics (at 64% and 49% respectively) employed by Indian retailers to understand their customer base. When it comes to using the number of transactions per customer as a metric, 60% of online retailers and 44% of offline retailers employ it. Income by segmentation was the least favoured metric by all retailers (at 34% total).

As it can be seen, many of the retail companies surveyed are actively moving beyond their traditional online or offline roles and experimenting with different channels, technologies and modes of operations. As you can understand, these highlights and insights cover just some of the unique findings from the report. If you would like to read the entire report in more detail and to further, you can download a free copy in PDF format at www.octane.in/research.

Hope these insights and findings help you in your marketing efforts as well!

-     Team Octane

Asking permission has always been a sign of your respect for others, and this philosophy is becoming more and more prevalent and important in today’s ever changing business environment. Consumers are becoming smarter and more demanding. Gone are the times of accepting whatever the company decides to send; now it’s all about the consumer dictating the information they want to receive. Permission marketing is when a potential consumer gives permission to a company to communicate with them by delivering them the information they want to receive. Opt-in forms are the bread and butter of the permission marketing game and today’s marketing environment. The goal of the opt-in forms is to basically take permission from visitors and customers to communicate regularly with them. It also is very important to realize that without obtaining permission through opt-in  forms, your email campaign is just considered spam; which not only affects your brand image and credibility, but also your innate ability to send emails.

Where should I put it?

Most visitors to your site are not going to search your website in and out to find the opt-in form, this is why you need to make sure you put your opt-in form in locations that the potential subscriber will see as well as acknowledge. The reason why placement is important is because most of the time the reader will not visit your site with the goal of registering to communicate with you. You need to place the ‘call to action’ in locations that attract the customer’s attention. Here are some of the main and predominant places to place your opt-in form:

• End of your blog post or other company resource.
• The subscriber has just finished reading your blog post and liked the post enough to  finish it. It is likely then that they want to receive more information from your company, so give them that opportunity with your opt-in form. This can also be true for other resources such as case studies or white papers.

• The Landing Page
• Your potential subscriber has just started to visit your landing page and they like what they are seeing. You need to give them an option to receive more information and content; this is exactly where your opt-in comes into play. The landing page can contribute the greatest number of registrations if placed correctly.

• Footer of webpage
• Place it at the footer of each of your company pages. The same as with the company resource; if the subscriber makes it to the bottom of your page, which ever page it may be, it should indicate a level of interest in content that you are providing so give him/her the opportunity to sign up for more.

• Social Media Pages
• You send out updates when a new blog post or video gets released, why not try to engage these subscribers who already follow you on social media? On Facebook, you can use an app to create a plug-in for your home page to acquire subscribers. For our company’s Facebook page, www.facebook.com/octanein, we use a simple subscribe now tool which we placed along the top banner of our page as seen below.
  
  
  

  Don’t forget to share the opt-in link through social media as well. For example if you have just shared a video through Facebook and Twitter make sure you send out a follow up post stating if they want more content and resources to sign up through the link.

How and When?

Have a nice clean call action which should entice the reader. Avoid generic call to actions such as ‘sign up now’. Try something such as ‘Sign up for our Newsletter’ and then give a short description on what are the benefits of signing up. For example the link below which is one that we use on our company website indicates the call to action which is ‘Subscribe to Our Newsletter’. It is followed by what the subscriber can expect to receive which should entice the subscriber enough to register their email. This simple opt-in form can be placed in many different locations because of its size and simplicity. Below is an example of a small opt-in form we use on our homepage www.octane.in.

On the opt-in form, keep it short and sweet. Make sure you clearly explain what benefits they will receive and how often to expect it in a clean and concise package. The form is all about creating trust between you and the subscribers, and messy unorganized formatting doesn’t foster this trust. Keeping in line with the trust factor, don’t ask for an excess of information, only relevant information such as first and last name, email address, mailing address and geographical location. This data can be very useful in segmenting your subscribers. You also need to realize there is a fine line on how to ask for it. The more information you ask for, the more uncomfortable the subscriber will become and the chances of them backing out increases because they feel uncomfortable revealing the information.

