Kolkata is the largest city in the West Bengal region in India and is considered the most competitive one in the IT sector in Bangladesh. The main reason - it’s physically closer than any other city. 

The region includes more than 900 IT companies with 145,000 employees, and 70% of them can be found in the city of Kolkata, which confirms again the strategic importance of the city in the country and the region’s IT industry. Kolkata is called the IT hub of East India, and has plenty of tech parks, including Bengal Eco Intelligent Park, Millennium City IT Park, Image Tech Park, and many more. 

Since early 2010, Kolkata has managed to grow fast and attract huge tech players such as IBM, TCS, PwC, British Telecom, and Ericsson, which consequently invested and developed the IT infrastructure, hiring most of the youth workers who are nowadays enrolled in the system. 

The dominant services in the IT industry in Kolkata include software development, product development and consulting, big data analytics, and system integration, but also digitalization of other services, such as healthcare, architecture, and banking systems, which enjoy a market demand. 

From hardware manufacturers, SME’s like Sonodyne, Videocon, Vikram Solar, Websol Energy, are among the top players in the tech industry as well. 

The region also has 36 IT parks and 14 Business parks, created to stimulate the development of the entire industry and boost the regional economy and competitiveness. And on top of everything, the Kalyani Institute is the main core of future tech workers. 

However, Kolkata remains one of the least paid cities in the IT industry, with a yearly average estimated at $4,386 USD. Yet, this is one of the reasons why big companies invest in this place, and also why IT products and services developed by Kolkata-based IT companies are cheaper than other tech hubs in India. 

In case you are searching for an IT company from Kolkata to work with, on TechBehemoths, you can find the most active ones that perform above-average.

Email Marketing is a digital marketing strategy used by businesses to connect with their prospects/clients and promote their services or products via emails.

Email is actually older than the Internet and was invented in the early 70s, it’s still one of the most widely used forms of communication on the web, especially for business purposes.

A significant number of businesses rely on email marketing to increase their revenue, as it’s an efficient channel when it comes to lead and sales generation. 27% of IT companies surveyed by TechBehemoths mentioned that email marketing is one of their top marketing strategies.

Here are some of the benefits of email marketing for businesses:

• Increases your brand awareness
• Generates leads and sales
• Has a higher conversion rate
• Builds brand loyalty
• Is a great channel for upselling
• Delivers personalized content and messages
• Generates results fast

There are multiple email marketing tools on the market for self service advertising like Mailchimp, Hubspot, Zoho campaigns. They include a wide set of advanced features like automation, segmentation, email templates, ecommerce options, A/B testing, etc.

However, for a more holistic approach and scalable results with email marketing, you might want to get help from service providers who have proven expertise and advanced knowledge/techniques.

If you’re considering hiring an email marketing agency, here are some things to look for:  

• Experience
• Location
• Team size
• Price range
• Portfolio
• Approach & techniques
• Communication & reporting
• Customer reviews

You can choose from more than 8,000 email marketing service providers on TechBehemoths. To ease the selection process, we’ve created a powerful filter to help you narrow down the list of companies based on your exact project requirements.

Browse the company profiles you think are a good fit and contact them for possible collaborations.

Is email marketing still an effective strategy?

Yes, email marketing is still one of the most effective and popular types of digital marketing.

Email marketing means sending informative, promotional or commercial emails to a target group of potential customers.

Here are some common use cases for email marketing. Business usually send emails on these occasions:

• launch a new product/service

• refresh your website

• thank you note, confirmation message, or notification

• host an event

• have new offers

Emails are also a direct channel of communication with customers, which allows businesses to increase their brand awareness and build stronger relationships with their customers.

Below are a few common types of email marketing:

What essential skills should email marketers have?

When looking to hire an email marketing agency, keep in mind the following required skills:

1. Strategy Development & Planification

Email marketing must be based on a strategy and plan. You need to understand the various subscriber life-cycle stages and how to engage them as part of your strategic thinking. A successful email marketer should know what campaigns work well for every stage.

2. Automation

One of the best things you can do to save time and increase your email campaigns' ROI is to automate lead nurturing processes. Email marketing automation includes both lead nurturing and lifecycle emails. Here’s what each means:

• Lead nurturing - implies sending emails to try to convert potential customers

• Lifecycle emails - imply sending highly relevant emails at the right time, based on the buyer’s sales journey stage (lead, new customer, existing customer, etc.) 

3. Segmentation

Email segmentation is a technique that categorizes your contacts into different groups in order to deliver targeted and personalized emails.

Here are a few examples of user segments based on who they are or what they did:

• Customers

• Followers

• Downloaders

• Free trial users

You can segment your email lists based on other fields like:

• Demographical data: gender, age, job, income, marital status, etc.

• Geographical data: country, city, language, etc.

• Activity data: previous purchase, website browsing, engagement, etc.

Here is how email list segmentation can help you achieve better results:

4. Copywriting

Email copywriting is the process of writing content for an email that is intended to convince a user to do a specific action: visit a web page, download a resource, buy a product, etc.

Email copywriting principles are similar to any other type of copywriting and is meant to encourage some of the following actions:

• Share or link to a web page

• Read your new article

• Follow your social media

• Book a meeting

• Invite to a podcast

Great email copywriting has multiple business advantages:

• Higher open and conversion rates

• Increased ROI [1] 

• Stronger relationships with your target audience

• Higher customers loyalty

• Better email reply rate => potential new meetings

[1] According to Litmus, when your email copywriting is on point, you can expect a return on investment (ROI) of up to $36 per dollar spent.

5. Analytics & Testing

It’s essential to understand the most important metrics and how to measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.

Here are some email marketing KPIs for reference. Average email open rate and clicks rate is highly dependent on your industry, but if your email open rate is about 10-15% that’s already a great result.

To find the right email marketing agency for your projects, use the Project submission tool on TechBehemots. Simply describe your business needs and the system will match you with the best possible service providers.