Betting on booming internet market in Indonesia with its point reward model - PoinWeb
We are always curious to know why somebody started up and the reasons can be varied. When we asked this to T. Muramatsu, COO, PoinWeb Indonesia, he was very clear in his response that he started up because he saw an opportunity in the booming Indonesian internet market - “Indonesian market is generally a very attractive market when it comes to scale, income generation and economic prediction. Also, internet market is still emerging and there is not much of a significant competition so far. This was our main reason to start our business in Indonesia.”
PoinWeb is a joint venture between RealWorld, a Japanese reward point provider and Indonesia’s Corfina Capital. RealWorld is in the business of giving redeemable points to users for shopping online, provide a crowd-sourcing platform for very basic online tasks such as data entry, and are also in point exchange business - users can exchange their accumulated points collected via different sources for something of tangible value. PoinWeb has deployed the same business model in Indonesia.
What does PoinWeb offer to users and brands?
For users – PoinWeb engages users via games and they also provide simple jobs such as data-entry. Users do simple and easy things and earn points which they can exchange for food/shopping/mobile vouchers.
For clients - they provide online advertisement, options to increase Facebook page “likes”, increase in online registration for their portals, data entry services and crowd-sourcing of customer feedback. Brands can create product/feedback questionnaire and target it to customized demography for collecting data for marketing purposes.
PoinWeb’s online points are utilized to accelerate users’ activities on brand pages & websites. These activities leads to benefits for both the users and the brands. Users get to redeem the points they earn and get discounts & offers on various stores, brands get more customers and their feedback. Currently they have 18 activities for users and are aiming to close this year with around 300 merchants on board.
What can make PoinWeb’s business model work in Indonesia?
Muramatsu shares that generally in Indonesian markets, ad clients pay a lot of money to acquire a new user and they struggle to sell their products online. Cost per customer acquisition is very high when it comes to internet marketing. Our services enable clients to gain new users with cheaper budget and can also support online sales.
Also, most companies in Indonesia are still having important information of their customers on paper and may need to convert it into digital format. Our crowdsourcing services enable them to convert information on paper into digital with cheap budget, quickly and precisely. We are charging our ad fee to our ad clients and operation fee to our crowdsourcing clients. We pay the online points expenses to our users from these fees respectively.
“Indonesian online ad market has just started booming up and many companies still spend their marketing & advertising budgets on display ads on major media, adwords etc. We are trying to explain the future model and persuade them to transform to it. It was not very easy to meet up the decision makers for even proposing the model,” says Muramatsu.
He has worked for IT and internet marketing in ASEAN regions, mainly Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. He has more than a decade’s experience in the marketing industry and has conducted many M&As, started up new businesses and comes with hands-on management experience. Started in February this year, PoinWeb is a 6-member team competing against another Japanese reward point site Excite-Point which works on the same model in Indonesia.
The budgets for internet marketing of target companies and the customer behavior in a long run will be the deciding factor for PoinWeb at the end of the day.
