Ex | focused on email marketing sol: netCORE's Kalpit Jain

NetCORE being 15 year old company started off with corporate e-mail in 1998, which offers e-mail infrastructure solutions, mobility solutions and e-marketing which is their biggest product line today where they send approximately 2 billion e-mails a month for lots of advertisers in India.

netCORE solutions, providers of innovative digital communication solutions in the Email and Mobility domains believe in emphasizing enterprises to be more customer centric and deeper in their engagement. With appropriate strategies on expanding footholds towards northern India, netCORE plans to soon come up with a series of knowledge sharing workshops.

The overwhelming engagement during the latest workshops stood as evidence of the fact that organizations are now willing to focus on nurturing customer relationships and reap benefits of the customer-marketer bond forever.

With the number of Internet  and mobile internet users hitting the 100 million and 80 million mark respectively, today’s organizations are focusing on their Digital Marketing efforts more than ever in order to keep pace with the ever changing consumer dynamics. A recent Hubspot research has revealed that as many as 78% of internet users conduct product research online. This makes it critical for organizations to stay on top of the consumer’s mind by investing time in building and nurturing strong relationships with them.

Today with approximately 120 million Internet users in India, the e-mail marketing users have increased too and with the involvement of mobile internet, growth of overall e-mail users been growing.
Adgully spoke to Kalpit Jain, COO-NetCORE Solutions to understand the scenario of e-mail marketing industry and his take on its growth.
He has observed that, “In last couple of years e-mail marketing as an industry  has grown 200-300 percent and we see similar trend happening over the next couple of years for e-mail marketing in India.”

On asking about IAMAI as a body, Jain happily said, “IAMAI is been a very strong partner for us and as a body helped players like us to go back to regulatory with the insights which believe are important for them to know about and things that they need to incorporate.”

E-mail marketing actually started off with battle of blast model where advertiser had database and he used to keep sending e-mails to subscribers. But with time now model is seems to be changing as some advertisers realized that it’s not only limit to sending e-mails but engaging with consumers.

Jain suggested that, “There should be some kind of guidelines to be formed to regulate spam traffic that’s been generated and we are working out to form it not only for service providers like us but for our clients, advertisers and end users too.”

When asked about growth, he said, “Quarter on Quarter netCORE has seen a growth of 15%. Our growth in Email Marketing Business has been really very good.” According to Jain some strategies which has helped them in this growth are: Focus on acquiring new customers, Working with agencies to offer unique mobile marketing solutions to FMCG                                      brands, Email Marketing workshops to educate the market about best practices of Email Marketing and Offering an Integrated Marketing solution to clients over Email, SMS & Voice.

In terms of marketing and promotional strategies that they adopt, Jain believe in Consistent ground work activities to gain progressive momentum and extended recall with Industry Associations & Events, Digital Marketing and Public Relations.

On discussing about the challenges, “E-mail marketing in India is at nascent stage as even today companies still look up to e-mail marketing just as a medium to communicate with their users.  They look up to e-mail marketing as battle of blast model, where they have a subscriber base, they reach out to subscribers and they really don’t worry about how often customer engaging with their e-mails.” Added, Jain.

Defining the market that they are in and their percentage share in that, he said, “Bulk and Transactional SMS Business is of approx 300 Cr in India and we believe we are No.2 or 3 in the space. Email Marketing would be approx 100 Cr and we are No.1 in the space doing approx 200 Cr email volumes/month.”

Today e-mail marketing is still in a stage where some companies have understood the power of e-mail marketing where some companies are yet to understand, companies have to see how relevant or segmented e-mails they are sending out to their consumers because that is what going to get them the best of ROI. Companies need to understand how to get best of ROI and how they should able to generate end sales.
NetCORE as an e-mail service provider over the last four years has done loads of on ground and off ground activities to help companies to come out with loads of creative ideas towards e-mail marketing.

“We were the first ones to start off e-mail marketing workshops in India and we still do it as regular practice. In this process we call lots of customers to whom we give knowledge about how e-mail marketing can be done in better way and what all practices are involved in it what they should do. With all these the end consumers doesn’t get too many mails but on other hand receives the relevant information.” He, explained.

He further added, “E-mail marketing has a bright future in India as today only 15 percent of India population has e-mail addresses whereas 85 percent do not have e-mail addresses that itself shows the future of e-mail marketing.”

In terms of acquiring new frontiers in 2013, Jain concluded by saying, “International Markets is a very important area we want to expand on; Working like a Mobile marketing agency is another important focus for us and building a tech platform which integrates SMS, Email, Voice and helps customers target their subscribers with any medium.”

The need today for Retailers & marketers is to stay on top of the consumer’s mind by investing time in building and nurturing strong relationships with them. According Jain strong customer bond coupled with appropriate best practices of Email marketing will lead businesses to be the best brands of the market.

The several economic downturns during the past decade have made businesses realize that the only factor that enables sustainability during such dire times is the trust that a brand has been able to instill amongst its consumers through its actions. And one can blindly say that there is no better way than Email Marketing to connect with your consumers and still maintain control over your conversations.

Things that differentiate NetCORE from other players is amount of experience in the e-mail space as they are 15 year old e-mail company, they also have a very strong experts team within NetCORE that works well with brands and the infrastructure.