Mastering App Growth and Engagement in the eCommerce space - Episode 4 of The App Marketing Show by Appnext

Foreign. Welcome to yet another exciting episode of the App Marketing show brought to you by AppNext. I'm your host, Megha Kataria, Head of Sales India AppNext. And today we are going to deep dive into the world of E commerce and shopping apps to learn more about user growth, user acquisition, retention and some engagement strategies with this industry. And for the same we have a very special guest, Shivani Tiwari, Head of Digital marketing at Agio. Hi Shivani, I welcome you to the show. Hi Megha, thank you so much for having me here. Look forward to talking with you. Great Shivani. So Shivani, let's start by understanding an overview of your journey in this space. If you can elaborate how it has been so far for you. Yeah, sure. So it has been an exciting 14 years for me. I started my career in the offline industry specifically focused on media planning. Then I moved to strategy. Around 2016 is when I started my own company called Kalagato and it was co founded with other people in the data space. That's when I understood the excitement around data, around users and the e commerce space. And the last nine years have been quite a ride. That's wonderful, Shivani. I mean, I guess today our viewers are going to learn a lot from this podcast. So let's start by understanding, you know, like app acquisition is always a crucial part for every app's growth. And what are the strategies that you have implemented in this user acquisition space? Yeah, so thank you for asking. This is a very critical question because user acquisition has massively changed over the last decade. When I started, you know, around 2013, Paytm was one of the accounts I was working in for Violet Group M and then TV ads and print ads used to be such a race because getting people acquainted or finding new users just through digital was not as easy or I would say not as facilitated by tools and technology as it is today. And over the last seven, eight years, Google, Meta and most of the ad tech platforms have created a lot of tools. However, the dependence on traditional marketing has reduced. So initially you would run traditional brand campaigns, spend a lot of investors money and spend a lot of marketing spends on that space. And then still you would get users to know more about your platform. Platform and the top of mind recall would lead to, you know, download now and download installs. Those kind of numbers would improve. But in the current years, every company is now focused on profitability and hence user acquisition is heavily focused on metrics now focusing both on whether customer acquisition cost or cost for first purchase. These are the few Metrics that we as marketeers are trying to focus on. And in the e commerce space just keeping downloads is no more a North Star metric because you can get very cheap downloads for four, five Indian rupees. Right. So I have been focusing on in the last few years on using advanced data signals. Whether it is your events of first purchase or your events of, you know, searching on the platform, there are multiple ways where you as a brand or as a app owner can design which event you want to optimize for and hence get your users to optimize for that North Star metric. So whether if I'm running campaigns for user acquisition and wanting them to purchase your app, cost acquisition per customer will actually reduce. And while you will may not get as many customers in a day as you would get in a typical CPI optimization space, but you will get people who will tend to stay far more longer. And at the end of the day with the CAC LTV metric this kind of, you know ratios that we want all want to optimize for the new way to go forward is very data driven and data centric marketing. And how do you understand where is your target audience? Like which are your right target audience? If you can just throw some light on that. Yeah, wonderful. So my last stint was with Flipkart for the last five odd years. So in Flipkart where it more about Massey customers the whole and we also had a very strong data intelligence inside the company. It was much easier for us because what we would focus on is say everybody who bought fashion. So I will talk fashion because I currently at AJU I'm also doing fashion. So fashion was very I would say segmented within Flipkart because you have men, you have women, you have parents, you would have different categories. Now here because we are not so much of a just mass fashion company. AJIO deals with mass to mass premium. We focus heavily on understanding who are these customers at different average price buckets. So somebody who's buying a jeans at 1000 or 1500 versus somebody who's buying a Levi's jeans versus somebody who's buying a gas jeans versus somebody who's buying a diesel jeans. So these are four different price points. What are the triggers of these consumers and how and why are they coming to us? So understanding them through analytics tools and internal whether it is session replay. There are multiple attribution techniques these days that you can and then we create these own, you know through these data signals we create cohorts and then communicate our proposition to these customers. Whether it is through Brand marketing or performance. Perfect. Perfect. So as everyone says, you know, app acquisition is very crucial. But I believe at the same time once you onboard these apps, it's very important to even retain these audiences and have some user engagement strategies around it. So what are some strategies that you would want to talk about for retaining your customers? I mean how do you plan to do that or what have you empanelled so far in your