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Is Google AdWords 15X Better Than LinkedIn Ads?

When we’d last executed search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns on Google AdWords and LinkedIn Ads, we found that, Google attracted almost 15X greater traffic than LinkedIn. We recently did a couple of B2B technology campaigns on these two advertising platforms. On this occasion, we compared not only their CTR percentages but also their cost-per-click (CPC) figures. Read our blog>>>

SaaS Will Change The Outcome Of The Bloatware Versus Light Apps Debate

We recently developed and delivered a mobile app called RAPP360. Short for Residency Audit App 360, RAPP360 makes it very easy for people having multiple residences to respond to tax audits from different jurisdictions by providing a detailed log of their physical location over the previous years. Read our blog>>>

ePayments Have A Long Way To Go

My stock trading account and the bank account to which it is linked are both held at the same bank which is a Top 3 private sector bank in India. Around five-six years ago, this bank changed all bank account numbers from 11 to 12 digits by adding a leading zero at the start of the old account number. Therefore, an old account number like 001 0400 8953 became 0001 0400 8953. Read our blog>>>

Is Email Principally Unsuited For Delivering Statements?

In the past, I’ve given several reasons to explain my preference for printed bills and statements. I’ve recently begun to feel that there’s perhaps a more fundamental and deep-rooted reason for my aversion for e-statements. Read our blog>>>

Beware Of Losing Sales With Bad Loyalty Programs

It wasn’t so long ago that I’d blogged about how one particular retailer’s loyalty program actually bred disloyalty. The ink is hardly dry on that post and I’ve already found another retailer that’s going down the same path and is bound to lose sales as a result of its poorly conceived loyalty program. Read our blog>>>

The Tug-of-War Between Different Pricing Models

Marketers are familiar with cost-plus and value-based as two most frequently used pricing models for products and services. Under cost-plus pricing, all input costs are totalled up and a markup is applied on top to arrive at the selling price. On the other hand, value-based pricing sets the selling price based on brand, competitor prices, perceived value of pain solved or gain created, and many other factors that are not linked to input costs. Read our blog>>>

Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon – Part 3

In this concluding part, we’ll explain what omnichannel behavior could mean in the context of retail banking and suggest ways by which banks could jump on to the omnichannel bandwagon even if they didn’t / couldn’t fix shortcomings in their current multichannel offerings. Read our blog>>>

Fortune GLOBAL 500 And Indian IT Companies

In its 15 Aug 2011 issue, FORTUNE magazine acknowledged that it “erroneously omitted Chrysler Group from the GLOBAL 500 list” published a fortnight earlier. It goes on to regret this error. Sounds more like a blunder to me. Apart from this blemish, this year’s FORTUNE GLOBAL 500 issue is a lot better than the lacklustre one of last year’s. Read our blog>>>

Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon – Part 2

In Part-1 of this blog post, we introduced the concept of omnichannel banking and explained how it differed from multichannel banking. We’d claimed that 100% multichannel support was neither necessary nor practical. In this Part-2, we’ll explain why. Read our blog>>>

Differentiate Your Product By Going The Extra Mile – Part 3

When I wrote Differentiate Your Product By Going The Extra Mile, I’d meant it to be the second and concluding post. But, I recently came across a few more updates – some positive and some not so positive – on this subject that I thought I must share, hence this third part. Read our blog>>>

Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon – Part 1

Enough and more has been written about how banks lack fully fledged multichannel support. The degree of multichannel support offered by banks varies from product to product and from one bank to another. Let’s take the example of opening a checking account. Read our blog>>>

GenY Is The Sweet Spot For QR Codes In Ads – At Least For Now

The use of QR codes in advertisements continues unabated. We came across three of them on a single day recently. As you can see below, there’s one from the leading Indian retailer SHOPPERS STOP, another from THE BODY SHOP, the UK-headquartered multinational that is the global leader in ethically produced beauty products, and the third one from the leading IT magazine DATAQUEST. Read our blog>>>

