How much Email Marketing ROI Good Enough for Business

How much Email Marketing ROI Good Enough for Business

   July 07, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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How much Email Marketing ROI Good Enough for Business

Look no further than email marketing to find the answer to what will generate a 4000%+ ROI (Return on Investment). Hands down, email marketing is the most cost effective and efficient marketing channel at your disposal. So you ask yourself, “Why aren’t I making a 4000% ROI on my email campaigns”? The answer is simple, mobile. That’s right mobile – a smartphone is killing your chances of garnering the huge ROI numbers you should. Let’s look at what you’re doing wrong or not doing at all.

Consider these statistics; 58% of all US adults own a smartphone. Here’s the breakdown by age groups:

• 18-29     83%
• 30-49     74%
• 50-64     49%
• 65+         19%

Now consider that 66% of emails are opened on mobile devices and of that, 38% are opened on an iPhone. More people open their email on an iPhone versus a PC as a whole, which is 34%. Personal and business lives are melding together into one device and everyone, including your competitors, are competing for attention.Optimizing your emails for mobile devices is a sure way to get ahead of the curve with studies showing that only 11% of emails are optimized for mobile. 

Lack of mobile optimization is stopping you from converting readers into leads and leads into sales.While 69% of smartphone users will quickly delete an email that is not optimized for mobile, 61% of smartphone users will immediately leave a website that is not mobile friendly. An email marketing campaign is only as successful as the revenue it generates.The 5 most relevant and important steps to take moving forward are:Design for mobile users. Ensure you design your email creatives to be responsive.

The majority of mobile email clients, including the iPhone’s native mail application, have images enabled by default. Can a user go into their settings and turn them off? Sure, but most people don’t take the time or extra step to do so.Make sure your call to action is clear and in their face. Make it a bold, obvious statement. This is an important step and not just for mobile email campaigns.Make sure your unsubscribe link is not to close to your call to action. Making this critical error can cause your loyal customer to opt-out.Ensure the email addresses in your list are valid and deliverable. 

Sending to dead or undelivered email addresses is nothing more than a waste of time and can irreparably damage your IP reputation. Be sure to clean and validate your email list at least twice per year.The best advice I can give is test your email creatives to your own smartphone. Be sure it is appearing correctly and displaying properly on both iPhone and Android devices. After you have tested your responsive email design and you are sure it looks right and displays properly, then and only then you can deploy it to your newsletter or customer list. If you have followed these basic steps, you should see a big jump in your open and click rate as well as conversions and ROI.

{{ The Guest Post Blogger organization was not involved in the creation of this content. - Dalvi Prabhakar B., Founder & Digital Manager (SEO,SEM,SMO) }}

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Samsung brings new phone to compete Moto E

Samsung brings new phone to compete Moto E

   May 28, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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Samsung is quietly working on a budget smartphone for India to compete against the popular Motorola Moto E which is being sold for Rs 6,999. The new Samsung smartphone is currently being tested. Samsung smartphone with SM-G350E model number runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat and is expected to be priced around Rs 6,500. Samsung's own website listed the User Agent Profile of the Samsung SM-G350E smartphone.

Motorola Moto E was released earlier this month and was an instant hit thanks to its decent combination of price and features. Micromax quickly announced the Unite 2, followed by Lava which released the Iris X1 for Rs 7,999.

Now Samsung is working to bring SM-G350E which said to have a 4.3-inch touchscreen display with 480x800 pixel resolution. It will be powered an ARM Cortex-A7 based mobile processor clocked at 1.2 Ghz and will feature 1 GB RAM. This Samsung handset is said to have 8 GB on-board storage and there will be a memory card slot. This phone will support dual-SIM configuration.

The smartphone will feature 5 megapixel camera at the back and VGA camera in the front. Samsung has loaded the new TouchWiz user interface on top of the Android 4.4.2 KitKat for this smartphone. We may expect the company to introduce the SM-G350E smartphone in a month or two from now.

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First look: BlackBerry Q10 smartphone

First look: BlackBerry Q10 smartphone

   April 28, 2013       Unknown

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The BlackBerry has finally caught up to the world of touch-screen smartphones. It took time - six years, from the launch of the firstiPhone - and it may be too late to save the company that makes it. But the BlackBerry deserves to be taken seriously again.

Why? Because the new BlackBerry Q10 is a successful marriage of the modern touchscreen smartphone and the iconic BlackBerry keyboard.

Though it can be hard to remember, the keyboard used to be a standard feature on smartphones, before the iPhone wiped our minds with its vision of touch-screen Utopia.

