Articles Category: Engagement

Smartphone adoption has skyrocketed in the APAC regions in the last few years. If you look at the number of mobile phone users worldwide, China and India occupy the top two slots on that list. Consumers in these countries turn to their mobile devices throughout their purchase journeys, and that’s great news for marketers. To cater to these mobile-first users, companies need to bring about a shift in their approach to customer engagement at all touch-points.

What factors define the mobile-first markets of Asia? What are some cutting-edge growth strategies that companies in these regions implement? What metrics should you focus on? We explored answers to some of these questions in our #GROWTH MIXER San Francisco with Anand Chandrasekaran, who’s an experienced product leader and an angel investor.

We are happy to share a summary of that discussion in this blog.

About Anand Chandrasekaran

Anand has led teams that built products that impacted millions globally. He has the unique experience of leading product teams for Yahoo and Facebook in the US as well as unicorns in Asia such as Snapdeal and Airtel. Owing to his experiences with internet first companies on both sides of the globe, he brings an interesting perspective, comparing the business landscapes and trends of the West and the East.

The center of gravity for mobile businesses is shifting to Asia

In 2018 alone, China had 100 new unicorns, the number in India went from 8 to 26, with six new unicorns created in Indonesia – and these numbers just scratch the surface of Asian markets.

The center of gravity for mobile-first businesses has started to shift towards the East. A few years ago, every founder based in the Philippines, India, or Singapore would go to the Valley to learn from the US businesses. Today, everyone goes to Beijing, Shanghai, or Schengen to understand how new companies run and how consumers are operating on their smartphones. Even investors turn to China and other Asian countries. In fact, five out of the top 10 investors named in the Forbes Midas list have made their primary deals in China.

Key factors that define the Asian markets for online brands

1. Android cannot be an after-thought: When companies operating out of the US, venture to the Asian markets like India, Indonesia, or China, the first thing that shifts is your user-base. As much as 90% of your customers will now be on Android. So you need to be Android-first, unlike markets like the US where you build for iOS first and think about Android in the second year.
2. A diverse audience: Asian countries are not homogeneous. One needs to cater to 20 different personas at a high level, each of which speaks a different language, might not have traveled to other regions, and has local behavioral attributes.
3. They’ve skipped PC: A lot of these countries are mobile-first. What this means is that the users have skipped using computers and went on to adopt the mobile. In India, for instance, there are about 250 million smartphones and about 150 million televisions. For many users, mobile is not only their first screen but their only screen as well.
4. Localization is not an option: There are millions of English-speaking users in Asia. So, a service built for the US can primarily work out of the box in these markets. However, the next 50-100 million online users consume content via videos, using voice search, and post voice notes. Next, these users will start using e-commerce, online hotel booking, and other services. Companies need to be equipped to localize their communication to be able to cater to these users.

Companies leading the way to growth

• Internet companies such as Flipkart and Ola, which started as the Amazon and Uber of India, respectively, built a considerable user-base before the companies Amazon and Uber turned their focus to Asian markets.
• OYO Rooms, Asia’s largest hospitality chain, and a member of the Unicorn club create immense value for consumers by bringing together consistency and convenience.
• Another example is Sharechat, a regional language social networking app, caters to the non-English speaking population, has grown to 50 million users in a year.

3 key takeaways from Asia, for marketers world-over

1. Data cost in countries like India is lower than those in the US or the UK, and there are millions of new users beginning to browse, consume content, and shop online. Services built for these new users are growing from zero to a hundred million users in a year. This means Asian markets offer an excellent opportunity to learn about new users, their online behavior, and new business models.
2. Companies looking to go global cannot afford to ignore the Asian markets, given the massive user-base coupled with an increasing disposable income.
3. Consider the LTV of Asian consumers against the cost of acquiring them.

Key metrics to focus on

All businesses need to identify and measure the North Star metric that best captures the core value your company delivers to customers. Identifying the right business metric is perhaps the toughest and the most complex conversation within an organization. Nevertheless, it is of utmost importance as it impacts several business decisions at the highest level. It is a matter of what you want to see versus reality. While the right metric depends on the respective business models, some examples are:

• For a messaging app, the number of two-way messages between users.
• For a music subscription app, the number of songs played.
• For an e-commerce app, total sales minus returns.

How companies successfully use the North Star Metric to drive growth

Take a look at these three real-life examples of companies that have successfully leveraged the North Star Metric.

1. 2-way Sends in a messenger platform

One of the world’s leading messenger platforms uses 2-way sends as the North Star Metric. To determine engagement, they count the number of times that a user has messaged a business, and the company has responded. Similarly, they measure the number of threads where two people have messaged each other. This helped them avoid counting Spam messages and focus on real interactions.

