Customer Relationship Management (CRM) / Digital Marketing

Mr. Rahul Tamaskar, Program Manager at eClerx, delivered a guest lecture to the students of SJMSoM, IIT Bombay. He started the talk by asking the audience about their understanding of e-mail marketing & their preference towards online shopping. He made the audience ponder over a question that why they used to get e-mails and customized advertisements when they add any item in shopping cart & do not complete shopping. Next, he informed that globally 48% of the customers use smart phones to read the emails.

One of the biggest challenges of recent times is to make a responsive design so that the interface & ease of using e-mail becomes same in all the platforms, be it laptop , tablet or smartphone with different operating systems. He thoroughly described the concept of customer tracking in context of e-mail marketing. Then he pointed out the fact that unsubscribing to e-mails determines the number of interested customers and classified the rest of the customers into genuine & lazy recipients. At this point, answering to a question, he mentioned some ongoing research on tracking the customer’s behaviour like time spent on reading the mail, pattern of cursor movement etc.

He explained the fact that e-mails with odd number of bullet points has a higher chance of being read. He then talked about sales automation in B2B marketing focusing on contact management, order management & product knowledge. Answering on the spread of digital marketing in rural areas he mentioned that SMS marketing is also an integral part of the same and   penetration of SMS in all areas is very prominent.

He talked about the Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing and pointed out them as the highest web traffic generator among others but also reminded that they are used for achieving long term goals Describing e-mail marketing as Science, Mr. Tamaskar stressed upon three important points of a successful e-mail marketer, i.e.

·        Segmenting the target recipients in different clusters & offering customized benefits in each segment

·         Relevant and catchy subject line of the e-mail

·         Email address of the sender

Next, he addressed the attribution problem in marketing and stated that individual influence of any medium on the customer is very hard to determine. For example, television advertisements aim for the mass but digital marketing is more aligned to individualistic approach with relevant information. Companies allocate different budget in different approach as their influence, customer base are not exactly same.

At this point he threw some light on the Digital Fingerprinting technique and use of first party cookies in tracking the customer behaviour in digital world. He also touched upon social media marketing and its use. He explained about Drip Marketing strategy where data is fed slowly to potential customers by e-mails or offline events to keep them engaged with the company.

He mentioned some of the prime focus of ongoing research on digital marketing:

·        With the advent of mobile, how to make in-app advertisement more relevant to the users.

·        How to get more information about users using mobile application overcoming the hurdle of application
 sand-boxing.

·        How to make consistent user experience in different channels

Mr. Tamaskar also conveyed that it is imperative for budding managers to have a grasp about the digital marketing in parallel with the traditional marketing strategies.

At this point, he pointed out the success factors of eClerx. More engagement with potential customers, drip marketing, strong knowledge management teams are some of the strong pillars of the company, to name a few. Apart from business by reference of satisfied customers, eClerx mainly focuses on Search Engine Management and e-mail marketing to explore new customer and spread the business across the globe. Customer Relationship Management is the important platform in B2B scenario & digital marketing is a tool to help it.

He concluded his talk by presenting the outsourcing delivery model of eClerx. He explained the roles and responsibilities in different hierarchical positions and in different departments with special focus on the process manager role.

written by,

Somenath Mukherjee

SJMSoM'16