campaigns? Definitely I think app retention is super important because no amount of users like we might stand at a 70, 80 million customer base, but to actually have a retained customer base is that's where the gold mine is. Because these are your believers, these are the people who will through word of mouth get more customers to buy from you. So for retention specifically we have marketing automation tools. And so I would say through multiple user touch points, we are stitching the entire journey. So if somebody sees our ad outside the app so they'll see the relevant coupons, this is specifically for repeat users and the first purchase person would see a very different coupon versus what somebody who's a second or somebody who's a very high premium customer. So from that perspective, the coupons are very customized now when it comes to the on app behavior. So we give them specific pop ups which you can use whether it is through Clevertap, through Moengage or multiple marketing automation platforms that you can use for. But retention boils down to the fact how laser focused your strategies per cohort. It is not a spray entry. You cannot do the same thing for every customer. So like there are different ways to retain luxury customers, there are different ways to retain bargain seekers and there are different ways to get customers who you would want to poach. Like what whom we would want to post from our competition. So retention is entirely, you know, a gamut of activities designed for different cohorts. Like I'll give an example, for the last few months we have, we do not have a loyalty program yet, but we are trying to identify who are these users who would eventually want to buy more and more from us. So in depth data analysis of these customers and using Both push notifications, WhatsApp and other, you know, whether it is CRM or also reaching out to them through multiple all possible advertising channels. What we have observed is if we are not speaking to them, we will not understand why they are not buying from us. So that's to address the churn rate speaking and understanding and then only you can retain your customers. Perfect. So now that you've acquired users and you have actually retained them Also the next step would be, you know, to understand or to rather measure and analyze these users and the activity that they are coming on your app and performing. So Shivani, how do you analyze and measure user engagement within the app? So I think when it comes to users, we try and understand what action I want from this user. So there are two sorts of actions in an e commerce space that any marketer would want. One is that you open the app. Second would be you purchase or you wish list something. Or the fourth would be you refer somebody. So for each different action there are different measurement tools as well, right? While there is mmps and I wouldn't want to name someone, but There are multiple MMPs that we can utilize for measuring app engagements or app re engagement campaigns, campaigns and then for new installs or for web. Web is quite a black box because there are very few tools in that space. But then you use your user analytics tool, whether it is Google Analytics or any anybody in that space, to understand where is your web user coming from? What do they want? We try and understand the traffic very well. Like for example, if I have say X million traffic per day, but what does this mean to me as a brand, right? So we try and we have some qualified metrics that we do not think of traffic as just traffic. We think of traffic as sessions. And different companies have different definitions of sessions. This is sort of proprietary to each company. But you try and understand that I what is my session length? Like is somebody just coming for one second, two second and you'll have your different attribution windows. Then you try to understand what is my session turnover in the sense is somebody coming to me today and not coming tomorrow. So you'll try and understand what is the repeat rate of this person, whether this is a new customer or which is the retained customer. And the most important is session depth, which most of the times initially we could have ignored. But now that you know, users have so much option options to choose from and specifically in the retail space, Myntra and so many other brands are coming up with so much of AI tech, right? So what can you do to keep your customer engaged? And hence you need to understand what is my session depth. If somebody comes to homepage, do they go to multiple pages? What pages are they browsing? What is keeping them engaged? So in this space we also have like a trend in which is more like a content advertorial to keep people engaged. So what information, what value add am I giving to my consumer? And hence why would they want to come back to me and everything is tracked through analytics and attribution tools to piece all of this together. That's really interesting insight that you've given, but I believe that every app also has its own set of challenges. Have you faced such challenges so far? And if yes, then how have you overcome these challenges that you face? So definitely like E commerce is right now extremely cutthroat in India. There is this, you know, impatience syndrome that Most of these 10 minuters have. Right. So now to compete. Well, even if we are just selling pure play fashion, we are competing with the same customer who has impatient and they are trying to order milk or they're trying to order functional footwear, stuff like that on Blinkit, on Zepto, on Swig Instamart. So yes, it's very complicated because the Kasbi, the same customer that we are targeting is also being bombarded with messages of 10 minute delivery, 15 minute