2. Daily orders minus returns minus cancellations in E-commerce portals

One of India’s biggest e-commerce marketplaces uses a North Star Metric- daily order minus returns. The company launched a new category of FMCG goods and saw their orders soar from 0 to 1000 in just three weeks. However, a closer look determined that the company was feeding the growth of small-time sellers who bought the company’s goods at 70% discount and sold them to the neighborhood at almost 50% profit; plus they returned what they couldn’t sell within seven days.  The daily orders minus metrics indicated that 85% of the orders were returned.

3. Song plays in a music subscription app

Wynk, a music subscription app in India had an entry pricing at  1/10th of the nearest competitor. Wynk’s team decided to use song plays as the North Star Metric for every feature they launch. This helped them determine that with the right programming and pricing, they could get people to shift from pirated music consumption to authorized channels for music consumption.

The world has changed in an unprecedented fashion, and so has customer preference. Essential, functional, and emotional spending have taken precedence over luxury expenditure. How should the marketing teams prepare for such a world where customer preference and behavior has changed?

We aimed to find the answers from the co-founders, CMOs, Marketing leaders across India’s top players in the online marketplace, local business discovery platforms, travel & accommodation, IT, and equity investment firms.

In this roundtable we discuss

• major changes in marketing communication tone in keeping with the current scenario
• addressing business challenges in accordance with the changed rules
• anticipating and dealing with changes in consumer behavior
• reorganizing and planning for marketing & advertising spend in a post-COVID-19 world

Our speakers for the event:

• Dhruv Mathur, Co-founder, LBB
• Manan Bajoria, AVP – Growth & Marketing, Ixigo
• Tarun Davda, Partner & Managing Director, Matrix Partners
• Olive Sen, Director – Marketing, OLX
• Gaurav Mehta, CMO, Girnarsoft

Without further ado, here are the key highlights and insights from the session:

Impact of COVID-19 on consumer behavior

Urgent need to go digital from localized businesses

• Localized businesses have been deeply impacted which has pushed them to go digital more aggressively
• LBB has noticed inbound requests from local businesses doubled on a daily basis
• On the consumer side, services that required stepping out have taken a massive hit but searches related to home delivery have picked up tremendously.
• While the traffic has dropped in absolute numbers but engagement has picked up since people are spending more time at home, posting a lot of information that the community is consuming.
• The key to ensure growth right now is adapting to the changed environment and being opportunistic in taking chances

Digitization in the auto industry and renewed interest in pre-owned cars

• With discretionary spend curtailed and supply lines disrupted, the auto industry has been affected.
• The positive however is that OEMs earlier hesitant in going online are now proactively looking into digital avenues for research & discovery as well as transactions
• Owing to the changed behavior of the OEMs, the whole industry can be expected to be digitized in the next 6 months
• SEO insights are interesting as the used car segment has been getting good traction, a trend previously evidenced in China
• The trend can be attributed to lowered user confidence in shared mobility services over health concerns. Users now prefer to have their own vehicle for emergency purposes
• From a revenue perspective, March was the strongest month for CarDekho following which there has been a steep decline.

Buying & selling marketplace expects renewal in popularity of pre-owned goods

• OLX has interestingly retained traffic to the portal despite a significant dip in supply-side
• Various categories on the platform have been affected differently, with the auto being affected least while electronics and furniture have suffered majorly
• Real estate has been hit the worst-hit both from traffic and revenue perspective
• This can be attributed to the fact that neither users nor the sales teams are able to step out
• Due to the mandatory lockdown, the offline inspection centers viz. Cash My Car has also been closed down disrupting the business further
• The online buying and selling marketplace is optimistic about a bounceback to pre-COVID-19 business capacity in the next 1-2 quarters as the economic situations seem favorable to buying value for money, pre-owned goods

Lockdowns and restrictions disrupt travel and accommodation segment

• ixigo has noticed a drastic impact on their business owing to the travel restrictions
• Ixigo Trains App has taken a hit to the DAUs/MAUs, frequency of app launches/day, subsequently affecting the ad monetization revenue
• Fall in impressions and advertisers curtailing digital spends has affected the ad bidding further reducing revenue/impression to one-third of pre-COVID-19 numbers
• Limitations imposed (e.g. airlines planning to keep the middle seat empty) will mean hiked prices to make up for reduced inventory thus reducing demand again.
• Business travel is expected to reduce with personal travel taking time to bounce as consumer confidence has taken a severe hit

