Digital marketing will be the most powerful way of marketing in the future: Sahil Chopra, iCubes

What services does iCubes offer and who are your major clients?
Our business is divided into 2 main categories. As iCubes, we are into email marketing and the affiliate markeiting business is under iCubeswire.

iCubes is a digital marketing solutions provider which help brands acquire and retain customers through web, mobile, email, videos, rich media and so on. It is a performance-based online marketing expert that help companies optimize their sales and provide personalized and behavioral re-targeting with split testing and real-time analysis. We offer fully outsourced email marketing services including campaign consulting, concept, design and implementation as well as self-service solutions enabling clients to manage their own email broadcast campaigns. Our consulting services include building Email Marketing programs and consultancy to fine tune the campaigns for optimum RoI. The email workshops that we conduct, open to public enrollment as well as custom tailored for Corporates, are amongst the most sought after programmes in the Email Marketing domain in India.

iCubesWire is a leading affiliate marketing network in India providing a robust platform to advertisers and publishers where they mutually grow and maintain long-term relationships. Our cutting-edge technology ensures reliable and real-time tracking to the advertisers and publishers across the globe.
We have more than 500 customers now – Some of the known names being Snapdeal, Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Shopclues, Taj Hotels, Titan and so on.

How do you help adapt to the changing digital landscape?
Mobile technology: We are focusing more on going mobile and working towards making effective mobile strategies as the world is becoming increasingly more digital and more mobile. As people continue to shift away from desktops towards mobile, the way they receive and consume email campaigns naturally shifts with them.

Big Data: We are investing heavily in technology. Our ability to capture big data and apply analytics to throw out useful insights for our customers will be at the core of our value proposition. That of course combined with our ability to conduct effective and wide ranging campaigns to leverage those insights.

Life Time Value of customers: We continue to build a business that delivers value to customers and to turn them into high-value lifetime customers who keep coming back and support us, in order to reap the long-term benefits of customer retention and loyalty.

 Please give details about Email education portal - emailvidya.com.

Email Vidya is Asia’s first Educational Portal on Email marketing. With this portal, we have taken the responsibility to enlighten, train and certify individuals and corporates in the domain of Email Marketing.

We conduct corporate workshops on email marketing and train individuals with real case studies and reports. With best practice examples and hands-on interactive exercises, we address the opportunities and challenges of integrating email into overall marketing strategy. We take individuals through the practical issues involved in planning and implementing an email campaign.
We have successfully conducted more than 35 workshops in India and internationally as well.

While the rapid pace of digital change creates exciting opportunities, it also brings new challenges. Please throw some light on that.
The marketing landscape is getting completely transformed by digital media -  online, mobile, social, location-based new channels are emerging on a daily basis. Technology is playing a key role in empowering marketers as never before. However, there are few challenges as well:
-Customers’ fast-changing expectations
-Measuring and predicting ROI and optimizing marketing operations while juggling an increasingly varied media mix
-Managing leads, agencies

How do you see the future of digital marketing in the next five years?
Digital marketing will undoubtedly be the most powerful way of marketing in the future. The digital media industry is flourishing, with an approximately 40% growth rate and even more significantly, this growth rate is not expected to slow down in the coming years. The marketing world has seen a great revolution in the past few years whether it is advertising, promotion or sales. People have started jumping into this ocean of opportunities offered by the Internet.

Below are some of my observations:
Content will always be the most important aspect of digital marketing and nature of the content will evolve. It will become more specific and specialised, going deeper into topics then what we see presently.
Techniques like SEO, SEM and Social Media Marketing will always be there.
Automation in marketing will emerge more effectively and will be predominant in the future.