Double opt-in

So far we have been only talking about single opt-in which is when they sign up, they automatically get added to the mailing list, but it is important that we also mention double opt-in. A double opt-in is when the subscriber signs up, a confirmation email is sent to their email and they must click on the link provided to confirm their addition to the mailing list. It is important to note that people who are really interested in signing up will proceed with the double opt-in process. This is a good way of maintaining a high quality and interested number of subscribers on your list.

We hope after reading this you have learned something about opt-in forms and how they can help your company grow. Try to test it to see which opt-in list call to action has the most traction and attracts the most sign-ups for your resources.

- By Team Octane

So what is A/B split testing?

It’s actually very much like it sounds, you send out multiple options or versions of your campaign to multiple but distinct groups of your customers to see which version gets the best results (such as opens, click through rate, conversions or shares).  For example, let’s say you have a list of 50,000 subscribers and you are deciding if it is better to send the email on Monday or Friday. Well you could create two separate campaigns and send version A to 25,000 of your subscribers on Monday and version B to the other 25,000 on Friday.

This way, you can then take a step back and analyze which campaign was better received by your subscribers. By comparing the differences between the two campaigns, you can then identify what worked and what didn’t. These insights can be implemented in future campaigns (with minor variations when necessary) so that you can consistently get good results.

Another way of doing A/B testing is to use only a sub-set of your subscriber list. For example, if you have a list of 50,000 recipients, you mark 2,000 of them for testing. You can then send campaign A to 1,000 of them and campaign B to the other 1,000. Then you analyze which was more successful and send that campaign to the remaining 48,000 to get the best results.

Different kinds of A/B split tests

The number of A/B split test options are only limited by your imagination. The most common forms of A/B split testing would be associated with timing. Timing is about when (time, day, date) you want to dispatch your campaign. Another common form of testing would be with the format or design of the mailer. This can be in terms of the text to image ratio, content placement, call to actions, colours etc. Here, we would like to mention that lesser number of images is better for your mailers (due to default image blocking in email clients) but A/B split testing is a great way of finding the right ratio that works for you.

Another one of the more important but often over looked tests is in relation to the subject line. This is so because the subject line is one of the single most important factors that determine if the reader will initially open your mail or not. We’ve seen that a great subject line goes a long way in positively impacting a campaign’s open rates. Similarly, other A/B test options can be font size variations, placement and size of ‘call to actions’, colour schemes, recipient location or demographics, subscriber behavior and history and so on and so forth. The number of ways you can segment your data will provide you with options for these kinds of test campaigns.

If you are looking to truly optimize the effectiveness of your mailers, then A/B testing is something that you should definitely be doing. By knowing which format and elements work the best, you will be aiming for and unlocking greater engagement from your customers. It all comes down to better understanding what your customers like and how you can tailor each of your campaigns to better suit their preferences and requirements leading to more productive conversations.

-Team Octane

• Develop a clear goal: Much confusion about the value of a newsletter can result if the marketing goals of the newsletter are not defined or are unclear. For instance, if a newsletter is supposed to jolt the readers and make them click and generate leads, then its content should be very different from when it just needs to communicate and give people food for thought. A clear concise path that leads to a compelling call to action is what is needed for a great newsletter structure.
• Deliver what you promised: A common cause of newsletter failure is that companies fail to follow what they promise to people while signing them up. For example, your sign-up page might say that the newsletter brings you best-in-the-industry white papers and marketing studies, but if your subsequent emails don’t provide this information, you risk losing the goodwill of your subscribers.

  Similarly, if you promised them news, updates and information but end up trying to sell them a product or service, then again expectations don’t meet reality and you could end up with a few unsubscribes, or worse still, spam complaints.

• Avoid the extremes: Let’s not forget that people are in a hurry and nobody wants to receive a newsletter that has about 1,000 words of content, no matter how valuable. On the same note, a newsletter that’s only a few scattered lines does nothing more than waste the subscriber’s time. Always plan the content carefully, in terms of quality as well as quantity.
• Make it mobile friendly: Your subscribers are increasingly checking their emails on the go on their mobile phones and tablets (as research indicates). So make sure your mailer design doesn’t break on different devices. Even the best newsletter content can lose all its impact if it looks like a broken mess of gibberish on somebody’s phone. Instead design it in such a way that people don’t mind spending a few extra minutes reading through it on a smaller screen.