Various industries noticing a permanent shift in consumer behavior

• Travel & mobility sector is expected to have a slow recovery with unavoidable business travel likely to start sooner than leisure travel
• The change in behavior can be attributed to dip in consumer confidence combined with worries of a 2nd and 3rd wave of the pandemic
• Businesses will need to change plans depending upon recovery models viz. U, V, or L shaped.
• Investors suggest planning for 3-4 months of zero revenue, 3-4 months of 30%-40% recovery, 3-4 months of 80%, and 80-100% of pre-COVID-19 revenue after a year.
• Brands bouncing back quickly like China’s Didi (revenue back to 80% of pre-COVID-19 peak) have done so by gaining back consumer confidence
• Didi provided sanitized cab offering with camera detecting if the car has been cleaned before, temperature check of the cab driver, mandatory masks for the driver and rider along with gloves and disposable hand sanitizers
• Private mobility (self-drive vehicles) is expected to go up while shared mobility (taxis and public travel) will take more time to bounce back.
• Similarly, with health concerns looming large two-wheeler used vehicle purchase is expected to see a spike
• In the e-commerce space, certain categories like online grocery delivery are benefitting with increased digital interaction between consumers and local vendors
• The telemedicine industry has seen greater acceptance by the doctor’s now more than ever, as they are happy with video-consultations, virtual waiting rooms, recorded online medical history, a library of drug combinations for diseases, etc.
• These one-time shifts in user behavioral trends are expected to stick forever unlike a fad

Solving for consumer’s lack of trust once normalcy returns

Gaining consumer trust in the usage of pre-owned goods

• In the current scenario, it is essential for a business like OLX to gain audience trust in using pre-owned goods given the overwhelming health concerns
• OLX is planning internally on how to implement safety checks in peer to peer selling to build consumer trust
• The brand might have to intervene in peer to peer selling for ensuring proper sanitization
• Such efforts are much easier implemented at inspection centers Upcoming project ‘OLX people business’ which deals with staffing of blue and grey collar employees will aim to resolve the delivery problems amid lockdown
• Business models will change and evolve depending on recovery systems, i.e. U or L shaped recoveries

Curating user experience to address the changing customer dynamics

• Auto classifieds have relied on a Low Touch Model which comprises of users taking charge of the whole buying and selling process of used cars
• Curating experience for used cars purchase is essential to gain the trust of the consumers and address the changed dynamics
• CarDekho is working with dealer partners to provide a curated experience to the users in their offline Gaadi stores, whether it is hygiene or documentation
• The aim is to make the user experience low touch while offering high touch, high engagement from the delivery perspective.

How to grow business the right way during these times?

There are 3 phases any business should consider right now:

• Phase 1: How to cut burn, manage runway, communicate with suppliers, clients, teams, stabilizing the company, expecting the worst-case scenario. Matrix Partners created a quadrant with COVID-19 impact and cash in the bank as two parameters. Different strategies were devised for companies falling in different quadrants
• Phase 2: Examine if the product is going to be relevant or not in the post-COVID-19 world. Figure out the use cases and work on them. Add or tweak product offerings or pivot depending upon the above assessment
• Phase 3: Figure out how to take advantage of the fact that market share has been brought down to zero (due to the pandemic). Decide what does it take for you to gain a disproportionate market share? What would you do today if you knew this is where the market will start. Do whatever is necessary to accomplish that, whether it means strengthening teams, reprioritizing product roadmap, etc.

Adapting marketing communication in response to changed user behavior 

Understanding your user and churning content to delight them

• Focus on the customer segment, understand your consumer, and make a dent into their anxieties instead of using the same ‘stay home, stay safe’ narrative.
• The key is to figure out where your business wants to gain disproportionate market share and try to be super relevant to the users
• Try to cut through the clutter by adapting your marketing communication effort to pick a topic and provide delight to the users through that.
• One example can be how VCs are supporting businesses, helping them learn and communicate with each other, and advising them to be in their mind space.
• LBB has recently launched a program called ‘local gifts’ which enables users to buy gift cards from favorite local businesses (which customer can use later) to help the struggling business survive during these tough times

Focus shift from one category to ancillary ones might yield results

• Insurance wing of Girnarsoft, InsuranceDekho is benefiting from great returns
• The brand is now looking at consumer behavior, the goals driving that, and are adapting their Marcom strategy on top of that
• Health and safety sentiments for oneself and family will increase in an uptick of insurance policies (purchase of used cars as well as new entry-level cars)
• The brand is also focusing on ancillary services of used cars, standardizing the buying and selling experience and organizing the used car industry

Strengthen customer relationship through informative communication

• Ixigo stopped sending sale communication i.e. cashback offers and instead focussed on travel safety advisory, a checklist to follow while traveling via flights/trains
• The brand reached out proactively to customers and informed about travel policy changes
• Introduced dedicated sections for COVID-19 news and a live tracker (which gets maximum clicks in a day) to keep the user engaged by providing legit information
• Ixigo’s communication revolves around COVID-19 do’s and don’ts, explainer videos, debunking myths about COVID-19, refund policies, latest travel updates, and more
• The communication has noticed good organic and huge social media traction
• Ixigo has added a section about airline advisory, which is updated with information about policy changes, reaching out via WhatsApp about changes in bookings made, etc.

