The Niyati blog has moved. From modest beginnings on Posterous to being hosted on our own server, we are hoping to (frequently!) share and exchange more information and interesting tidbits from our World.  And no, we won’t keep it only technology related. We do have loads of fun at work and bump into interesting people and attend events in the real and virtual world.

So, keep tabs on us. You don’t want to miss the ride.

(Voice fading away….) Round up the bloggers, boys!

QR Codes have caught the fancy of advertisers in the recent past. Starting from Ford introducing it to view the Figo video to Levis Jeans, Infosys, Platinum Guild and many more, that small little square arrangement of black and white dots are becoming a lot trendier. The recently launched GRT Jewellers Golden Seed campaign rings in the New Year with customized designer QR Code – a step ahead of the normal black and white QR codes that you have seen until recently.

It is the first of custom designer QR codes adopted in retail advertising and probably the first in the country. Targeted at Smartphone users with any QR Reader installed in their phones, each scan led the user to a microsite with a call-to-action. What’s important to note is that although this is targeted at a niche audience, advertisers must try and leverage best practices to make QR codes successful.

Here are a few tips ...

1.    Enhance Brand Equity:
QR Codes can be more than just black and white squares and dots. You can make smart use of spaces to integrate your brand identity and win over your customers. Beautiful, rich, smart and trendy QR Codes can give your brand a facelift and also paint the picture of a savvy business. What better way to reach out to your audience in a 2cm x 2cm graphic advertisement.

(Designer QR Code for Rangde.org - leads you to their website)

2.    Ensure 360º Visibility:
The easiest way to let customers know about your QR code are through your regular print advertisements. But then you can also have it at any point-of-sale within your store by way of posters and outdoor media through hoardings, banners and even product packaging. If you do email marketing, online advertising and are active on social media networks, you could milk the most of these media to let the audience scan your QR code. The chances of QR scans by customers online are even more and sharing becomes easier.

What’s in the QR Code is more important than how it looks? Most QR Codes allow you to embed an URL (which can eventually lead to a website, video, image or blog), a Text message or a Phone Number.

We recommend going that extra mile to make the scan worthwhile. Going by the conventional advertising adage - there are a few smart things you can do to make that QR Code attract attention, create desire and trigger an action.

3.    Link to a Microsite :
Perhaps the best way to offer more information on your product and/or service is to provide a link to an URL that could be campaign specific information. Linking it to a video commercial that is already on air on popular channels might be a waste of the medium. Unless of course, if your media planner has saved you a few lakh rupees and kept your video embedded on your microsite or on YouTube. Like every good search engine marketer, we also bet on microsites that have lead generation forms to capture contact details of your customer.

(Designer QR Code for Saint-Gobain Sun Ban Glass)

4.    Offer a Promo Code :
If you have an e-commerce site or are running a sale at your retail outlet, it is a good idea to offer a promo code that could give them either a price or a percentage discount. Customers see the promo code after scanning the QR Code and can enter it while they checkout of the shopping cart online, or while they purchase off-the-shelf. This way you ensure sales and your cash registers ringing.

5.    Make use of SMS Short Codes :
You can make use of SMS Short Code services to embed key pull messages from your customers. There are also options where you can trigger an SMS to be sent to the Customer’s mobile number. The desired objective is to capture the contact information of the customers scanning the QR Code and then having your sales staff follow-up with them.

It doesn’t end here. Go one step further to analyse the performance of your QR Code.

6.    Measure Scans:
Make use of analytics to review the number of scans on a daily basis and the region from where you are getting the most number of scans. This can be a little tricky because most analytics default it to the gateway of the telecom service provider. So a Vodafone user in Chennai might always show up as Bangalore or Mumbai. This makes it redundant, but then comparing your scans with the amount of conversions you clock daily will give you a fair idea about the performance. These metrics provide a guided mechanism to plan your advertising and marketing spends.

7.    Improvise Campaigns:
Once you start seeing the results, improvise on your campaign with newer schemes and promotions. Like every business, innovation is key. Innovate on your offers and innovate on your QR codes. Touch wood, your QR codes can have customers queue up at your store – be it offline or online.

