Rajesh Jain

The Micron-Mu World

It is 2025. I wake up and check my phone. After navigating through the messages from family and friends, I switch to my micronbox. It is the single repository for all brand communications. No spam gets through. The micronbox has two folders – one for the transactional and some broadcast marketing messages sent by brands, and another for microns. The micronbox smartly picks up all brand communications across my various inboxes – emails, SMSes and RCS messages (sent to my mobile number) and push notifications (for the apps I have installed on my phone). Microns are short messages, each with an incentive in the form of Mu (a virtual currency) to pay for my attention and actions. Microns can be read in 15-30 seconds. Each micron offers me a reward (Mu) for opening it and for acting on the message.

As I check my microns folder in the micronbox, I see a message from MakeMyTrip. In the Subject field, it shows me the Mu triad – my total Mu, the number of Mu I get for opening that message and the Mu I can get for doing the suggested actions in the message. In this case, I get 1 Mu for opening and 10 Mu for the actions. My total Mu this morning stands at 5678. The attractive Subject line “Experience Kashmir like never in 5 days” catches my attention and I decide to open the micron. There is a nice itinerary for a mini-vacation and an AMP-powered survey form which asks me a few questions about my possible travel plans. I answer the 3 questions and see my Mu go up by 11 to 5689.

There is a micron from HDFC Bank offering me 11 Mu for opening and 100 Mu for clicking through and reading about the special offer they have on the new iPhone that’s about to be launched. My Mu now stands at 5800 after I check out the offer.

Ah, my friend Akash just activated his account – thanks to my referral. So, I get 100 Mu taking my tally to 5900. And I will also now earn a small fraction of all the Mu Akash earns going forward – and it goes two levels deep (a level below Akash also). I now have my own Mu Making Machine!

I have been learning about Kabir and his dohas. The micron tests my understanding of today morning’s doha and rewards me 1 Mu for opening and 20 Mu for answering the question correctly and quickly (within the stipulated hour of the micron being sent.) My Mu has risen to 5921.

The App Store has sent me a notification about the launch of a new productivity app. It promises me 60 Mu for watching a 30-second video. I decide to do it – am always open to see what I can do to become better. My Mu is now at 5982, including the 1 Mu for opening it.

There is another micron from the author of the book I have just finished reading. The offer is 3 Mu for opening, and 5 Mu for each of the 5 questions about the book. I think it’s a cool idea – I had really liked the book, and decide to take up the challenge. I get 4 right, and my Mu total is up 23 to 6005.

There is also a nice fun element to opening the micronbox with a ‘delight’ rather than ‘delete’ mindset. There are only as many messages as the brands whose messages I have subscribed to – so I never feel overwhelmed with 3000+ unread messages! My few minutes of attention and actions early in the morning have been duly rewarded. I learn and earn. The Mu may be small but it is good to see brands valuing my attention and willing to pay for me to be attentive to their message – a far cry from a few years when brand messages constantly bombarded my inbox and it was always a cat-and-mouse game with the spam filters.

The rest of the day also needs my attention. A pity there is no Mu waiting to be earned for getting out of bed! Before I do that, I decide to quickly check the MuShop for redeeming my Mu. The offer I like is for the latest issue Bloomberg Business Week magazine with a cover story on “The Hydrogen Economy.” I encash 6000 Mu to buy it. My Mu tally is now down to 5, but there are still 12 more unread messages – each with more Mu waiting to be earned.

Imagining the Future

Entrepreneurs create our future. This is what I had written in one of the posts in my Proficorn series: “An entrepreneur must imagine the future and get there first. One is not building just for the next few months – one has to imagine tomorrow’s world and create that future. If you get there first, you win. This journey is what makes entrepreneurship so exciting. It is a race – where there are many competitors, known and unknown. But there is a second race – in the entrepreneur’s mind, to create and craft a future that isn’t yet unknown. The entrepreneur then also has to persuade others (employees, partners and customers) about that future. It is the ultimate reality game!”

In 1994 as I was thinking about the ideas that eventually led to the launch of IndiaWorld (India’s first Internet portals), I would think about what the Internet could do. A phrase I remember from that time is “connect Indians globally into an electronic informational marketplace.” That helped me envision what tomorrow’s world would look like and make the right business decisions to succeed in a competitive marketplace. In 2011 when I began to think about India’s political future and the 2014 elections, I started thinking about how the BJP could get a majority on its own. That led to the formation of Niti Digital and its multiple initiatives in media, data, analytics and volunteering. In both cases, I was imagining a future that didn’t exist and then working to make it happen.

