At marketing automation pioneer MoEngage’s GROWTH19 event, new product launches and sharp insights into user engagement, retention and growth are the key takeaways

“At MoEngage, our goal is to deliver millions of hyper-personalised experiences to customers across the globe. We’ve been pioneers of many industry innovations and helping businesses understand consumer behaviour across different touch points, tying the entire customer journey together,” said Raviteja Dodda, CEO at MoEngage.

Raviteja was speaking at #GROWTH19, a one-of-its-kind event by MoEngage, which brought together Digital Entrepreneurs, Product Owners and Growth Marketers under one roof to discuss all things related to user engagement, digital growth and more.

#GROWTH19 is part of MoEngage’s initiative to empower the product, marketing and growth community with actionable takeaways, real insights and thought leadership. At the event, the attendees got a glimpse into the marketing campaigns that are driving growth for MoEngage’s customers such as Gaana, Airtel, Yatra, Viu, Wynk and more. Validating the company’s ability to be in sync with their customers’ needs, MoEngage launched innovative products and showcased them, with live customer examples of how early adopters are using these new products.

The first product launched was MoEngage Analytics, which helps make marketing more agile for companies by enabling them to track & analyse user metrics, identify specific user segments that need attention and instantly communicate to that segment with personalised messages across multiple channels -- all this within one screen.

The next launch was the Open Analytics Suite, a data platform that would enable companies to plug in any business intelligence (BI) tool directly on top of all MoEngage data, and build any kind of visualisation thereafter.

The third product, On-site Messaging, allows brands to show prompts to website visitors that are personalised to different user segments based on their interests and activities. Sharing their experience of using these products, Rana Vishal Singh, Head of Marketing, Treebo Hotels, said, “We choose to work with MoEngage for their innovative product roadmap. At Treebo Hotels, we keep pushing boundaries and setting new standards when it comes to customer experience. We needed a partner like MoEngage who invests in product innovation that enables us to stay ahead. We have been beta users of MoEngage Analytics and On-Site Messaging Products and I must say that early results have been encouraging. The team at MoEngage is open to any feedback and quick to act on it. I am excited by their product roadmap and look forward to partnering with them to further enhance our customer experience.”

The team at OnlineTyari, another early adopter of these products also spoke about how they were able to make their customer engagement more data-driven with MoEngage Analytics and drive significant increase in conversions.

Watch this video to know more about the exciting new Analytics offering from MoEngage

Here’s a brief summary of each of the sessions at #GROWTH19

Don’t overwhelm users, make the experience as seamless as possible

In his talk on Building the Right Team and Structure to Drive Conversions and Rapid Scale, Pranav Kumar, Head of CRM, OYO, shared the hospitality chain’s growth story. “CRM plays a key role in driving conversions and personalisations across mobile apps which drives 5x more revenue than any other channels, and drives 2x more conversion than any other platform.”

He said before building CRM, it was important to choose the right tool that gives proper insights analytics and segmentation, and also deliver through the right channel.

Another session which focused on Growth Drivers for Consumer Internet Companies was a fireside chat with investors Tarun Davda of Matrix Partners and Ashish Kumar of Fundamentum Partnership. Discussing the metrics they looked at when considering investing in a startup, Tarun said that at the seed stage, they looked at the team + idea. Beyond this, the question they asked was, “Are you able to scale, cutting out risk at every stage? That’s what every investor looks at.”

Agreeing with Tarun on these metrics, Ashish said, “Why are we convinced that one company is better than others? We see if there are accelerators or inputs to accelerators that will improve the market share in 12-18 months for these companies.”

Deepit Purkayastha, Founder of Inshorts shared some interesting insights on how they use push notifications to personalize user experience and drive engagement for millions of different users across multiple cities.

A key question that many startups ask is how they can go about building and scaling up products? In his talk, Ashish Gupta, CEO at Docprime.com (a Policybazaar initiative) spoke about some critical elements.

Policybazaar initially started as a lead generation model, and then evolved to an aggregator model. Later, they realised that they needed to become an end to end provider because “we couldn’t have consumers having disparate experience across providers. One of the metrics was that the customer never has to leave the Policybazaar site to finish the transaction.”  

“We evolved our model every two-three years and not one of them based on a failure. My advice to product guys is do not worry about where you were and where you are today. Worry about every day being a percentage better than the last day and evaluate where you can go from there.”

