Lead Generation Way Ahead

For technology marketers, content marketing is done with specific goals in mind, and lead generation is a top goal. Overall, their focus is more on measurable outcomes rather than less measurable goals like “brand awareness.” And in order to succeed, they have to be confident in the quality of their data in order to make precise measurements and track progress toward goals.
ReachForce helps marketers increase revenue contribution by solving some of their toughest data management problems.  We understand the challenges of results-driven marketers and provide solutions to make initiatives like marketing automation, personalization and predictive marketing better.  Whether you have an acute pain to solve today or prefer to grow your capabilities over time, ReachForce can unify, clean and enrich prospect and customer lifecycle data in your business, and do it at your own pace.
To learn more about how ReachForce can help you optimize demand generation and your impact on revenue, check out our real-time web form enrichment demo, or request a free marketing data diagnostic. Get the power to let data drive marketing and higher performance.

Email Is Not A Tool, It's A Platform

The new age startups would have you believe that email is dead and would convince you to move on and adopt a multitude of tools in its place. The truth though is that email is not going anywhere and that is because email is not just a business communication tool - it is a platform, a platform where you can market your business, attend to customer support, manage your projects, make cold calls etc.
It is a platform that, with right enhancements, can help you run your entire business, especially for small businesses and startups.
It is, in fact, an open, and a multi-faceted platform on which innovative things are being built.
Email is not dying but is transforming, tremendously. It has gotten much smarter and easier to use, without losing its interoperability or its ubiquity.
If you are wondering why the hell should I try and enhance email through add-ons and extensions when I can simply use tools that don’t depend on email, consider this - instead of using a separate tool for each operation such as customer service, task management, email marketing etc., if you were to enhance your email and base your operations on this platform, it can serve as the common centre for all your business operations. Instead of having to shift from one tool to another, all the information you need will be right there, in your inbox.
Why do I call email a platform?
I call it a platform because of its ability to let us conduct multiple operations right out of the inbox.
Project management
Emails contain a lot of information essential to running a project. For example, a request from a client via email is a task you will assign to one of your team members. You will either do this by forwarding the email to the team member or by using a task management tool.
On that note, there are some innovative tools out there, which can partially or completely integrate with email and work in tandem with the inbox. These enhancements allow you to design your project management workflows, delegate tasks to team members, monitor the status of these tasks and more.
We anyway conduct most of our project management operations from the inbox; complementing this process with the right set of tools can help you perform better. In fact, you can run a whole bunch of virtual teams quite effectively, if you equip yourself with the right set of tools.
Customer support
We already conduct a number of customer support activities through email. Especially for small to mid-sized businesses, email is the go-to customer service platform. You can use an email response management solution to ease your job. You can also enhance your service by using simple features such as email templates (which maintain consistency across all reply emails) or use automation to follow-up on customers after you provide your customer service.
You can also make use of tools with features like Shared Mailbox which allow you to maintain a centralized inbox from where you can assign customer support emails to you team members.
Client management
Email is the best way to manage your relationship with your clients/customers. Here’s why:

• It’s ubiquitous - everyone uses email, you can be sure that all of your clients have an email ID.
• It’s interoperable - doesn’t matter which email client your customer is using (Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook etc), you can still reach them.
• Unlike other Instant messaging options like text messages or Whatsapp, email doesn’t butt into the personal space of the customer/client (which can be quite annoying!)

Sales management
Sales management is another important aspect of your business and yet again, with the right set of tools and features, email can turn into a powerful sales management tool.

• Features such as email templates can make the job easy for your sales team and can help you maintain a consistent tone in all your email replies.
• Using email, you can maintain your relationship with old customers either through follow-ups or through email newsletters.
• It is definitely easier and more appropriate to make cold sales outreach via email than any other means.
• Personalization is an important aspect of sales emails and by equipping your inbox with tools like Rapportive, which provide additional information on a lead, you can personalize the content of the email.
• Tools with features like shared contacts allow you to maintain a centralized list of  contacts for the team.

