Lucini&Lucini India’s Kalpana Rathore on email mktg in 2015
“Email marketing is a tool that cannot be ignored anymore as it is one of the first digital ways to communicate with people individually, creatively, without intrusion and yet more effectively. Hence sooner or later every advertiser who wants to use the digital channel will have to run an email marketing campaign as well,” said Kalpana Rathore, General Sales Manager of India at Lucini&Lucini.
The rise in internet population and the growth of ecommerce sites in India has guided the growth of e-mail marketing in India. Email marketing is not only an emerging digital marketing tool but also one of the most effective tools to target a brand potential target audience, according to Ms Rathore. In an interview to Digital Market Asia, Ms Rathore further explains the potential of email marketing in India.
“With the advent of social media, there was a fear that email would eventually lose its share of the market. Not only is email still a popular marketing tool but it also works particularly well alongside social media as part of a comprehensive strategy,” Ms Rathore pointed out highlighting the competition between email marketing and social media marketing.
A recent industry research by Lucini&Lucini highlighted that email marketing is preferred by 71 per cent of marketers while social media is preferred by 69 per cent. Nevertheless, marketers can customise the content of the e-mail depending on which stage of the purchase cycle a consumer is in, to cater to customer queries and dilemma and enable a conversion.
Furthermore, e-mail campaigns possess the potential to bolster any brand’s social media. If you may have noticed, a lot of promotion marketing emails now carry links to a brand’s social properties such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest etc. prompting consumers to join their groups, become followers or fans or even to share the content of the email via their own social network of choice, added Ms Rathore.
Triggers, personalisation, triggered transactional email and dynamic content are a few tactics that email marketers have used extensively over the last three years. However, the advent of mobile and video have created an even greater need for emails marketing to be tuned to these and be far more responsive.
Email marketing is here to stay and continues to grow in ROI and in its share of marketing spends across verticals which currently stand at USD 40.56 for each dollar spent and a CAGR of 16 per cent, respectively.
As a means of structured communication, email continues to grow in usage and effectiveness, driving more revenue and engagement for the brands that use it effectively. The lines are blurring and as such, email will continue to evolve and leverage the synergies it has today with mobile, social and web to send more relevant and dynamic messaging based on customer behaviour and stated preferences, summed Ms Rathore.