‘Returning users are a key metric for customer engagement’

Pooja Ravishankar, Category Marketing Head at BigBasket, Abhishek Joshi, CMO at MX Player, and Nitin Sethi, VP Digital at Indigo Airlines flagged off the post-lunch session in a panel discussion on Improving User Engagement through Analytics. What, How and When to measure and act?

All the panellists agreed that other than frequency of usage and time spent by user on the app, a key metric, which helps measure user engagement, is the number of returning users.

On how to best use insights for customer engagement, Abhishek said that the journey between data to information to insights does not happen overnight. “You need to spend time, churn numbers and the numbers need to speak to you.”

Nitin mentioned that while these insights could help in cross-selling and upselling, companies should know when to do it. “There’s a very thin line between intrusive experience and great user experience and companies should never cross that line. Use insights in a good manner to create value and don’t push away the user, don’t force the user.”

Pooja summed up by saying that the most important thing is to have a data-driven culture across the organisation. “Everyone should swear by data, and be trained how to check data in a correct manner before taking a decision.” The second most important thing, she said, was to have the right tech platform to back all this data.

‘Personalisation important to retain customers, but make it relevant’

Earlier in the day, Gaurav Chhaparwal, Analytics Leader and Advisor at MoEngage, spoke about how to build personalised User Experience to Create Long-Lasting Customer Relationships.

He mentioned how companies were losing connection with customers as they were unable to communicate with them in a relevant manner, and attributed some of it to the digital spray and pray approach. “Almost 24 percent of online customers get frustrated when content appears that has nothing to do with their interest.” He added that it was important to have the right tool and the right people to drive the journey of personalisation.  

The topic of retaining customer interest was further examined during a panel discussion between Mrinal Singhal -AVP Marketing, Yatra, Sharad Harjai -Senior Director Marketing, Grofers and Amit Tandon- VP Marketing, Healthkart. The topic was “In this era of unlimited choices for customers, how do companies break through clutter and build customer loyalty? “

Mrinal said that while availability of multiple channels was a good thing for marketeers, the key challenge was to ensure that they get consumer attention. It was important to keep messaging simple and not be over intelligent. Sharad said it was important to ensure the consistency of the brand’s messaging, language and design across customer channels. Amit spoke on the importance of giving customers a good after sales experience.  

During a discussion on user acquisition, challenges, discoverability, fraud, fragmentation, and more between Sahil Deswal, Growth and Marketing Head at Times Internet and Mohit Gupta, ex-CMO at Fab Hotels, a number of interesting insights came up.  

On how to pick the right channels to grow your audience, Sahil said there is no one size fits all and that companies should pick what’s best for them, while realising that growth comes outside our comfort zone. Mohit said they first need to understand the product, and the market they are catering to. Then run a small campaign to understand the demographic audience well and gauge their response.

When asked to suggest a growth hack with very little marketing spend, Sahil mentioned app store optimisation, which was not used by lot of marketers. “Devote time and effort and develop some science around, you will see relevant actionable insights.”

According to Mohit, the biggest growth hack exists in the data of companies’ businesses. “Make sure you are looking at data in every step of the funnel and asking hard questions to yourself and your team.”

‘Experiment, make mistakes and move on’

The concluding session was a talk on entrepreneurship lessons between Ashish Kashyap, Founder of the Ibibo Group and INDwealth, and Raviteja.  

Responding to a question on how they chose which vertical to enter after experimenting with different categories when they started the Ibibo Group, Ashish said, “Building a business is like growing a child, there are no formulae or recipe, and there are lots of iterations, trial and error and experiments.”

He went on to add that experimentation is very critical to building a successful business. See what experiments are blossoming and double down on them. “The lower the cost of experimentation, the greater the value derived. Also, one should reduce the cost of failure. Be decisive, and even if you are wrong, move on to the next thing.”

Commenting on how a business could leverage tools like MoEngage to reach out to consumers, Ashish said, “In today’s multi-channel world, tools like MoEngage can help analyse consumers across devices, reduce consumer friction and personalise communication.”

His tip to companies wanting to know when they have achieved the right product market fit? ”The first set of users need to really love you a lot, not be indifferent. You have to be very valuable to them.”

The day concluded with the announcement of the “MoEngage Marketing Awards 2019” and Ashish and Raviteja felicitated the winners on stage.  VuClip was declared the Gold winner, while OnlineTyari and Jabong were the Silver and Bronze winners, respectively.

Click here to check more about #GROWTH19.