A newsletter is all about planning in advance, meeting the expectations of your subscribers and maintaining the right kind of balance between information and promotion. Even with all the spam complaints, people still do sign up for information that is relevant or interesting for them and give us the privilege of getting in touch with them on a regular basis.

As marketers, we shouldn’t abuse that opportunity and make sure that every time we dispatch a newsletter campaign, it is for the benefit of the subscribers. After all, customer goodwill is a huge component driving forward any marketing ROI expectation and your newsletter is a great channel for developing it.

-         Team Octane

• The #jeeppuzzle: Some time back Jeep launched a remarkably clever Twitter campaign built around a puzzle. Solving this puzzle required gleaning clues from pictures, but to reveal the pictures you had to follow the given Twitter profiles in the right order. One can imagine the delicious struggle people would’ve gone through figuring out the right order! Needless to say, the interactivity and the ‘quest for a prize’ element worked wonderfully for the company and its followers.



• Artist Greg Burney: Artist Greg Burney really wanted the world to know his talent. A tall order, no doubt, but it was made possible by using Twitter creatively. Burney’s masterstroke? He offered to draw the profile pictures of the first 3,000 people to follow him on Twitter. It sure must have been a lot of hard work, but it paid off handsomely as Burney managed to get over 4,400 followers. What does it tell us? You can get the attention you desire if you earn it the right way.



• Barack Obama on Twitter: Today, no one can ignore the very important role social media is playing once again in the American presidential elections. Twitter has become a serious platform for promotion, debate and influencing public opinion. For the presidential campaign, reaching out to people directly helps offset the anti-incumbency factor so pronounced by the four years of recession hit economy. This is all an exercise in marketing and growing the Obama brand via greater engagement with their audience (the voters) and increasing the base of donors to contribute towards the election fund.



While people might feel constrained by the limit of 140 characters, we hope that examples like these put into perspective the benefits of working around such limits using creativity, value and genuine interaction with your audience. These are therefore, better ways of engagement using social media than just broadcasting content.

 

-          Team Octane

 

Given how widespread the problem of spam is, ISPs and mail servers actively employ a variety of techniques to detect spammers, and if you’re not careful, you could get classified as one. Worried for your campaigns? Don’t be! Just follow these eight simple tips and you’ll be safe:

1. Avoid spam phrases: Malicious emails like to use certain types of phrases to trick potential victims. So while you might think using something like “full refund” is persuasive, this can actually send off the alarm bells ringing for the spam filters. Make sure you are aware of the common spam phrases and avoid them.
2. Don’t buy lists: Never buy email lists, no matter how tall the claims. Such lists contain defunct and non-permission based email addresses that will increase your bounce rate, increase the chances of being marked as spam and affect your campaign’s performance negatively.
3. Go easy on images: Images make a newsletter look good, but overusing them results in your messages being classified as possible spam. Make sure there is a good amount of text also by sticking to a 60:40 ratio in favor of text.
4. Keep the message size small: As much as possible, keep the size of your messages small. That means attaching smaller files and sacrificing those fancy fonts. Same goes for the artwork, which should be restricted to a minimum.
5. Practice segmenting lists: Segmentation of mailing lists makes sure your emails are more targeted and personalized. This reduces the likelihood of an annoyed user hitting the ‘mark as spam’ button and more often than not, segmentation also boots your ROI.
6. Use credible “From” addresses: Deliverability is also affected by the choice of “From” email address. Use only highly trusted prefixes like “jobs@”, “contact@”, etc. and avoid anything too cryptic, vague or radical.
7. Make use of feedback tools: Most mailbox providers have tools to help email marketers get feedback on deliverability. Tools like FBL (Yahoo!), JMRP (Hotmail), etc., can instantly tell you how your subscribers are reacting to your campaign.
8. Be consistent in email scheduling: Sending regular email traffic is considered more credible by ISPs than alternating between hibernation and hyperactivity. Plan a schedule for email dispatch and stick to it.

Avoiding the spam folder is a lot more work than first meets the eye. A sound knowledge of the best practices and constant monitoring of your efforts are the only safeguards against this pitfall. Follow these tips and you will definitely see a positive difference in your campaign results.