Rethinking marketing budgets, driving more business from existing customers, and figuring out key spend areas

Spend wisely and on cash positive and good ROI assets

• Marketing spends at LBB haven’t been curtailed but has become more focused and is driven by product change, market share orientation, and performance orientation
• Telemedicine and other categories are still advertising because it is a land grab opportunity
• CPM/CPC rates and ad shares are dropping. Users will leverage it since these are never seen before bid rates
• With big advertisers from some verticals stopping advertising, others are leveraging the open inventory
• In fact, LBB hasn’t noticed any change in spend patterns of vendors who advertise on their platform except a slowdown in decision-making time
• Some of these advertisers have already planned for the post-COVID-19 situation, figuring out what to do, and they’re certainly not stopping thinking about marketing and advertising.
• There has been no change in the tactical approach at LBB but the marketing strategy has been adapted according to the behavioral changes of the user such as increased community engagement.

Online selling and buying marketplace prioritizing product innovation

• For brands like OLX, the focus is on product innovation rather than marketing
• The brand is, however, reaching out to existing customers via empathy-driven communication and driving CSR fundraising initiatives to help the migrant workers
• The new user acquisition and performance marketing activities have taken a back seat.
• The brand will start marketing spends once lockdown eases and things go back to normalcy
• OLX is informing users about the validity extension of their listing and subscription packages

Building a platform based on genuine connections rather than advertising spends

• A lot of marketing spends at Girnarsoft and it’s offerings like CarDekho have been curtailed
• Only project-based marketing where partners want advertisement done on their behalf are operational
• User acquisition efforts have been put on the back burner for now.
• The organic play is going strong with the brand at 70-75% of traffic even now
• The focus is on investing in building the brand which is the best defense against any upheaval be it a crisis or competitor pressure In the B2B domain, the brand is extending insurance to regular dealers through InsuranceDekho
• The aim is to help the stakeholders with their working capital as an outreach program On the B2C side, the brand is ensuring that the video content churned out brings positivity to the users and in turn are getting a lot of love and traction from the audience
• Girnarsoft is focused on building a platform through genuine connection rather than a transactional connection generated through advertising.
• The brand has in fact doubled down on content marketing efforts as this is the right time to do a lot of these things

What is the biggest priority in the next 3-6 months?

The immediate priorities for the brands affected by the pandemic are to ensure cutting costs in order to extend the runway, devising contingency plans to revive the business, survival planning, tweaking the business models to be ready by the time normalcy returns. This is also the best time to implement a good operating rhythm, cultural agility, and decentralizing decision making as much as possible. Brands should also focus on understanding the new, thereby figuring out business solutions according to changed consumer behavior.

In conclusion, the speakers also shared their takeaway on remote work and its future. While most felt that there has been a boost in the productivity of teams like marketing, technology, and product, they lamented the lack of human contact, cumbersome process of setting up meetings. The unanimous feeling was that certain teams like sales need to get back on the ground owing to a more customer-facing aspect of their role. Most companies will now be more open to WFH scenarios and workspaces will be used for operational reasons that can’t be achieved at home.

What’s Next?

Check out the highlights of our exclusive virtual roundtable on the impact of COVID-19 on Indian businesses Find out how the global coronavirus pandemic affected the acquisition and LTV of apps in Europe? Wondering what is the coronavirus business impact on your vertical? Find out in our geography and business vertical specific COVID-19 impact quadrant! Register now to learn the tips of driving successful customer-centric marketing in the post-COVID-19 world!

We have learnt so far what growth teams are and how organizations benefit from them. We have also seen how to lay the foundation for a successful growth team in organizations, along with examples of how leading edge companies such as Facebook, Uber and AirBnb do it. In this blog, we take you one step further in this journey to understand models of growth team structure so that you can choose what is best for your organization.

Models of Growth Team Structure

Finalizing the growth model for your organization and deciding where it fits into the overall structure simplifies decision making related to growth teams. There are mainly two models that most growth teams follow. Which model you select also dictates where in the organization structure your growth teams should logically sit.

Understanding the Functional Growth Team Model

As we’ve learnt earlier, growth teams are designed to be cross functional. In a functional growth team structure, each team member reports to their respective function head. For example, a marketing team member reports to a manager from Marketing, an analytics team member might report to the Head of Analytics etc.