Differentiate Your Product By Going The Extra Mile – Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog post, we’d compared the realtime SMS alerts for credit card transactions sent out by two banks, BANK1 and BANK2. In this Part 2, we’ll look at these SMS alerts as ‘products’ and see how well they work for the customer towards detecting and preventing fraudulent credit card transactions. Read our blog>>>

Differentiate Your Product By Going The Extra Mile – Part 1

Credit card holders in India might have noticed of late that they’re receiving SMS alerts on their mobile phones each time they use their cards. I’m not sure if this is a bank/card-specific initiative or the outcome of some new government regulation applicable across the industry, but I’ve been receiving these notifications from the issuers of both my Visa credit cards since the middle of June. Read our blog>>>

Art Meets Science With A/B Testing – Part 2

We were recently curious to find out if there was any scope for improvement in the text and color of the CTA element on the homepage of our EMAIL360 website. Read our blog>>>

Art Meets Science With A/B Testing – Part 1

Beneath their hoods, software applications and websites may be all science but there’s a lot of art on their surface. There’s no right answer when it comes to screen layout, color schemes, navigation flows and other design elements. Read our blog>>>

Goodbye SEO, Welcome SDO

In the first part of this post titled Does Google Find Something Different About You?, we’d covered the ‘Something different’ section of Google search results. In this part, we shall explore reciprocal relationships between a company and its SDG members. Read our blog>>>

Usability Can Cut Costs

Usability is generally associated with benefits like reduced friction, superior UX and greater cross-selling for e-commerce providers. During a recent transaction, I realized how better usability could also cut costs for an online business. Read our blog>>>

Does Google Find ‘Something Different’ About You?

Although we believe it’s been around for a while, it was only recently that we stumbled upon the ‘Something different’ section on the left-hand panel of Google search results. Read our blog>>>

Developing The Product Mindset

India has done very well for itself as an IT services destination Recently, there has been a mushrooming of IT product companies in India. Product companies need to recognize that the product business calls for a different mindset. Read our blog>>>

Who Will Bell The ‘QR Code Reader’ Cat?

In the three months since we’d written about QR codes, their usage by advertisers has seen strong traction. However, after a quick-and-dirty study of the user community during the same period, we learned that... Read our blog>>>

Why Innovate?

There’s no shortage of blogs, articles and books written by pundits offering advice to executives on how to nurture innovation within their companies. However, the question “why innovate?” seems to have acquired the status of a “holy cow”, judging from the relative lack of buzz around this subject. Read our blog>>>

 

Creating The “Network Glue”

After trying and failing to locate a trusted plumber, electrician and handyman via yellow pages and other directory services, I recently came across GigPark. Its promise to leverage my social network to become the easiest way to “discover the trusted local businesses your friends use” seemed like manna from heaven. I rushed to GigPark, registered immediately and linked it to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Read our blog>>>

UX Is Lot More Than Eye Candy

A couple of years ago, we’d created a marketable item around Web 2.0 technologies that was targeted at banks. At the time, we’d inferred a growing interest in online shopping for financial products when an increasing number of Gen Y / Millennials began to ask, “If I can buy a book, CD or, even a car, online, why should I visit a branch to open a checking account?” Given this background, I was very excited when I recently read that a leading bank in Australia launched a new Internet Banking portal that was inspired by online shopping portals. Read our blog>>>

How Many More PFMs Do We Need?

To paraphrase a Bob Dylan classic, “How many WeSabes and Kublaxes will have to shut down before PFMs call it a day?” Read our blog>>>

What If Google Only Displayed Ads?