-         Team Octane

• KennethCole’s Arab Spring gaffe: The best way to become the center of attention is by doing something connected to the popular events, but KennethCole took the advice the wrong way when it tweeted this during the Arab Spring:

  The backlash was swift and embarrassing. #KennethColetweets started trending on Twitter as scathing criticism and clever spinoffs started pouring in, resulting in the kind of publicity the company never intended. The CEO duly issued a public apology later, but it could do little to mend the millions of sentiments hurt.

• McDonald’s Twitter bane: Usually known for its smart social media strategy, McDonald’s thought it was on to something interesting when it launched the #McDStories tag to channel conversations and optimize conversions. Surprise, surprise! The hashtag started attracting more negative stories than positive ones, and the situation soon got out of hand. One only needs to sample this tweet (courtesy LA Times) to understand how unpleasant it must have been:

  “These #McDStories never get old, kinda like a box of McDonald’s 10 piece Chicken McNuggets left in the sun for a week.”

  
  The lesson here is clear: Social media doesn’t always behave as you want, and it doesn’t take long for the exception to become the rule. Factor in these considerations when planning your campaigns.

• HabitatUK’s sour apple: HabitatUK came under heavy fire for taking recourse to hashtag spamming for promoting its products. Imagine the plight of Apple aficionados when their Twitter searches for the latest news started throwing up discount offers:
  Within seconds users started bombarding @HabitatUK asking them to justify this blatant hashtag spamming. It’s not clear how much HabitatUK gained in terms of business from this campaign, but it sure lot a lot of reputation and future customers.

So there we have it. Three examples where brands that saw their social media bandwagon derail in no time, all thanks to lack of foresight. Incidents like these go on to show that on social media, the consumer has as much influence as you do, building your online reputation is something that needs time, dedication, sincerity and capable tools that can give you proper insights and guidance. Recognizing this and using social media cautiously but effectively can lead to results that have a positive impact on a business and its reputation.

- Team Octane

Here are some important considerations for such marketers aiming at the mobile environment:

• Location is the key: Mobile users carry their smartphones everywhere they go, which makes location the strongest leverage a marketer has. It allows mobile campaigns to be dynamic; offering users content and special offers based on where they happen to be. It works because it can be a positive experience as well as a highly convenient tool. Mobile devices have built-in technology for discovering location, so do make use of it!
• Optimize for mobile: Do you have a website? Then make sure there’s an excellent mobile version also. Same goes for your emails, which are increasingly being accessed on mobile devices. From banners to artwork to content, everything needs to be calibrated specially for the mobile. This helps improve user experience substantially and allow your message to really shine through.
• Customize heavily: The attention span on the mobile is far shorter, which means higher relevance leads to better results. Your content should be extensively customized based on the user’s needs, be it email messages, apps, promotional offers, or something else. Of course this means you’ll have to make a greater effort to find out more about the end-users, which brings us to good engagement.
• Put some fun into engagement: Mobile is fast-paced and users expect to enjoy their interactions with their devices in various ways. Gamification techniques can help you build conversations by rewarding people for participating. Another idea is to use QR codes to attract potential customers and give them something special for the effort.
• Make things easy to find: Mobile devices have smaller screen-sizes, have limited hardware navigation tools and are dependent on wireless data connections; which means users don’t expect to dig through multiple links or pages to find information that is of interest to them (as they would otherwise on a desktop). Work on being accessible and making interfaces as simplified and goal-oriented as possible.

The on-going digital revolution demands that we as marketers look at the world with a new set of eyes, the eyes of the mobile customer. In this fast-paced and evolving world, the price for increasing returns and success is constant innovation and creativity.

-         Team Octane

The basic idea is this: Email addresses get de-activated by the ESPs (such as Yahoo, Google, Hotmail etc.) if there is no activity on them for a certain amount of time. Once they get deactivated, the control for those accounts lands up with the ESP which then occasionally reactivates them secretly to check if they are still receiving any mail. If such an email address receives a promotional email, then the sender is dispatching unsolicited communication to obviously inactive IDs and hence spamming.

If the sender was actively checking the campaign results to see the bounces and segmenting the mailing list to remove the deactivated email addresses, then it wouldn’t be a problem. The fact that they are not doing that shows they are not keeping an eye on the recipient activity and hence exploiting the communication channel blindly. The result? Blacklisting.