Also, consider this - email is well-suited to the mobile age.
Another remarkable aspect to consider is that email does mobile really well. Emails are generally lightweight and they can easily be downloaded in the mobile inboxes of the readers and they can respond to these emails (forward, reply, delete etc) with just a couple of clicks - very mobile user-friendly.
Also, for email marketers, the newsletters, if optimized well, will load without any format disruption as email is generally mobile ambient and convenient.
Wrapping up: Email is evolving rapidly and unbundling itself to meet the changing demands of the people and is absorbing more of the technology around it. More often than not, it’s the simple email management tricks like using labels, filters etc. that can help you boost your performance by many folds.
Additionally, don’t underestimate the power of using right tech tools that integrate with your Gmail. They can help you get through the day faster, manage email quite efficiently, communicate better, and run your business effectively.

Google CHanged World How

It’s incredible that it took just 18 years for Google -- the company reached this milestone of adulthood on Sept. 27 -- to create a market capitalization of more than $530 billion. It’s perhaps even more amazing to recall how the search engine has changed life as we know it.
Google, now a unit of holding parent company Alphabet Inc., began in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Stanford University dorm in 1998 before campus officials asked them to find a real office after the Stanford IT department complained Page and Brin’s were sucking up all the university’s bandwidth.
By the time I joined the company in November of 2001, it was apparent that we were changing the world. As an early employee at Google -- the second attorney hired there -- there were times when shivers ran up my spine thinking about what we were building. Democratizing access to information, and bringing the real world online -- it was an inspiring place to be.

Having grown up in a working class neighborhood, I had to travel to an affluent neighborhood to access a good public library, spending countless Saturday afternoons with volumes of reference books to learn how to apply for financial aid to attend college. In those pre-Internet days, a good library and a kind-hearted librarian were my keys to advancement.
After the printing press, the first major democratization of access to information had been driven a century ago by steel baron Andrew Carnegie. He became the world’s richest man in the late 19th century and then gave it all away, donating $60 million to fund 1,689 public libraries across the United States. To my mind, Google took Carnegie’s vision of putting information in the hands of the general public and put it on steroids, creating a virtual library akin to those found only in sci-fi movies in 1998.
Google indexed the internet extraordinarily well without human intervention, unlike previously curated outlets such as Yahoo! or LexisNexis, and in such a way that the user did not have to know how to use the index or Boolean search methods. Google enabled free searches of words or terms, making all manner of information instantly retrievable even if you did not know where it was housed. With Google, you could find any needle in any haystack at any time. Unlocking that data has indeed been a great equalizer: any individual can arm him or herself with relevant information before seeing a doctor or applying for government assistance, housing or a job.

Machines Impact on Financial Services

This includes the hassle of accepting payments in India which still remains in cash. However, merchants today have realized that accepting cash is not the most seamless way for payments. “Merchants have realized that while it may not have an upfront cost but the overall lifetime cost of handling cash is really expensive compared to going cash less,” says Harshil Mathur, Co-founder, Razorpay. Bengaluru-based payment gateway solution provider, Razorpay was part of winter 2015 batch of world’s top seed accelerator Y Combinator.

“With the launch of unified payment interface, Aadhaar etc., in the next two years, the way payments are done will be changed in India. It will also be critical as more and more people enter the banking ecosystem,” adds Mathur.

Gurgaon-based Eko India Financial Services that offers payment and money transfer services to customers and retail merchants believes that data generated by these digital transactions will in-turn help merchants cope up with their working capital issues. “We share the data generated by merchants’ earnings with alternative lending companies who can offer working capital loans to these merchants based on that data as traditionally merchants have been unable to raise working capital loan from formal institutions like the bank,” says Abhinav Sinha, Cofounder & COO, Eko India Financial Services.

Clearly, fintech is the way forward in such cases even as vast Indian population remains bereft of banking services. “A government in favor of dematerialization and online on boarding of the rising rural middle class could only augment the fintech growth,” says Nikhil Kamath, Co-founder and Director, Zerodha – Bengaluru-based discount brokerage firm. However, banks too are undergoing digital restructuring to avoid being on the edge of their seats courtesy fintech start-ups that have been unbundling
banks’ various services. On the face of it, banks, however, term fintech start-ups as partners rather than their possible nightmare.

“Banks have the wherewithal of putting the right governance structure, audit mechanisms, settlement and reconciliation processes in place where as start-ups are good at knowing how to work on the user interface and user experience design. This is a perfect combination to offer better services. I often joke about it saying that if fintech start-ups are to be WhatsApp of today then banks have to play the role of Internet service providers. So both have to go hand in hand,” concludes Ritesh Pai, Senior President and Country Head - Digital Banking, Yes Bank.