Readers might have noticed a spate of recent articles complaining about the deteriorating quality of Google search results. On the other hand, people haven’t seen any cause for concern in Google’s financial performance. Read our blog>>>

Why B2B Suppliers Should Accept Credit Cards

7-11 and other B2C merchants, who have long been accepting credit cards, have recently started protesting against the 1.5-2% merchant fees charged by banks for processing credit card payments. That being the case, you might find the title of this post a bit strange and wonder why we’re recommending B2B suppliers to start accepting credit card payments now. Read our blog>>>

The Mark Of A Great Product

I think it was Pink Floyd who said, “we never thought of it that way”, when someone asked them to comment on a particular interpretation of one of their songs. It’s the mark of a great “product” when its consumers come up with different uses for it than contemplated by its creators. Microsoft Word, Excel and many world-class ERPs show such signs. In our own sphere, we came across such a product last year. Read our blog>>>

Facebook & Unintended Consequences

Being a social network revolving around an individual’s personal life, Facebook’s allure to consumer goods companies and B2C brands has been obvious. But, when it came to B2B, I never “got” Facebook. Read our blog>>>

Treat Complaints As An Opportunity For Cross-Selling & Upselling

In this blog, James Clark muses why banks find it so difficult to handle complaints. As products and services are becoming more complicated, complaints about them are getting increasingly trickier to convey, understand and resolve. On the other hand, cryptc n SMS / IM style of comms reglrly adpted by both sides is aggrvtng d prob. Read our blog>>>

About Technology “Stress Tests” In Liquidity Risk Management

Management of liquidity risk in financial institutions has been a major thrust of regulation enacted in the wake of the Great Recession. Many American and European banks recently went through stress tests to certify the quality of assets in their books. The Basel III framework from the Bank of International Settlements – often called the Central Bank for Central Banks – has raised the percentage of senior capital required to be maintained by banks in liquid and near-liquid assets. Since liquidity risk, in simple terms, is faced when a bank runs out of money, these measures are not difficult to understand. Read our blog>>>

Positioning Technology As A Risk-Free Way Of Cutting Costs

Every downturn sees several technology vendors urging customers to look beyond headcount reduction in order to cut costs. In a recent example, a cash management vendor promotes improvement of straight-through processing as a way to improve efficiency, and hence cut costs. Most of these pitches fall on deaf ears. Read our blog>>>

Use High-Tech With Caution In Ads

Of late, there has been a spate of print media ads that encourage readers to learn more about the advertised product by serving up online experiences immediately on their mobile phones. Read our blog>>>

Use QR Codes To Create Augmented Reality & Bolster Conversion Of Leads To Deals

The other day, during a visit to the local temple, I came across a poster advertising a concert for Carnatic music, which is a South Indian classical music form. I was very keen on attending it. However, since there was a lot of crowd in the temple at the time and because I didn't have anything to write on, I couldn't note down any details of the concert pertaining to singer, venue, date and the box office telephone number. Read our blog>>>

How Businesses Can Overcome The Tyranny Of Friction

Writing in the Finextra blog about the tyranny of friction, David Strachan provides a personal example of how Flippin’ Pizza lost his pizza order due to friction. Transaction friction is a highly underrated threat for any business. Read our blog>>>

How Humanlike Are Virtual Agents?

From their early – and much parodied – avatar of the animated paperclip in Microsoft’s Clippit, virtual agents have come a long way. Virtual agents are intelligent Web robots with humanlike persona that have the ability to interact with website visitors in automated dialog, understand users’ needs, guide them to Web pages without navigation, cause images to pop up, highlight portions of their screens Read our blog>>>

Suggestions For The Indian Software Product Industry

With our experience with some of India's leading software product companies, we firmly believe that implementation of these suggestions would help improve the success rate of the Indian software product industry. Read our blog>>>

A CAPTCHA A Day Keeps Customers Away

It wasn’t very long ago that I’d extolled the virtues of reCAPTCHAs and had introduced them in this blog to make it easy for people to leave behind comments without my getting hit by tons of spam. However, I’ve recently been finding reCAPTCHAs to be quite complex. Fearing that they’d confuse readers wishing to leave comments, I recently replaced them with... Read our blog>>>