delivery me first is this. Second is the fact that the system of fashion retail is highly fragmented. There are some players like us who are extremely fashion first bringing the best and the newest assortment. And then there are players who are extremely tech savvy. So they're offering to customers certain tech, you know, interventions that probably other players are not offering. And the customer is spoiled for choice in this space. Right. So the challenge is the customer still has those 24 hours and the salaries are not increasing as most of us know. So how do you keep your people engaged? How do you care for your customers and how do you get them to buy from you again and again? I think that's the biggest challenge. More than acquisition, the biggest challenge is retaining these customers and preventing uninstalls. Correct? Absolutely. I completely agree there. And I know for the fact that you've been in this industry for quite some time and you've seen the industry grow and go down as well. So do you want to, you know, share some thoughts about how have has this industry been changed in in terms of the landscape like specific to E commerce and fashion today? Yeah, I think when E commerce started I was, when I was working with Flipkart, I think the in fashion space, the whole fear of ordering fashion online, you know, not having this nuance of touch and feel in around 2016-2019, in fact till 2020 pre covered that fear existed. You know, I will not buy fashion online. Repeated brand tracks and repeated, you know, consumer usage and attitude studies, uxrs. All these studies would tell us that the people in India were not convinced to buy online. So we started with that space, then we, you know, Flipkart definitely led the, you know, the space and you know, 100% returns and refunds, that kind of communication, educating the consumer about trying and testing online. But now we are at a space where people have built not just belief. So post Covid there has been extreme behavior change. There is no inhibition in ordering stuff online. Of course fashion as an industry versus the rest of E commerce has the highest returns percentage. So there is an extreme fear as a business owner also in the space because you are losing a lot of amount of money, your inventory gets impacted because people are returning stuff very frequently. So a lot of innovation is expected in this space both from us and from the competition. And I would say second is as an advertiser what we face the most is that everyone has done ads so much for the last 10 years that you all have, you know, your at least all the Metro and Tier 1 City, every customer has tasted you in some form of fashion. So now if we had a 10 day delivery, say eight years back now to get them back again to my platform and let them know that today I have same day delivery at ajo, today I have one day delivery. I think that transition is very expensive. So convincing a lapsed customer now to come back to me, that is becoming very expensive for every advertiser because everyone has touched the top 100 million once or twice in their whole, you know, journey of last 10 years. So that is very expensive. Acquisition is becoming very expensive because there's only so much part of the Indian Internet that will spend that amount of money as what we want and hence we are not able to scrape more users. And I would say attribution, at the end of the day, attribution analytics is very broken in the Indian ecosystem overall, in the ecosystem of tech, ad tech space because there are players that still are not very well integrated with most of these channels that focus on, you know, single user view. So the biggest challenge to me is convincing the customer to buy online, convincing the customer to not give them aggressive discounts. I think we all have bled a lot, so how much more discounts can we give? And third is as a market, your focus on data driven in single user view, you so one single dashboard where you can get to know how much I'm spending on X platform, what is my cost per session, what is my roas and what is it leading to in terms of my revenue metrics? I think that is the ideal space we all need to be in. Wow, that was wonderful. Like we all have seen this era of not buying anything online to almost buying everything online these days. And definitely I agree to a lot of the points that you just mentioned. Lastly, do you want to give any quick tip, maybe like a strategy or an input from your side to all the app marketeers who are watching our podcast today? Yeah, definitely I would give one single tip is go outside of your role because the moment every app marketer is focused on only app install campaigns and app engagement campaigns, you will never build for the long term growth of the business. Understand sit with your sales team. Sit with your sales planning team. Sit with your merchandising team. Understand what catalog will come. Understand what you know coupon planning is happening when all of these are stitched together for the user, the user is seeing you at the end as just one single platform and for the offering is much more strengthened. So I think focus on this and use data, use heavily, you know, use analytics, learn whatever is needed, but focus on stitching everything together for your marketing piece. So thank you Shivani. It was wonderful having you today at our podcast and thank you so much for sharing these wonderful insights. Thank you so much Megha. I love speaking about app and this was such a great platform for me to share the insights with the app world. Thank you to our viewers and listeners for tuning into the App Marketing show by App next. Stay tuned to this channel for more such episodes from the industry leaders for great insights.