How Axis Securities re-invents its email marketing practice

Email marketing plays a major role in strategic communication of Axis Direct

Axis Direct is the flagship brand of Axis Securities Limited (ASL), a subsidiary company of Axis Bank, engages in distribution of wide range of financial solutions as well as brokering and investment services to retail customers. It provides simplified platform for online trading in India in Equity, Derivatives and Mutual funds, IPO and Indian Share market. Axis Direct offers wide range of diversified investment option, protection solutions, loans and tax planning solutions. For them,email marketing plays a major role in strategic communication as it keeps the investors updated with the latest news, market,share/stock and expert recommendations on daily and weekly basis. The efficiency and effectiveness of the emails largely depend on the relative consistency, relevancy and correctness of the email content.

“Technology today is achieving new possibilities and is cutting short the time taken in everything we do. In stock markets, timing and real-time information is most critical to trading successfully. Every fraction of a second the values of stocks change and so does the portfolio values. In this context, it was imperative that our customer gets live communication information on display. However, email as a channel of communication has been historically a static medium of communication. Our objective was to change this and to make our email content live and real-time thereby helping our customers to take right investment decisions at all times” says Arun Thukral, MD & CEO, Axis Securities.

Making the move

The company was facing major challenge as the emails of Axis Direct were more informational in nature. However, due to time-bound and dynamic behavior of financial and money market, the emails often lost context by the time subscribers opened them. The highly important financial numbers would often become redundant at the time of opening the email. The only thing available before email deployment was the market news updated for subscribers. Intermittent market behaviors like stock prices, portfolio values, market news, index values etc were not available as a part of the direct response strategy (email marketing). Consequently, the emails often lost its relevance due to different time and context.

Around the same time, Kenscio has started a campaign which uses Real Time Personalisation (RTP) technology. It has evolved an innovative idea in the field of email marketing and data-driven marketing. Both Axis Direct and Kenscio joined hands to bridge the gap between static email and dynamic email marketing. Kenscio’s R&D team worked hard to keep the email interactions in realtime. Through this campaign, the company realized that the age of static email is over. Manjunatha KG, Chairman and CEO, Kenscio says, “Content dynamics and being contextual are two important factors for any email jumping into an inbox to stay relevant and ‘clickable’ amongst dozens of promotional mails flooding the inbox every day.”

Handling implementation

The major challenge that the Kenscio faced was to understand touch-points of financial markets with email communication that are time sensitive and translating them through development and coding. For example, if certain aspects of communication keep changing in very short span of time (Stock Market indices, share prices etc.), there are other factors which take longer duration to change (Market News, Hourly Updates etc.). Moreover, certain pieces of content have to synchronize based on whether a market is closed or open at the point of opening the email.

Kenscio implemented RTP in emails after having several rounds of discussion with Axis Direct. Manjunatha says that “RTP enables real time personalization of email content by allowing reconfiguration of email content based on email opening timing. The dynamic financial content and numbers are live feed from external sources inside the inbox.” The final campaign was rolled out in June 2015 after going through several rounds of coding, development and testing