Since then, keyboards have been disappearing from smartphones. Physical keyboards just didn't fit into the design mold set by the iPhone. Palm Inc. created a credible, innovative smartphone with a physical keyboard, but it was a slide-out version, which made the keyboard seem like a burden and an afterthought. There have also been Android phones with physical keyboards, but they haven't been very good, and they've mostly disappeared.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry has continued to make well-designed phones with physical keyboards. But until now, it hasn't gotten the software running them quite right. Even with physical keyboards, modern phones need touch screens to control movies, games and other tasks beyond the BlackBerry's roots in messaging. The company has experimented with touch screens, but has been partly hamstrung by the pre-touch foundations of its operating system.

After numerous delays, the company finally came out with a modern operating system this year, the BlackBerry 10. The company considers it crucial to its future, as the BlackBerry seeks to recapture relevance lost to the iPhone and Android devices.

BlackBerry's first phone with the new software, the Z10, is a touch-only device. With the Q10, we really get to see how it works with a keyboard.

On BlackBerrys, the keyboard has always been about more than filling in text fields, and the new operating system takes that further. If you want to send a tweet about what you're eating for lunch, just pick up the phone, unlock it and type "tweet Turkey sandwich again today." Hit Enter, and now the world knows about your boring fare before you've even had a bite.

Just as you can on some older BlackBerrys, you can also launch applications by typing. If you want to play "Angry Birds," instead of flicking through screens to look for the icon, you can just start typing "Ang" and the game icon pops up. Again, that's fast.

The keyboard is handy for music, too. If you're in the apps screen, just start typing the name of the song or artist you're looking for, and up it comes.

I haven't used a keyboard-equipped phone in years, but the Q10 makes it very tempting. There's no getting around it: it's a faster, more accurate way to type, even compared with innovations such as Swype, which lets you "type" by swiping your finger from letter to letter.

The keyboard eats up space that could be devoted to a bigger screen, of course. But BlackBerry has saved some space by eliminating the big buttons that resided between the screen and the keyboard on older BlackBerrys. This results in a larger, square screen. It's very sharp and colorful, too. To some extent, the 3.1-inch screen compensates for its small size with a high resolution, which allows it to present a lot of information, as long as you're willing to hold it close and read small type.

US phone companies haven't yet said when they'll sell the Q10, but expect it by the end of May for about $250 with a two-year contract. It's coming to country's home country of Canada on May 1.

The BlackBerry 10 software made its debut a few months ago on the touch-only Z10. The new operating system is a welcome change, not just for BlackBerry users. It's very quick to get around the phone, and it seldom leaves me baffled the way many incarnations of Android do. It's laser-focused on giving you access to email, texts and other means of communication, as opposed to music, movies and games.

One of the coolest features is the "peek." From any application, you can swipe your thumb up from the bottom of the screen, then right, to slide the application slightly off the screen. That reveals the messaging "Hub," which gathers your communications. At a glance, you can see which accounts have new messages. If you want, you can slide the app farther to the right, getting you into the Hub to read and write. Swipe left, and you're back to where you were.

The interface takes time to get used to, and it doesn't have the simple immediacy of the iPhone. But once you learn it, you can positively zip between tasks.

The downside to the new operating system is its relative dearth of third-party software. There are applications for Facebook, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. A Skype app out will be out soon. But there isn't any app for Netflix, Amazon or eBay. There are no Google apps, either. The selection of games is particularly poor. There's only one incarnation of "Angry Birds," and that's "Star Wars."

I also encountered one glitch while using the Q10 for a few days: I was unable to type my response to one email. Leaving it and going back into it did not help until the next day. That's the kind of problem that's going to frustrate BlackBerry users, so I hope it's a rare one, and one the company fixes soon with a software update.

That aside, the Q10 is likely to be attractive to the BlackBerry faithful. It deserves to lure some people over from Androids and iPhones as well. The keyboard makes the Q10 a good complement to a tablet. Use the bigger screen for entertainment, surfing and gaming, and the BlackBerry for messaging.

When I reviewed the Z10 model in January, I found I couldn't point to anything about it that would make me say: "Forget those other phones: you have to buy this one." I can for the Q10. If you value a keyboard, this is the one to get.

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Where does Google see its future

Where does Google see its future

   April 22, 2012       Unknown

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Google’s Page ‘quite focused’ on lower ends of tablet market

Where does Google see its future in the tablet market? Try the bargain bin.

