NGR's Blog

Complex software projects like NGRPulse, NGRERP, etc, have a long development cycle. You are passionate about technology and someone has to nudge you to start the project. Then you start understanding the domain a bit. The first people who you talk to will sow seeds that will go very deep and will form the genesis of the project. You start giving form to your ideas.

Then you start finding "how" to execute the ideas. You learn about software development, you learn about databases, you learn about web servers and web frameworks. Somewhere down the line, you don't like the frameworks out there so you start to write your own. After a while a prototype is emerges. You are forced to implement it immediately because the legacy software has crashed and the original developer has left the country. You work on your prototype, fixing bugs under pressure and veiled threats from users.

As I started to reflect on this question, my first thought was to look at all the amazing trends that we have witnessed in the Indian Internet landscape in 2011. Here are just a few for context. The total number of Internet users crossed the 120 million mark; ecommerce is now in excess of Rs. 40,000 crores annually; the Indian Facebook population is touching the 40 million mark; there are 50 million mobile data subscribers; new companies and eco-systems are being created around cloud computing, online advertising, mobile applications, web infrastructure, online travel, and much more.

By multiple estimates including reports published by BCG and McKinsey, India will reach somewhere in the vicinity of 250-350 million Internet users by 2015. I took a liberal interpolation of those estimates to arrive at a number of 30 million new users that we will add in the coming year. That’s a staggering number – and larger than the entire population of Australia if you like those kinds of comparisons. However, to truly deconstruct this number and get a sense for what the potential impact this will have for a business looking to leverage this user base, we need to look carefully not just at the users but also at the following ‘inverted iceberg’- where there is more than that meets the eye below the surface.

You have diligently gone through the process of establishing which of your subscribers are actually inactive and more importantly why. There could be a number of reasons for this, but one of the most likely is that your content simply isn’t interesting enough to grab their attention, either in the subject line or in the body of your emails. These are the subscribers that you want to target your re-activation campaign at.

Re-engaging (re-activating) your subscribers is a good idea for a number of reasons. Firstly, the process costs less than if you were to try and acquire new subscribers. Also, having inactive subscribers on your list can harm your reputation and deliverability. This is because client interaction is becoming increasingly important in the filtering decisions with ISP’s. With the aim of identifying spammers, these ISP’s turn old email addresses in to ‘spam traps’ or ‘honeypots’ and monitor email marketers that constantly send emails to these invalid addresses.

Lead management has become a basic necessity for marketing purposes. B2B marketing departments, thorough as they are with their motives of accentuated investment returns, encourage the employment of an optimized lead management process. Nurturing your leads on a mass scale will not provide you with the sales figures that you have been aspiring for. Because each prospective lead’s requirements differ you need to customize your lead nurturing plans accordingly to achieve the maximum.

The lead management lifecycle is a known fact — capturing, nurturing, scoring, timing the leads when they are sales ready and evaluating. An effective lead management helps you to identify the needs of your customers and close the sales deals efficiently. There are different sources of communication, such as the email, phone, social media, etc., where you can meet your prospective customers. Strike and build a relationship with them and nurture them by providing them with research materials and statistics so that they can come to a conclusion regarding the products they want to purchase.

Can you honestly say that you feel the love emanating from your loyal subscribers?  If the answer is ‘no’ and the feeling is more like that of licking a cactus, then you could assume that you aren’t engaging with your subscribers very well, if at all. As you know, engagement is one of the first things you need to establish and meticulously maintain if you want to reach the goals you have in mind. If the thought of this strikes fear in your heart and mind, fear not! Engaging with subscribers has become infinitely easier over the past few years and today there are scores of different online platforms you can choose to connect with your valuable customers on.