Over the past few months, I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about microns. The more I have written, the more excited I have become about the possibilities. Ideating is a long and painstaking process; while the basic idea may just pop up, refining it into something practical and doable takes time. As I have thought more and spoken with people, it has become better. Transforming brand-consumer communications is a hard problem to solve, and yet, as I have thought about microns and what can be done, I have come to believe it is increasingly possible and even necessary.

It was in this context that I had written about the micron-verse a few weeks ago: “Microns can have widespread usage because of their simplicity and brevity. They take 15 minutes to create and 15 seconds to consume. They come right into the inbox – which we all check many times during a day. When we think of emails, we think long, boring, never-ending newsletters, with lots of scrolling. When we think of microns, we should think short, exciting, fun, interactive content, available on a single mobile screen (no scrolling required). This is what will take the 15% open rate of emails to 100%. Whether for customers or employees, microns can help brands and businesses open a richer world of greater engagement and interaction. Welcome to the micron-verse and the 100% opens movement!”

In this series, I will peer into the future – like a science fiction writer – and give a glimpse of how our lives will be different in the micron-verse.

MyToday Microns and Mus

What I will write next is a vision for the MyToday platform – I will know whether it succeeds in the months to come. I like to share ideas openly because I have always believed that by ‘open-sourcing ideas’ one can get inputs from others which could make the idea better. So in that spirit, here is where the imagination takes over.

MyToday.com already supports the creation, publishing and sending of microns. The new element in this is the addition of Mus. My initial thinking was to price microns at a fraction of emails to drive the interesting use cases – these were short emails and thus cheaper than emails. Since emails themselves are quite cheap (15-45 cents per thousand emails, or about 1-3 paise per email), making microns even cheaper would not be that attractive. Emails anyways have the best RoI and technically, they can do all what microns can, so just offering something cheaper did not make sense.

It was then that I thought of eliminating the unit pricing for emails entirely – make the price linked to performance (based on the opens). While this was a step forward, this again meant we were still playing the price game.

That was when a new idea came up. The low open rates in promotional emails (typically 15%) has meant that brands have taught their customers to ignore emails. What if we thought of microns as being the opposite and target 100% opens?! While the content of microns would be a key driver, that’s when the idea of adding a points program came in – and “Mus” as a reward for attention and action was born. Mus would be the secret sauce to make microns a habit in the lives of consumers.

Netcore’s 70% market share with emails in India meant that we can potentially take the idea to a large number of brands and thus create a points program across brands. This is still not a done deal but has potential. What brands would agree to would be to pay not Netcore/MyToday but their customers! This payment would be in the form of points – Mus. Each micron would thus be a carrier of rewards, enticing the recipient to open and act. In effect, microns with Mus had the potential to train consumers to open every incoming brand communication with the µ in the Subject field! If brands agree, this would be a great win-win for both them and their consumers.

Of course, the question of how Netcore would gain remains. We would need to spend on sending the microns and managing the platform. But we would not get any cut from what the brands paid the consumers. This is where I decided to take the long view. Done right, Mus had the potential to be a gamechanger in the world of brand to consumer communications. If it works, it would move brands to use more of Netcore’s communication and customer engagement and experience platforms providing plenty of monetisation opportunities in the future. Start with delight and the deals will happen!

So, that’s the idea. Will it work? Can it transform brand-consumer engagement? We will find out in the months to come!

The Hurdles

The idea that I have described about creating a points system for brands to reward consumer attention and action seems like a simple enough idea that it should have been quite common by now. But it is not. That is what intrigues me. Why have brands not done this? Here are some reasons that I can think of as to why this has not happened.

First, such a program can only be done in the digital world. In the offline transactions world, we had brand-specific loyalty programs. These were typically physical cards which had to be shown at checkout and to which points were added. As ecommerce grew, the mobile number or email address became the identity to which the points could be linked. The rise of a digital identity also led to the creation of multi-brand programs (Payback in India, for example). Credit card companies also created their own points programs to drive the usage of their cards over other payment alternatives. As these programmes grew, so did the benefits and rewards of owning and using a card. One thing common to all is the linkage with a transaction because it is impossible to measure and track engagement in an offline world.