 Responding to a question about tablets during the company’s earnings call today, Google chief executive Larry Page said: “We definitely believe that there is going to be a lot of success with the lower ends of the market, as well with lower-price products; that will be very significant, and definitely an area we think is important, and we’re quite focused on.”

Tablets running on Google’s Android operating system have struggled to compete with the iPad, which dominates the market.

“There is a number of Android tablets out there, and obviously we have strong competition there,” Page said. 

One of the most popular budget tablets is the Kindle Fire, as Page suggested on the call.

“There’s also obviously been a  lot of success on some lower-price tablets that run Android, maybe not the full Google version of Android,”  Page said, referring to Amazon’s tablet. 

The Kindle Fire is based on Android, but Amazon has reconstructed the software so significantly that it doesn’t help the search giant much. Amazon doesn’t bundle Google’s services, like its search engine, e-mail and social network, with the tablet.

Google has been rumored to be working on a so-called Nexus tablet that will introduce a new version of the Android operating system and sell for a low price. The Verge reported last week, citing unnamed sources, that the tablet’s release date had been pushed back to July in order to reduce production costs.

As part of Google’s harder push into tablets, Page’s ambitions include making Android phones and tablets play better together, probably relying more heavily on cloud synchronization. Google Play, the media hub that the company released last month, will help with that unification, Page said.

“You won’t have to manage all these devices,” Page said. “You want to think about all these screens around you working seamlessly.”

 That goal will be especially important when Google puts a screen directly in front of your eyeball.

                                                                                                              MARK MILIAN

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Internet giants scramble for social media pie

Internet giants scramble for social media pie

   April 22, 2012       Unknown

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Internet giants scramble for social media pie

In India, mobile advertising set to touch $144 crore by 2013. In March 2012, the market was pegged at $105 crore , according to the findings of the Internet and Mobile Association of India

   Last week, when news about Facebook acquiring the startup photo-sharing app Instagram for a whopping $1 billion surfaced, the digital world was abuzz with frantic activity and comments. While the investors and market watchers got busy analysing  the valuation of Instagram  in the wake of the deal, others talked about how Facebook’s appetite to gobble up players had increased over the years.

    Scratch the surface a little a bit and one can see that Facebook was not just trying to net the 30-million strong user base of Instagram, but was rather making a strategic move to  keep competitors (read Google) at bay. As Gartner’s principal research analyst (India)  Asheesh Raina puts it, “Facebook paid a premium, as it wanted to keep Instagram out of the hands of the competitors.”

    Though an eye-popping $1 billion may sound too much a price for protecting its turf from a potential threat, it is nowhere close to what Google paid ($12 billion) last year to Motorola  Mobility to protect its mobile franchise. Or, when Microsoft shelled out $8.5 billion to acquire Skype. Google acquired Motorola Mobility to protect its popular Android mobile operating system from Apple and Microsoft’s anti-competitive threats to its patent portfolio.

     Analysts however believe there’s another compelling reason why Facebook spent big on the acquisition. As research firm Forrester’s CEO George Colony wrote, Facebook is too web-centric:” App internet poses mortal danger for any player that remains too web-centric. It will enable companies to directly link with their customers.”

    The acquisition of Instagram puts Facebook in a better position in the app internet market and perhaps becomes a template for how Facebook will expand its model into the new high engagement architecture, Colony added. Without Facebook’s own app presence, “Apple, Google, Amazon, (and potentially Microsoft) ecosystems can become too powerful, blocking the Facebook’s growth and presence,” he wrote.

     Instagram, a free photo sharing programme, was launched in October 2010 by Kevin Systrom. It allows users to take photos and apply digital filters and effects, before sharing them on social networking sites.

     An article in Fortune magazine in November suggested how the mobile is going to be the next battlefront for Silicon Valley’s web giants. Facebook, Google, and Apple are all competing to attract mobile users and make money off their actions. “Google may also find ways to build many Google+ features right into Android phones and tablets, making it harder for rivals to compete. That last point is not lost on (Mark) Zuckerberg.  It prompted him to seek closer ties with Google’s biggest rival in mobile  ¬¬¬¬¬--- Apple,” the Fortune article said.

      In India, mobile advertising is all set to touch $144 crore by 2013. In March, the market was pegged at $105 crore, according to the findings of Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). Raina feels Facebook is aware that its strength lies in easy interface, photo-tagging and sharing capabilities. Instagram strengthens  its presence in the space. “More, it gives them access to mobile devices and helps users instantly edit, upload and share photos through their devices,” he says.


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