Telecom Regulatory Authority of India(TRAI) has released a detailed report on number of internet connections in India. Points to note
- These are internet connections and offices and cybercafes have many users accessing a connection so actual number of users in India is significantly greater than these number.
- There are 19.67 million Internet subscribers in March 2011 a yearly growth of 21.59 % w.r.t March 2010
- Broadband users(>256 Kbps) are growing at 35.49% and were upto 11.89 Million at March 2011
- Dial Up and Narrow band users (<256 Kbps) are growing at 5.12% and were upto 7.79 Million at March 2011
- Maharashtra is having largest Internet (<256 Kbps) and Broadband (>=256 Kbps) subscriber base in the country. Tamil Nadu is at second place in internet and broadband subscriber base
Complete report can be found here
Internet lead generation is a big business internationally but in India its value is still to be realized. Having worked in couple of lead generation companies I have seen most of people complaining about the quality of lead generated by internet medium but compared to any other medium it still is your best bet. A research by Leadqual backed by MIT has some very good answers why your lead might not convert well
- Prospective buyers fill out 3-5 lead forms (especially true of those coming from Google campaigns)
- The first to contact a lead increases conversion 238%
- More than 65% of all conversions occur on first call
- Calling a lead more than 5 minutes after a lead is submitted has a 46% lower qualification rate than calling in less than 5 minutes.
- Speed of response is the best predictor of a closed transaction
- Enormous opportunity exists for after-hour and weekend calling when most companies are not staffed for a rapid response
So the key is time taken to respond to a lead created in your system. Here is a whitepaper by Leadqual on the same subject
While you can get visitors to your site by running marketing campaigns and doing SEO the bigger challenge is retaining them. The best ways to achieve this is through email marketing and over the last few years I have done it at an enormous scale in India and have learnt some hard lessons just thought to share them here
Image based mailers just doesn't work:
More than 50% of your users will not see your emails with images so you need to create mailers that will convey the message without using the images also. Images are however necessary to appeal to those users who will see the mail with images since it is a measure of quality for them to differentiate from spam.
Mails on Mobile:
I cannot share exact statistics on this but a large number of respondents have started reading their emails on mobile and those respondents need a text based mailers rather than graphics one thats why one should always send a text version of the mailer.
Email Clients:
Yahoo Leads in India , Outlook is a close second gmail and rediff are other important email clients. the data will vary depending upon the kind of database.
Frequency of sending:
This is only my observation sending more than 1 mailer per week will cause your users to hit unsubscribe button more often.
Clickthoughs on previous emails:
This is the strongest tool to segment your data
Things to test in an email
Subjectlines, Call to action/Offers,Send time and day, email layouts
Listen to feedback:
Quite a few people will reply to the email id you sent mail from. Monitor that id through which you can get lot of abuses but you can get some valuable feedback.
On a last note email marketing is not a substitute to other marketing techniques but it is a very good add on and is especially useful in lead generation and e-commerce offers
Related Reads:
Email Marketing Open and Click rates
Email Marketing Best practices
Image based mailers just doesn't work:
More than 50% of your users will not see your emails with images so you need to create mailers that will convey the message without using the images also. Images are however necessary to appeal to those users who will see the mail with images since it is a measure of quality for them to differentiate from spam.
Mails on Mobile:
I cannot share exact statistics on this but a large number of respondents have started reading their emails on mobile and those respondents need a text based mailers rather than graphics one thats why one should always send a text version of the mailer.
Email Clients:
Yahoo Leads in India , Outlook is a close second gmail and rediff are other important email clients. the data will vary depending upon the kind of database.
Frequency of sending:
This is only my observation sending more than 1 mailer per week will cause your users to hit unsubscribe button more often.
Clickthoughs on previous emails:
This is the strongest tool to segment your data
Things to test in an email
Subjectlines, Call to action/Offers,Send time and day, email layouts
Listen to feedback:
Quite a few people will reply to the email id you sent mail from. Monitor that id through which you can get lot of abuses but you can get some valuable feedback.
On a last note email marketing is not a substitute to other marketing techniques but it is a very good add on and is especially useful in lead generation and e-commerce offers
Related Reads:
Email Marketing Open and Click rates
Email Marketing Best practices
Google owned Doubleclick has released a list of top 1000 sites in the world Facebook and Yahoo lead the list with 540 million and 490 million visitors respectively.The largest Indian site in this list is Rediff at 234 with 12 million Unique visitors per month. Interesting google has kept its own sites Gmail, Youtube etc out of the list. This is part of promotion of google ad planner which is the source for the list. Here are the top 10
A very interesting presentation from founders of two hot startups Xobni and Dropbox. While quite a few things said by them don't work in Indian context there are some interesting points made also but keep in mind that these are product oriented sites and not content based sites. Here are the key statements made by them
- Don't Make your users think ( reduce complexity).Every 10% easier product means 50% larger audience
- Simple landing page: capture interest/email address
- Xobni: Adwords users don't convert to paid but they refer others who do
- Focus: do a few things really well instead of a lot of things poorly
- Freemium Model: Only 3% of Ning users convert to Paid
- Hook the user first, educate over time (tours, tip emails, etc.)
