The State Of E-mail Marketing In India

The past ten years have seen an extraordinary flurry of jargons and buzz-words in the domain of marketing. While the only big inclusion in the marketing budgets of corporates is Internet marketing, this term itself can mean so many different things. Search Engine Marketing, blog marketing, email marketing, social media marketing are just some of these new buzz words.

Today we have marketing books just to teach you how to market your brand via a Facebook or a Twitter. While such new avenues of marketing are being created every now and then, only a few of these marketing channels have stuck to being a reliable medium over the long run. A recent study showed that channels like search engine marketing and email marketing are among those that have stood the test of time to remain the best forms of Internet marketing still.

Email marketing has been a rage in the western world for quite sometime. The reasons are not difficult to fathom. Email is still the primary form of communication for most people, they can be personalized at minimal cost, can be used to reach millions at low investment levels. Email marketing campaigns have also shown to provide the highest returns on investment (over 150% higher than other forms of online marketing).

Inspite of all this, quite surprisingly, email marketing has not picked up to a great extent in India. Well, I still keep receiving mailers from an airline I once flew or a movie-ticketing portal I once used to book a movie ticket. But apart from the big names, others in the corporates have not taken to email marketing to a great extent.

According to Ragy Thomas, the Chairman of the Board at Sprinklr, an upcoming Indian email marketing firm, the email marketing scene in India today is at the same level at what was in USA a decade ago. While that is a scope for concern, it is also a scope for tremendous opportunity. According to him, “Email has proven to have the maximum Return on Investment of any marketing channel globally. Couple that with the growing internet user base in India that is projected to be third largest in the world by 2013,  you have a no-brainer opportunity to get in on the ground floor”.

While the yet to be discovered opportunity is something to be optimistic about, there are other factors that can play a crucial factor. The first and foremost thing is the fear of being labelled as spam. As any company will tell you, brands take years to be built and seconds to be destroyed. And as it is, we are all equally flooded with spam mails every other day, and marketers would not want to be seen to be taking the spam route in order to achieve profits. This is possibly the biggest reason why brand marketers are willing to forego the increased ROI for a safer marketing route.

The path forward is thus in increasing the exposure of the marketers to the genuity of such a marketing medium and educating them about how it can be used as a genuine marketing tool and still not be perceived as a spam machine. And this is a task, the onus of which is clearly on the Internet marketing websites that run the show in India.

News Source: The State Of E-mail Marketing In India