GTM360 Launches SAP Mailing List v2

Around three months ago, we launched our SAP MAILING LIST product which then contained around 3,500 contacts of SAP customers and partners. Apart from fielding inquiries from several prospective customers, we derived a few useful insights during this period. Read our blog>>>

Why Implementation Methodologies Won’t Go Away Anytime Soon

Involved especially in ERP and other large change initiatives, SAP ASAP, Oracle AIM and other implementation methodologies codify “the key steps in a typical project, thus being able to deploy less experienced resources who, equipped with a methodology, would be able to complete the project with minimal previous experience“. Read our blog>>>

Preserve Aspect Ratios & Protect Corporate Identities!

Just by looking at the picture on the right, if you can guess who is featured on it, you don’t need to read any further. However, like most of us with normal eyesight, if you’re able to recognize that it’s Aishwarya Rai only after clicking on the image, welcome to the world of distorted images on the world wide web. While this is an extreme example of distortion, let’s see a few relatively common examples. Read our blog>>>

IT Services Companies Can Achieve Laserlike Focus With Marketable Items

Indian offshore-centric IT services firms have created a multi-billion dollar business from nothing in shorter than three decades. Companies, large and small, have reached here by riding the wave of lower costs to offer a broad range of services to overseas customers. Now, according to this report, it looks like what got them here won’t get them there. Read our blog>>>

PIPL Digs Deeper And Delivers Richer Contact Information

Business development executives and inside salespersons crave for direct telephone numbers of contacts in potential buyer organizations so that they can reach them directly to pitch their products and services. However, they find that company websites, Google search, and, increasingly even Hoovers, Jigsaw and other specialized contact providers, seldom provide anything more than switchboard numbers. Read our blog>>>

Select The Right Contact Provider And Boost Campaign Success

The marketable offerings are created, the email flyers, telescripts and other marketing collateral are ready. It’s now time for business development executives to reach out to the target market via email blasts and telephone calls in order to create awareness and generate leads. Read our blog>>>

Overdraft Opt-In Presents A Huge Opportunity For BPOs

The Federal Reserve Board of the USA has amended the so-called “Regulation E” to prohibit financial services institutions from charging overdraft protection fees for ATM withdrawals and one-time point-of-sale debit card transactions unless the customer has opted in to overdraft coverage. Read our blog>>>

Google Versus LinkedIN Advertising Rekindles The Quantity Versus Quality Debate

Having recently completed a month-long campaign using the recently-launched LinkedIN DirectAds PPC advertising platform, I can’t help comparing it with Google AdWords, the #1 PPC platform in the world. I’ve used the latter several times in the past, albeit not for the same product / service. Read our blog>>>

No PC, No Google

In the early days of the Internet, there was so much hype around what it could do that the common man was almost under the impression that it could do anything except make his coffee. Vendors of ERP, office automation and other high-tech products had to gently remind their customers that they needed computers to access the Internet. Now, in its Web 2.0 avatar, there’s so much buzz around Google, Facebook, Twitter and the like. For those interested in finding ways to improve their Windows environment, nothing seems to be coming their way. Read our blog>>>

Call Centers Can Cut Costs And Still Enhance Customer Experience

Websites of banks, telcos and other service providers make available a lot of generic information (e.g. interest rates) to their customers without asking them to log on. However, when the same customers telephone their call centers, why do they insist on knowing the account number, telephone PIN number and other info that’s virtually the equivalent of a voice log on? Read our blog>>>

Mine OOO Messages To Bolster Effectiveness Of Email Marketing

A recent email campaign we executed to announce the launch of our SAP CUSTOMER & PARTNER MAILING LIST gave us another occasion to be reminded about why we love Out of Office messages. You can mine OOO messages to bolster the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by growing and enriching your mailing lists. Read our blog>>>

GTM360 Launches SAP Customer & Partner Mailing Lists

With over 3,500 contacts of SAP customers and partners, our SAP mailing lists offer compelling value for SAP and other ERP service providers targeting existing SAP sites for upgrade, support, replacement and other services. More>>>

Price Decontrol Doesn’t Mean Inflation

In the context of oil, a recent Swaminomics column in the Times of India made a passing reference to the notion that “price controls do not quell inflation, and abolishing price controls won’t accelerate inflation”. Politicians and the average reader aren’t the only ones who’d disagree, as the author fears. I can easily imagine many marketers and others raised on cost-plus pricing model to find this notion highly counterintuitive. Read our blog>>>

Why Inbound Marketing for B2B?