In addition to focusing efforts on key metrics, a functional team structure allows growth teams to get valuable support from the rest of the organization.

On the flip side, multiple hierarchies reduce the speed and flexibility of growth teams structured in such a manner. Function heads could also find it challenging to balance between their functional and growth related objectives. This happens especially when their functional responsibilities are not aligned to the key metrics of the growth team.

The other kind of imbalance that can occur is too much influence of a single function on the growth team, overshadowing its cross functional capabilities. This is a valid concern especially when organizations blindly place a growth team within the marketing function since that is seen as driving customer acquisition.

That said, several successful organizations have effectively used the functional growth team model. Prime examples are Pinterest, Twitter and DropBox.

If the functional growth team model is what suits your organization best, the next question to answer is where should it fit into the overall organizational structure?

How to fit Functional Growth Teams within the Product Team

The Product team is the most obvious place for a functional growth team to sit. This is because a significant part of a growth team’s responsibility is to work on seamless product experience. Once a startup has scaled to full-fledged operations, it is important for the product and growth teams to work together. The smallest of decisions made by either team can have a great impact on the other team’s functioning.

As companies grow, it makes sense for them to merge their product and growth teams, as it allows them to look at product improvement holistically. In such a structure, the Head of Growth reports to the Head of Product. AirBnB and Slack are examples of companies that merged their growth teams into the product team as their operations grew.

How to fit Functional Growth Teams within the Marketing Team

Since customer acquisition is what drives growth, it is not surprising that marketing and growth teams share similar responsibilities. To align these responsibilities, some organizations merge growth teams into existing marketing teams. In this model, the Head of Growth reports to the Head of Marketing.

Understanding the Independent Growth Team Model

Growth teams that follow the independent model function autonomously. Business objectives determine how independent growth teams prioritize their own goals and actions. The areas on which team members focus their efforts can change based on the resources available.

There are two kinds of independent growth teams – one, where teams are structured based on workflows; two, where teams are structured based on metrics.

The metrics-based independent structure is often favored by startups because of its focus on results. However, this approach has a flip side. Since each member chases his or her metric independently, there are frequent clashes with other team members. Organization support for such teams could also diminish over time.

Companies which have attained high growth using independent growth teams include Uber and Facebook.

How to fit Independent Growth Teams in the Organization Structure

Since growth teams are dedicated to improving specific metrics, they take complete responsibility for the final output. Complete responsibility allows growth teams to assign tasks internally and work directly with the CEO. The Head of Growth in the independent model reports not to any other functional head but to the CEO.

Conclusion

Before opting for either growth team model, make sure you understand the role that a growth team will play in your business.

1. If you visualize the growth team to be primarily involved in product development, it makes sense to go with the functional model.
2. On the other hand, if driving growth through holistic measures is what you want your team to do, go with the independent model. Selecting the model wisely allows the growth teams to easily work towards the goals set by you.

In the next blog, we will look at the kind of members that you must have on your growth team.

Having worked with multiple consumer internet companies over the past years, we at MoEngage realized that there is a lack of a strong community for Product, Growth, and Marketing functions to learn from each other and share insights. This led to the start of #GROWTH, our very own community for these functions, in 2019.

We conducted our first-ever virtual Product Summit on December 18th, 2020, to help Product owners discover new paths to growth.

Product Managers, Entrepreneurs, and Technologists from all over the world tuned in to learn how to drive Product-led Growth in a consumer-first world. Over the course of 6 sessions, Product leaders from over 15 top customer-centric brands shared plenty of interesting learnings, leading to some very fun questions from the audience as well!

Here are some of the key learnings for Product-led Growth from the Product Summit 2020:

Keynote: Product-led Growth With Anand Chandrasekaran

Speakers:

1. Anand Chandrasekaran, VP, Product Management & Design, Five9
2. Raviteja Dodda, Co-Founder & CEO, MoEngage

In the Keynote session, Ravi and Anand spoke about Product-led Growth. Since Anand has built products in both the consumer and the B2B space in both India and the United States, he spoke about the differences between the two ecosystems.

Anand also shared his approach to defining the product vision, the strategy roadmap, and metrics in a consumer product, by quoting Keith Rabois’s analogy of a successful product:

Building on this analogy, and adding from his own experience at Wynk Music, Anand described what Product-led Growth at a consumer product looks like by taking examples from e-commerce, music streaming, and online payment apps.

In an audio streaming app, ‘time spent on the app’ cannot be treated as a growth metric. A much more impactful metric to look at should be ‘audio playback time’ as users can spend a lot of time on your app just looking for the right audio content to play.