(Designer QR Code for Acme Fitness - leading to the TRUE Fitness Campaign)

Albeit new to a desired Indian Target audience, the marketer must remember that the smartphone users are much lesser compared to the mobile phone users. And then the number of smartphone users who have a built-in QR scanner (in their smartphone or tablet) and those who know how to use them are relatively lesser. But the interesting and the promising fact is that, this is set to grow in the coming years. And with mobile commerce picking up, what better way to make a sale than by just scanning the QR Code.

The GRT Golden Seed Campaign with its Lotus QR Code was developed by Niyati and integrates Analytics to not only measure the number of scans of the QR Code but also the conversions that happened at the microsite. This may be India’s first attempt at designer QR Codes by a Retail Jeweller and we are happy to be connected with a niche smartphone audience and grab their attention. Want a designer QR code for your marketing campaigns? Talk to Niyati today!

When you are good at what you do, your inbox fills up with enquiries for services you offer from prospective clients, appreciative mails from clients you have worked with and also the unpleasant attention from spammers.

Our pet peeve in the recent times have been spammers. We seldom pass an opportunity to let the spammers know that what they do is not appreciated. However, when one stops, five others begin!

We probably could be more tolerant to such spam mails, if only they were written well. At Niyati, we always see the bright side of things. Learn from every experience, is our unwritten motto.

The event that triggered this posterous blog is one such spam email that was delivered to our inbox this morning from a company called Pheunix.com

Three things happened when I opened the mail this morning:

1) The email triggered this blog post

2) I had my share of laughs for the week.

3) My flu got worse

Jokes apart, if only companies like these could keep a check on the language on the website, by some freak chance, they may even land a project for real. Read and judge for yourselves if we are over reacting to such emails:

 ____________________________________________________________________________ 

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are here for introduce our self as a website outsourcing concern for interested to work with you. We are working from a long time into website designing and development services. We have hundreds of satisfied customer with our quality website services. Our previous work states for itself. Our designs and developments are available at our Portfolio section. We are experts of Customized rich Internet application development to fit your custom needs. Our organization has capitalized extensively on the deft artisans and comprehensive development studio. Each and every project is stringently examined by technical experts, at various stages of design, development and testing etc. to keep our customers delightful moreover, by virtue of quality proven and ravishing services. TECHNOLOGIES WE USED Joomla, Wordpress, PHP 5.0, CMS, SMARTY, MYSQL 5.0, APACHE, OPEN SOURCE DESIGNING TOOLS WE USED 1. Adobe Design Tools 2. Macromedia Design & Development Tools 3. Animation and Graphics We want to get a change to work for you as a website outsourcing provider. Please tell us your requirement and we will assure to give you 100% perfection in our job. Thanking You N*********** Execution Department PHEUNIX

We deals in  Website Development | Software Development

 

____________________________________________________________________________

 

Posted by: Arthi Ramesh

 

 

Sarvamangala Mangalye Shivae Sarvartha Sadhikay

Sharanye Triambake Gauri Narayani Namostute

Niyati designed this mailer for GRT this Navaratri. We sincerely hope that you rejoice in the glorious presence of Maa Durga in your life!

We share something awesome with the Lord of good beginnings. His birthday! Niyati turns 12 on this auspicious day!  What better day to choose than today to thank everyone that has made a difference.

Thank you Ganesha, for your blessings every year for the last twelve

Thank you colleagues, who have been with us in this eventful journey

Thank you clients, who have had the confidence in our ability to deliver

Thank you partners, who have worked along and contributed to every project

Thank you well wishers, who love our work and have told us in so many words

Thank you bankers, who have supported our dreams and aspirations to be the No.1 digital agency

Thank you competitors, who have egged us to do better than the best!

Thank you landlord, for housing us at a wonderful space we call office

Thank you Chennai, our home base from where all the development work happens

Thank you Auditors, for keeping our accounts in order

Thank you Google, Wikipedia and million other websites for without you Niyati would never be what it is today!

And finally how can we forget our parents, who gave us the confidence that we could make a difference! Thank you!

As part of the celebrations,we have gifted ourselves something we have wanted for a while. We finally squeezed out enough time to revamp our corporate website!  Though it is still a work in progress, we are eager to show it off to you

Go ahead, take a sneak peek at our very own corporate website- all shiny brand new, revamped and fresh!

www.niyati.com

Come July every year and colleges and institutions everywhere gear up to welcome a brand new batch of students into their alma mater.  It is important for the new students to feel comfortable and familiar with the information about the campus, the courses offered, the faculty and other services of the institutes offer before they set foot into the new campus. This has been the primary focus of our new client- The SMOT School of Business, Chennai, for whom Niyati Technologies designed and launched a brand new website.
 
