There have been instances where people have spent more time going through their mailboxes looking for a particular email than actually reading one. While it doesn’t make much of a difference for personal accounts, it can be a major productivity barrier at the workplace. But what really causes this issue?

Unwanted Mail: At some point of time, all of us have had to deal with maiils from unknown/unwanted senders. However, people often think that the easiest way to deal with such a problem is to curse a bit, ignore it and in most cases, delete these emails. This is as effective as killing 1 Mr.Anderson (remember from The Matrix). Over a period of time, you’re bound to receive thousands such emails which not only adds the tedious task of deleting them but also clutters mailboxes thus making it supremely difficult for you to search for relevant mails.

The easiest solutions to this problem:

1. Delete your email account – Well, that’s not really an option for most of us except the “Monk who sold his Ferrari“.

2. Unsubscribe - More than 95% of mails from unknown/unwanted recipients have an ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the mail. It takes just one click on such a link to get your email address removed from the subscription list thus avoiding any mail from the same sender in the future.

3. ‘Report Spam‘ – All email service providers(at least the one’s that the cool people use)offer an option to mark a particular email/sender as Spam. This ensures that any more emails from the same sender will automatically be moved to the ‘Spam’ folder.

While performing an action for every unwanted mail seems tedious, it seems to be the most effective method to keep your inbox clutter free. This is something that needs to be done at the user’s end, but, there is something that email marketeers can do to make the receipients life a little easier.

Just the other day at Smursh we were discussing some bits about an email campaign that we ran recently. It was a highly successful one wherein the number of mails opened, number of links clicked and even the number of links at the end of the mail clicked exceeded the industry average by a huge margin. The last stat being the most important which indicates that people read through the entire email before acutally clicking on links provided at the end of the mail! To top it all, only 4 of the over 550 people that the mail went to, chose to unsubscribe!

How did we achieve this? To start with, we went on to talk about these steps that people take to avoid spam and how we as email marketers should deal with it.

Our initial goal was to not be or come across as spammers, but it went beyond that.

We concluded that the best way to make sure our mails are not unwanted is to add value to them and make them wanted. We have to make sure that people look forward to the mails we send out. And that actually sums up our efforts in all the campaigns we run. We don’t want to make people cringe when they see our mail, and that includes everything from your subject, to your design and finally, to your copy.

Now to take this idea and develop it further!

Smursh wishes you a very happy new year and hope that 2011 turns out to be that perfect year that we all picture in our heads.

We are very much alive!

The new year is Turquoise because they said so.

It is relative to:

• The brand”s objective
• The customer”s want
• The time at which the above two meet

Digital media scores over traditional media because it brings the factor of time rightly into the limelight. It can connect the consumer and the brand when both are in a position to engage. It is the difference between selling insurance outside a cinema hall and selling it at the client”s house on a weekend.

The customer might want it, and the product might sell itself as well, but they need to connect at the right time. The web and the mobile enable this very well. Search marketing for instance is the best example of time based marketing.

How to put time into advertising?

Analyse what information people are seeking, contrive your information according to the speed with which they require the information, and thirdly open avenues for longer interactions later.

Here is an example:

I am looking for the share price of Smursh (whenever it will get listed). I don”t want to know about how a broker’s demat account is practically free (at that moment of time at least), what I need is the share price so just give me a share price. Instead, pitch me an avenue I can use or come to directly the next time I want such an info – SMS update for instance, a Facebook Fanpage or even a website.

Ask him to connect on Facebook or a forum you have to discuss shares and stocks and on those platforms sell your product benefits.

Appreciate a person’t time and he will appreciate you.

Smursh builds conversations as we believe conversational marketing is at the bottom of community building. And we think while technology can enable it a lot better, it is still a people driven business.

Image courtesy: Sean Dreilinger

Smursh Media Story

We provide comprehensive digital media solutions while still being distinctly digital, media and solution providing firm.

All of Smursh’s business interest lies in the digital field, Smursh.com is our flagship brand providing comprehensive digital goodness as a full service agency.

We create our own digital properties including websites, online communities and applications grounding a firm media foothold.

And we use the harness the power of these two to enable effective solutions for brands in their communication needs.

Based in Bombay, Smursh Media enables communication online. We believe in the power of communities on the web, and consider clear and creative conversations as the tool to build them. Getting this done effectively is our constant pursuit.

Overview:

Hokey Pokey is a local Ice Cream Parlour having seven outlets in the city in a short span of 1 year and adding more outlets and branches on a quarterly basis. It has been one of the first to introduce the concept of Make your own Ice Cream in India.

Objective:

With an innovative and quality Product in hand, Hokey Pokey simply needed to reach out to their Customers and increase the footfalls in their Parlors through Targeted and Economical Marketing efforts.

Solution:

Smursh took a twofold approach to the above Objective. First, to become part of real time and day to day conversations of potential and existing Customers. Second, to establish or use an existing  platform to build a community of its regular Customers.

Smursh used tracking tools to discover and monitor conversations revolving around keywords of the Product and its location to enable and be part of conversations. Doing so, Smursh was successful in touching base with its potential customers to make them aware about the brand converting them into Customers by organizing meets and popular events at the parlors.

On the other hand, Smursh parallely established a presence on an existing platform using Facebook. With the help and collaboration of enthusiastic Customers who already had taken initiatives in forming groups, Smursh formed a strong base of fans using Fan Pages and Groups on Facebook. This page now holds a very healthy and interactive community which is part of daily updates, discussions and contests driving indirect sales and branding for Hokey Pokey.

Other than the above, Smursh also designed campaigns which drove engagement for existing Customers and provided added incentives for potential Customers to be part of the Hokey Pokey brand. These campaigns included separate platform design and development which included real time conversation aggregation, online game and viral content.

This happened.

There are many things that make us stay late at work. There are many things that make us don’t work as well. But very rarely do they both happen together. Yesterday however this did happen.

What happened?

This happened.

This blog will be our repository of research, ideas, views and a general insight within and outside of Smursh. Hope you have a good time browsing.

PS: A lot of people have asked us about the meaning of Smursh, so here it is – there is no meaning. It is a play of words with the names of the three on the right, go figure: P.