While discussing the importance of collaboration between the Product and different functions (like Marketing or Growth), Anand shared a personal story that taught us that reducing the number of recurring decisions and establishing veto rights is the key to reduce friction while collaborating.

Anand summed up this session by sharing how he picks companies to invest in. After investing in more than 50 companies over 6-7 years, this information was very valuable for the audience!

What Does An Ideal Product-led Growth Setup Look Like

Carrying forward the conversation on Product-led Growth, the next session in the Product Summit saw Product leaders from Grofers, OLX, and Pratilipi discuss the role of the Product function as an important driver of growth and how to solve the hurdles along the way.

Speakers:

1. Vakul Agarwal, Head – Retention, Product & Customer Lifecycle Marketing, Grofers
2. Jasjit Singh, Associate Director – Product & Dealer Experience, OLX
3. Shally Modi, Co-founder & Product Head, Pratilipi
4. Ashwin SL, VP Marketing, MoEngage

The session started off with Vakul, Jasjit, and Shally explaining what Product-led Growth means for their respective products and what they do to achieve Product-led Growth. They also listed down what metrics they track to measure growth, and why. The common, underlying theme in all their definitions was Customer Delight and tracking North Star metrics that solve their users’ problems.

Next, the speakers walked the audience through the process of structuring Product-led Growth teams, and how these teams scale in fast-growing companies. An important learning was how Product Management teams mirror Brand Management teams and why experimenting and proving hypotheses is key to Product-led Growth.

There is no substitute for consumer experience. No matter how big your bank balance is, you cannot buy a consumer experience.

Before wrapping up this session and answering audience questions, Vakul, Jasjit, and Shally shared the challenges and hurdles they’ve faced in their Product-led Growth journeys.

How To Drive Collaboration Between Product, Growth, And Marketing Functions

In this session, Product folks in the audience got to learn how different functions can work together to achieve a common customer-focused goal and how brands can tackle the problems that arise when these functions collaborate.

Speakers:

1. Shivangi Srivastava, General Manager – New Initiatives, Swiggy
2. Nikhil M, Head of Products, Rapido
3. Lijo Isac, VP Product Management, Byju’s
4. Anjan Bhojraj, Head of Products, HealthifyMe
5. Shivangi Boghani, Head of Sales – India, MoEngage

The session kickstarted with Shivangi, Nikhil, Lijo, and Anjan explaining the importance of collaboration between Product, Growth, and Marketing functions in consumer products. By sharing their own stories from fast-growing ecosystems, the speakers went over some of the strategies involved in maintaining successful collaboration and removing friction as teams grow and scale.

Apart from the KPIs that different teams chase within a company, Trust, an immeasurable metric, forms the core of frictionless collaboration between Product, Growth, and Marketing functions.

As Product leaders, the speakers went on to highlight what other different functions they end up collaborating and working with the most to drive successful Product-led Growth. It was interesting to see the evolution of this collaboration with different maturity stages of a product. The key highlight of this session was how different teams at Swiggy, Rapido, Byju’s, and HealthifyMe maintain a common Analytics dashboard and what metrics they look at regularly.

The speakers wrapped up this session by what the future of Product-led Growth looks like at their companies, and what trends are they expecting to see in the consumer tech ecosystem.

How To Leverage User Insights And Analytics To Maximize Engagement

In this session, Product leaders from Rapyd, Samsung, and Housing.com shared their take on how Product teams should rely on user insights and analytics to achieve their North Star Metrics and overcoming Analysis Paralysis.

Speakers:

1. Shivani Mukherjee, Head of Product Solutions – APAC, Rapyd
2. Niraj Bajaj, Director – Product Management, Samsung
3. Sangeet Aggarwal, Head of Products, Housing.com
4. Anand Rajput, Senior Product Manager, MoEngage

Shivani, Niraj, and Sangeet kickstarted this session by describing what user engagement looks like at their respective products, and what key metrics they track to measure growth in engagement. Adding to this, the speakers also highlighted the key milestones in their user’s journeys and what goals are defined for the Product team. It was interesting to see how closely these milestones and goals mimic their user’s buying behavior.

Next, the speakers explained the different growth drivers and breakers for Product teams at Rapyd, Samsung, and Housing.com, and how they leverage analytics and user insights to make data-driven decisions.

Analytics do not mean much without understanding the ‘why’. Observing how your users interact with your product helps teams define better target personas and track more effective milestones.

This session concluded with the speakers sharing a few Product-led campaigns that have contributed to improving engagement scores, and how important analytics is going to be to run similar campaigns in the future.