There is no astonishment as to how meaningful push notifications have become for mobile. We all understand that a significant amount of a company’s success hinges on their presence in the mobile world. This means that a plausible portion of your business strategy should be based around mobile marketing, while push notifications should be a front runner within that section.
What I learned while managing push notifications at Facebook is that there are a few things to consider when trying to create a mobile presence through push notifications. You should be able to measure it, increase the impact of your program once established and also determine what other channels you should utilize.

1. Measure success.

The question many have is what metric should you use as your KPI to measure the success of your push notifications? The open rate of your notification is the biggest performance indicator when utilizing push. In other words, what percentage of push notifications were opened by users?

The higher the better.

Of course, it’s inevitable to not lose users as they go down the funnel. However, getting users to open your notification to begin with at least brings them into the funnel. Push notifications are more effective when going down a funnel anyway. Therefore, open rate is the metric that is crucial for you to examine, and optimize accordingly.

Open rate does, however, depend on the platform they’re getting delivered to.

Android Vs. IOS

When deciding which platform works best for push notifications on mobile, we can analyze data from Android and IOS. Leanplum.com shows that the open rate for push notifications is roughly 1.77 percent for iPhones, and 3.48 percent for Androids. Meaning, delivering your push notifications to Android Users will create more engagement with your brand and/or app by placing them in your funnel.

This statistic is due to user experience, another important part of making push notifications successful on mobile.

Android and IOS notifications function in different ways. With IOS, as soon as a user unlocks their phone, the notification is out of sight. While Android users have no other option but to acknowledge the notification eventually since it sticks in their notification section.

2. Personalize.

When increasing the impact that your push notification program has, your first objective should be to educate users on the benefits of receiving these notifications. This allows them to think about whether or not they want to opt out of receiving these.

Your second objective should be looking at how many people you currently send them to. While there’s no right or wrong push frequency, you need to experiment and see what frequency works best for your particular platform. If you notice that users are opting out, then maybe you’re being to spammy and need to lower how many you send. If not, you should increase the number you send out.

However, my recommendation to guarantee a much more prodigious impact is personalizing your notifications. It has been discovered that brands who personalize their push notifications leads to an increase of open rates to roughly 800 percent.

3. Leverage all channels.

After you’ve developed an app for your brand, you begin sending push notifications and utilizing techniques to increase the impact of your program. Now what? Do you stick to this method of bringing individuals into your funnel or do you utilize other channels as well?
Many companies are wondering whether or not they should send an email, after they’ve already sent a push notification. The fact is that you should be utilizing multiple channels besides push. You want to send these notifications to every channel possible to maximize reach.
What other channel can you use? As I mentioned above, email notifications are one, along with SMS and in-app notifications.
Email notifications is second to welcome emails when it comes to open rates as well. A push notification coming to a user’s phone is fine and all, but how about also sending it to their inbox, a tool many Americans check every day. By doing so, you maximize deliverability as well.
But what if you’re scared that you may annoy users by sending to multiple channels?
It would be worse if a user missed a piece of information than if they got it twice. Ultimately, you should think about your notification channels (email, push, in-app, SMS) holistically as a “universal inbox.”


Push notifications are influential drivers to maximizing mobile presence. Measuring the open rate, utilizing multiple channels to reach your users, and personalizing your notifications are surefire ways to receive the full benefit of push notifications.

Samsung Gear 360- Catch Any Angle from 0 to 360

Until now, virtual reality footage could only be produced with one of two extremes: high-end rigs that cost thousands and require a film degree to figure out, or cheap cameras with more blur than a Britpop festival.
The splash- and dust-resistant Samsung Gear 360 camera is a much-needed Goldilocks option: It’s smaller than a baseball and mixes pro-level HD video with a consumer-friendly price point, and footage is instantly editable (when paired with select Samsung smartphones, of course).
Don’t be mistaken: A decent 360-degree camera for the masses is a big deal—especially when new YouTube and Facebook features also let viewers explore these videos from their web browser. “As more consumer 360 cameras become available, more content producers will bring us past the current landscape of kitsch and cliché,” says Dillon Morris, a director at Pivot Studio, which creates 360 content.