Inbound marketing is now being increasingly adopted even by “conventional” B2B high-tech product and services vendors. More>>>

Security Can Be Frictionless

I was initially shocked to learn from this report released by ThreatMetrix last week that financial services firms worry more about fraud than customer convenience.On second thoughts, this shouldn’t be too surprising – after all, banks seem to be getting singled out for criticism for all kinds of fraud.  

The Downside Of Generic Brands

Brands like Xerox, Maggi and, to a lesser extent, SAP, virtually represent their entire product categories. With a dominant market share in their respective product categories - Xerox in photocopiers, Maggi in noodles and SAP in ERP - such generic brands have not only enabled their owners profit in the native product categories but have helped them enter new product categories through brand extensions. It must surely be a dream to own a generic brand.  

Differentiate By Catalyzing Executive Mandate

Package implementers and system integrators can go beyond their traditional arm’s-length entreaties about the role of executive mandate and differentiate themselves by acting as catalysts for its achievement.  

Embrace Voicemail Messages To Trigger Action

In India, it’s customary for people to take calls on their mobile phones even when they’re busy in meetings or while they’re driving – most often only to tell the caller party that they’re busy at the moment and will call back later. Somehow, activating voicemail and leaving a signon message to do the same thing in an automated manner, is not common.  

Mass Brands Can Acquire – And Retain – Customers Of Class Brands In This Recession

If there’s one thing that’s different about this recession from the ones before, it’s the permanent shift of customers from premium to value brands. In a recent report, McKinsey says that marketers of premium goods who are waiting for a return to normality following the recession may be disappointed. “Their customers have tried cheaper products—and actually like them”, warns the report.  

Go To Market Process

Go To Market is what separates a great idea from blockbuster revenues. Packaging the idea into a marketable offering, presenting it through marketing collateral, and generating qualified leads for it via targeted campaigning -- these are the key steps in the go to market process. More>>>

Marketability

Any idea, product or capability must be marketable in the first place. Therefore, marketability is the first and arguably the most critical element on which they should be evaluated. Offering, campaigning and sales have a much better chance of succeeding if the idea, product or capability is marketable. More>>>

Differentiators

GTM360 uses the STRADOF framework to identify differentiators in its clients' offerings. STRADOF stands for STructured Methodology for RApid Development OF Differentiators. STRADOF looks beyond features, examines the attributes of the Total Ownership Experience and goes on to provide a structured methodology to develop a set of credible and ready-to-use differentiators for a wide range of "high-tech" products. More>>>

Five Tips To Boost Inside Sales Effectiveness

Realize that your inside sales team is at the tailend of your go to market process and can be effective only if it's equipped with upstream go to market elements like marketable offerings and supporting collateral. Giving them a mailing list and telling them to make cold calls won't work. More>>>

SEO Or SEM?

With the growing buzz around inbound marketing, it might be useful to note a few key differences between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  

Broaden Markets With Multilingual Support For Your Products

Traditionally, multilingual software applications and Web sites allowed users to select a language from a list containing multiple languages at the set-up and log-in stage. The language was then installed and displayed on all screens, menus, and help text. That sufficed when the application’s use was confined to a single language at a time.

Boosting Cold Calling Effectiveness

Frustrated with rejections on a daily basis, salespersons have been seeking out alternatives for years to cold calling for generating leads. Is cold calling required or not?