If you are an email marketer, the prospect of being ‘blacklisted’ should sound off your alarm bells. But then how do you make sure you are not sending mailers to such spam traps by mistake? Here are some easy tips to follow:

• Keep it easy to unsubscribe: The unsubscribe link should be clearly visible on each email you send. After all, if someone doesn’t want to be on the list anymore, there’s no point trying to trick them into staying. Letting subscribes go when they want will also keep your list clean, besides reducing the chance of falling for a spam trap later when such a user abandons an email address.
• Employ double opt-in: When people sign up for your mailing list, you should make sure they are the genuine and actually interested in receiving your emails. One way of doing that is by putting in place a double opt-in system, wherein you complete the subscription only after an email confirmation. In other words, the user’s consent is taken twice to make doubly sure he/she knows what they are opting in for.
• Never use scrap addresses: If you expand your email list without much consideration, you risk ending up in a spam trap. Never use purchased email lists or databases, no matter how low the cost; and never send unsolicited emails, especially to role-based and generic email addresses (jobs@, info@, etc.). A home-grown email list does take time to grow, but it is your best bet for long-term benefit.
• Take email bounces seriously: Get more proactive on email bounce management. If you encounter a hard bounce, for instance, immediately remove the address from your list or add it to your suppression list. Similarly, put more thought into understanding soft bounces and how you can minimize them so that your campaign results improve.

Spam traps play an important role in curtailing spam activity on the Internet, but for a careless email marketer, this is akin to landmines hidden randomly all over the digital space. To avoid being black-listed, all you have to do is be smart about your email list management and follow industry-approved best practices. After all, email marketing is more about engagement than it is about reach.

-         Team Octane

The decade gone by saw a cold war on these lines between Microsoft and Linux. While Linux could never challenge the ubiquity of Windows in the desktop space, it did manage to sweep clean the server market. For most of that time, Microsoft laughed all the way to the bank but the open source movement rolled on, producing marvels like virtualization and big data. In the end, before there could be a verdict, the rules of the game changed.

The Rise of the Smartphone

Desktop software and hardware manufactures, dominant players in the computing world for more than two decades, suddenly found themselves unprepared for the unexpected revolution of mobile devices. Almost overnight, the iPhone became the device of the future and a few years later, the iPad launched to much fanfare eventually outselling laptops and desktops in the large US market. Simultaneously, the release of Android, made possible the enormous variety of hardware types and specifications in mobile phones and tablets that could never previously be imagined. Computing had gone mobile with new players dominating the field; Apple and Google, while traditional giants such as Nokia, Microsoft, Blackberry, DELL and HP were left scrambling.

Open or Closed?

Developers always detest multiple platforms. Releasing new software is trouble enough without having to customize it for multiple platforms. But that is exactly what the smartphone revolution has left us with. For a business or an independent app developer, there are many operating systems to consider – Symbian, BlackBerry OS, iOS, Windows Phone and Android. Each one of them now offers an application store and a pool of millions of potential users; but neither offers any level of inter-compatibility or inter-connection.

So essentially our predicament from the desktop era still remains: Should the platform of our choice be open or closed? While open platforms do tend to promote greater freedom of choice, they are harder to control and monetize (let’s not forget Android still doesn’t have a real revenue model). A closed system is easy to monitor and profit from, but the tightrope walk is not for everyone – for every Apple, there is a RIM.

Today, it really doesn’t look like systems can be truly open; if recent patterns are anything to go by. Google had to step in to control hardware (with the acquisition of Motorola Mobility) in order to guide the destiny of Android. Then there are the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, who have their separate hardware devices and forked ‘walled’ versions of Android!

So the most logical thing to do in such a dynamic environment, as consumers, developers and end users of these platforms, is to celebrate the availability of choice. Never before in history have we been given such a wide pool of innovative systems to choose from and while cross compatibility is a nightmare, there is more to celebrate here than worry about (patent wars aside).

In the end, it all comes down to individual preferences, application requirements and business aims but we should recognize that we are getting the best of both the worlds, open and closed; which one we choose is entirely up to us.

-         Team Octane