SMOT is a vibrant young institute that offers MBA and PGDBA courses from two reputed universities - The Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli, and the Saint Mary’s University, Canada. SMOT School of Business offers young graduates who want to excel in their corporate roles, an education that will groom them for the best fit for a challenging role in the corporate world.

Visit www.smot.edu.in and let us know your feedback on the new site design!

Are you a Juggler? Can you juggle a combination of responsibilities?

 

If you are a graduate fresh or used (yeah experienced too) (And no, we won’t turn you down if you are a post graduate), with exemplary conversation skills, a friendly demeanor and an incredible urge to be in the Creative and design field, this may just be the chance you are waiting for.

We are hiring Project coordinators to be based at our Chennai office. Your role will be to liaison with our clients and be the channel of communication between the client and internal teams.  

Why do we insist that you have to possess juggling skills?

That is the upside. One of your roles will be to represent us as a company to the client and the other role will be to represent the client’s interest to the internal teams!  You get to wear two hats to play this role to the hilt. Of course, you will be responsible for the quality of deliverables. Why would we pay you a handsome (or beautiful)  start salary if that is not part of the deal?

If you can communicate your strengths and willingness to be evaluated for this role to our Creative Director, Mr. Ramesh Nair, by email , phone and other media options, consider half the bridge crossed.

You can reach the man on +919884082639 or write him at contact@niyati.com

Picture Courtesy - www.freecoloring.org

Upgrades can sometimes really turn you down. Especially when you are ignorant of them. In a similar instance we faced yesterday, I thought it best to blog about this for the benefit of others who are looking to do similar activity on their emailer communications. A month ago, around May 18th Twitter upgraded to a new UI and together with it some of the code that worked earlier (we had sent an emailer out on May 17th and it worked perfect) didn't really support the new UI. Twitter did give the option for users to switch back to the old UI, but not before doing a global transition. We had problems with a simple Tweet This button that we had added to our emailer.

The older code worked with a simple line of code :- http://twitter.com/home?status=Your+Message+Goes+Here

As a matter of fact, if you prefixed www. to the domain making it http://www.twitter.com/home?status= , the code does not work. Pretty strange. But twitter prefers and demands to keep it that way.

The newer code works this way : - http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Your+Message+Goes+Here

Where ' home?status= ' is replaced with ' tweet?text= '. Please note that there is a new parameter here called 'intent' after twitter.com, which I presume is to make sure of your intention to tweet the message :-)

Please note that this is not ReTweet, which will require additional support files, but this is simply tweeting a preset message without the RT and other frills. 

 

Being a part of the crowd is passé.  Being part of the cloud is what is fashionable!!

Niyati is proud to be associated with CloudNucleus, whose acclaimed new age data recovery software product StorCube provides automated backup of systems, applications and data providing an assured protection for physical, virtual and cloud based environments.

Being a young and vibrant design company ourselves, we choose to flock around with similar entities in different business verticals. Niyati has been involved from branding CloudNucleus as vibrant, high energy and passionate right from the colourful logo we designed for them to making their website visitor friendly, user focused and easy to navigate.

If you are worried about losing your data on your PC or server, it might be a good idea to back up with StorCube from Cloud Nucleus today!

 

 

 

 

Among the biggest purchases you will ever make in your life, buying a home will perhaps top the list. When Mark Aakjar approached Niyati to give his website a total overhaul, we realized how the home inspection services he specialized in was absolutely crucial for both the buyer who will need to access the condition of the house and the seller to help him provide accurate disclosure information.

Mark Aakjar, owns Mark’s Inspections and offers comprehensive home inspection services. He is among the top Home Inspection service providers  in Westchester County, NY.  Mark’s Inspections is a member of the American Society of Home Inspectors. Mark’s core expertise in the understanding of the industry and highly personalised solutions, have made him a popular choice of home inspections with every new home buyer or seller in New York City.

Mark approached Niyati to give his company's website a total overhaul. And that is exactly what we did! We redesigned, renovated and modernized the website. And you see the results here :

http://www.marksinspections.com

If you live in NY or its vicinity and are likely to buy or sell property, we recommend that you ask for a free quote from Mark’s inspections today!