Everything You Should Know About Product-driven Engagement

Speakers:

1. Arindam Mukherjee, Senior Director – Product, User Experience & Growth, Flipkart
2. Mithun Madhusudan, Director of Product Management, ShareChat
3. Yash Reddy, Chief Business Officer, MoEngage

The penultimate session of the Product Summit kicked off with Arindam and Mithun describe what Product-led Growth looks like at Flipkart and ShareChat, and how it translates to the future of both these companies. The speakers also listed what different metrics they track to measure the impact of Product-led efforts on improving User Engagement.

Arindam and Mithun then explained how the Product teams segment users by creating different cohorts and run highly targeted campaigns to drive more user engagement – language, geography, and user behavior are some of the factors both they consider to create cohorts.

Looking at different cohorts, analyzing their behavior, and understanding consumer psychology helps build an effective growth model to drive Product-led Engagement.

The speakers also shared instances of how automation enabled the Product teams of Flipkart and ShareChat to drive stickiness and retention, and what role technology will play for Product-led Growth and Engagement for them in the future.

A Data-driven Approach To Product Onboarding

The consumer of today takes well-informed decisions before signing up for a product. We found Product Managers asking themselves, ‘How well can I get my users started? How accurately can I predict their behavior inside my product?’. In the final session of the Product Summit, Product leaders from Byju’s, Razorpay, and Paytm shared their thoughts on a data-driven approach to Product Onboarding.

Speakers:

1. Sharavan Tickoo, Lead Product Manager, Byju’s
2. Siddharth Arora, Associate Director – Product Management, Razorpay
3. Prashant Singh, Entrepreneur and Ex-VP – Product, Paytm
4. Nalin Goel, VP – Product, MoEngage

Shravan, Siddharth, and Prashant started this session by defining what an effective onboarding looks like for their users and explaining the importance of a successful onboarding for the Product team. They then deep-dived into how their respective Product teams ensure that their users have a seamless first-time experience on their product.

Your brand may have a glorified vision that the entire company would like to pursue, however for your users, the micro-moments spent on your product matter more. Contextual nudges, seamless experience, and ease of performing an action lead to delightful first impressions.

The speakers also highlighted the importance of data in defining effective product onboarding journeys, and how it eventually leads to better lifecycle management. One interesting learning for Product Managers from this talk was to sign up as a new user for products you’ve been using for a long time (for example, Facebook) to learn the differences between the two experiences.

We recently concluded #GROWTHAsia 2020, a two-day digital summit aimed at helping the community of product leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, and marketers understand and learn how to drive customer delight in a mobile-first world. We assembled an illustrious panel of marketing leaders from top customer-obsessed brands in Asia, the likes of Airtel, Tokopedia, Bukalapak, Zilingo, ONE Championship, MX Player, OLX, Zee5, Mapemall, OVO, Myntra, Marks & Spencer, Verticurl, Koinworks, Cashalo, OYO, GTech, and The Lumery.

The two-day event organized on 5th and 6th August 2020 was supported by our partners at Mixpanel, Branch, and Segment. The virtual event comprised of tracks covering key mobile marketing topics viz. omnichannel experience, loyalty, personalization, engagement and retention analytics/metrics, and marketing-product alignment. If you happened to miss out on the interactive and insightful sessions, worry not, this article will aim to summarise all of the topics discussed during the event.

Here’s an overview of all the panels and sessions covered during #GROWTHAsia 2020:

Panel 1: Actionable Strategies That Boost App Engagement

The session moderated by Ashwin SL (VP Marketing, MoEngage) with Sapna Arora (CMO, OLX), Abhishek Joshi (Head of Marketing, MX Player), Harish Narayanan (CMO, Myntra), and Anugrah Honesty (Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Bukalapak) attending as panelists.

Here are the overall highlights from the panel:

• The pandemic has changed customer behavior in the last four to five months in various diverse segments like digital media, e-commerce. It has led to customers changing their preferences, which was not an easy task otherwise as they are resistant to change and often impervious to marketing communication. But these changes brought by the pandemic came faster than brands would have imagined, requiring an immediate change of strategies to increase engagement.
• During this time, when the customer behavior changes around app engagement and customer communication, it is important to engage them positively. Think about how you can be helpful across the board to brand partners, consumers, suppliers, etc, and have a positive voice. To do that, you can take a content-focused engagement approach. For example, you can give your customers tips on fitness, how to get ready for work from home, design ideas on how to set up your home, exercise tips, decluttering, etc. This will improve customer engagement.
• The definition of customer engagement has changed during the pandemic. You have to be very quick on your feet. Do not waste time deliberating on your strategy, creatives, etc. But you should be cognizant of the fact that you can’t hurt your viewer or your end consumer by pushing something on them, which might misfire. So understand what they want, and offer it to them.
• From a product perspective, first, try to boost the engagement and get people hooked to your platform. Once that happens, it will be easier to align other strategies to bring them to the transaction stage.
• When you want to retain the traffic generated during this period, do not take the viewers for granted. Do not start thinking that you know what the viewers want. Always keep on planning for better retention strategies and listen to what your viewers want.

