Email Marketing in India: How to get best performance

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