Second, until recent times, digital was not a large channel for most brands. Hence, digital communications and engagement was a small part of the overall marketing program. As such, the basics were all that was important – send out the receipts and offers, and hope for some clicks. Digital’s growth has skyrocketed in the past few years and a new class of digital-only direct-to-consumer (DTC) challenger brands have emerged. So, it is only now that there is a critical mass of digital brands – some digital first, some digital only and some hybrid (offline first, with digital as add-on).

Third, engagement budgets have been mostly much smaller than acquisition budgets in most marketing departments. The exciting thing is to get new customers – which means running TV ads or doing large spends on Google and Facebook. The bigger the budget, the more exciting it is for the marketer. Once a customer is in, engagement, retention and growth are typically given to a much smaller team with even smaller budgets. These teams do their bit – emails, campaigns, push notifications, SMSes with a single objective to get the consumer back to the website or the app. In these smaller budgets, there is little room for rewarding attention.

Fourth, should brands decide to spend to reward attention and action, someone in the C-suite would definitely bring up the issue of double spending: “So, you are spending on sending the email, and then also spending to get someone to open or click the email? This doesn’t make sense at all.” And thus any rewards program would be nipped in the bud since no email company would be willing to take up a pure performance campaign because they would have no control on the creative, and there is a finite, non-zero cost for sending emails.

Fifth, should all these hurdles be crossed, no loyalty brand would be willing to run a program where 100% of what the spend is passed on the consumer.

Finally, to really make a program like this work, it would need to get multiple brands on board – consumers will not find it attractive if points can only be earned across one or two brands.

A product or program has to solve all these problems simultaneously to succeed. And this is what the Netcore’s MyToday Microns and Mus platform hopes to do.

Microns and Mus

Microns are short, informational content delivered in a sequence to the email inbox. They can be consumed in 15-30 seconds. They are uniquely identified with the µ in the Subject. They are thus a new category of emails – neither transactional nor promotional. They offer something useful and interesting to the recipient. By using email as the transport mechanism, microns can be subscribed to and delivered to almost every Internet user. (An estimated 4 billion people have email addresses.) Email is not controlled or monopolised by any corporate entity thus making it an open communications platform. It has been around for 50 years and will probably be around for many more.

Mus are points that are earned by consumers for actions done in their engagement with brands. Initially, Mus are earned within microns: opening a micron, clicking a link, filling a survey, referrals to family and friends. Later, they could be extended beyond microns – clicking on SMSes or push notifications, downloading an app, completing a profile to share personal information with a brand, and so on. Mus are a transfer from a brand to consumers. Mus are this earned by consumers. They can be spent on rewards or gifted to others. As the use of Mus expand, they can become currency – a medium of exchange.

Mus reward attention and action. They can work across brands because they are linked to the email identity of a person. They can be thought of as a cross-brand (or coalition) loyalty program, or even like airline miles. The innovation is that for the first time, non-transaction behaviour in the form of attention and actions are being rewarded. Typically, loyalty programs are linked directly to purchase – get a certain number of points for spending money on goods and services. Mus reward brand engagement. [As far as I know, there has never been a loyalty or rewards program for multi-brand engagement.]

Each micron would show in its Subject line the total number of Mus the recipient has at any point of time along with the number of Mus to be earned for opening the specific micron. The aggregate is also updated in real-time in the body of the micron. By showing the total microns in the consumer’s wallet, spoofing is avoided since only the microns platform (MyToday) and the consumer would know the total at any point of time.

Emails are paid for by brands based on volume. So, each email has a finite non-zero cost for a brand. Microns with Mus would be different. They could be sent by a platform like MyToday for free. Only when they are opened would brands pay – and this payment would be in the form of Mus which are transferred in their entirety to the consumer. So, MyToday becomes like a loyalty program operator – an intermediary between brands and the consumers. Mus offered by brands are added to the wallets of the consumers for them to use. An attractive redemptions platform would be needed to ensure that Mus have value – thus directing favourably the attention and actions of consumers.

It all sounds interesting and exciting. So hasn’t anyone done it before?