Insights from individual experts:

Sapna Arora

• In times like these, uncertainty regarding what is going to happen is always there. So it is better to avoid getting off track in terms of strategy,. It is important to remain on track according to your long term strategy, as far as your product and technology are concerned.
• Think from a humanitarian point of view, especially in times like the pandemic, while making any decision. One should also try not to sell too hard. Always be careful about what to communicate and be sensitive as you won’t know how much the damage would be in terms of people’s health and lives.
• Talk about what is relevant for the consumer at a particular time. For example, OLX, being a pre-owned good platform, talked about the products at home their customers hadn’t used for a while and about decluttering. It is very helpful for the consumer to hear messages around that because they could start planning as to when the lockdown opens, what are the things that they could get rid of. Also because people’s wallets are getting tighter and people are becoming very conscious of how they spend, these kinds of messages will help them plan.

Abhishek Joshi

• Better app engagement will only be possible when a brand/app starts seeing things from a different perspective and approaches them differently. Being customer-centric is necessary in certain situations to maintain and grow brand engagement.
• Viewers/customers should never be taken for granted by any brand or app. This might lead to people moving away from your platform a lot faster. One should get back to the drawing board, keep a close ear on the ground and start listening to what their viewers want. Only then the generated engagement can be retained.
• The definition of engagement and retention is changing. Brands must study how they are perceived to understand what the consumers think of them. The results from this kind of study can be used to make better campaigns and keep up with the change.

Harish Narayanan

• When the business is not functioning or when there is a time with close to no transactions, it is smart to utilize this time to plan for the future or when you reopen. This will help you to utilize your time better and stay a step ahead of everyone else.
• Get to a point where you can engage audiences on an e-commerce platform even when you can’t sell anything to retain them. Create positivity, be sensitive to their sentiments, and serve them the way they want to be served. Audience engagement will prevent your DAU from falling down. Create content that will bring people to your platform to just browse and to engage with you and to consume your content.
• The biggest problem that arises while working from home is that the boundaries between work life and personal get blurred. A solution to this would be to establish clear guidelines on work norms to ensure that the work is done and the employees are comfortable.

Anugrah Honesty

• It is absolutely necessary to shift your campaigns in accordance with customer behavior to survive in a highly dynamic environment. In a time like the pandemic, it is important to focus on the needs of the customer.
• Remember that at times challenges are not only from the buyer side but from the seller’s side also. Try to increase the adoption rate of the service so that the ones who are usually selling through offline channels start selling more online, thereby improving their incomes.
• Ensure that all the stakeholders and decision-makers reach a consensus for smooth functioning. Even when you create a new mindset or a new point of view, make sure that all the decision-makers and stakeholders share it.

Panel 2: Aligning Product and Marketing for Better CX

The panel was moderated by Scott Pugh (APAC Director, Mixpanel) and included Aditya Chintawar (VP, Product, Koinworks), Ameya Sawant (Head of Growth, ONE Championship), Kushal Manupati (Head of Digital, Zilingo) as the panelists.

Here are the overall highlights from the panel:

• The first thing that is important for a business is to understand the current time and what are the key products which they would like to sell at this time. Remember that it is not the right time to celebrate something or launch something when people are losing their jobs. So bring sensitivity to your marketing campaigns.
• When time requires it, you need to adapt your strategies. In business, one should do this from not only a product perspective but from a consumer perspective as well. You need to align the vision of your product with the needs of your customers.
• Do not shy away from using technology that you can acquire or buy in the market versus building it yourself. Sometimes a technology or a platform that has been tried and is trusted works well.
• It is important to maintain a proper marketing budget. The way you drive the marketing budget will affect decisions like launching something new and investing in acquiring new users. Building a platform that consumers find valuable also plays a role in driving the marketing budget as it can lead to less spending and getting a good return.
• After engaging the users on your platform, ensure that you work to retain them from the very beginning. Retention can be seen only when you have something to offer and your customers are satisfied with it. So, identifying and fulfilling their needs should be the first priority.

Insights from individual experts:

Aditya Chintawar

• Be sensitive about what the consumers might be going through. Try to educate people and give back to society during tough times. Positive sentiments are important to bring people back to your platform.
• Marketing in the right way is necessary. For example, if you want people to read your notifications, they would have to find something useful in them; you will have to get them hooked on it. One should remember not to overuse it. If a consumer gets too many notifications that he/she might not like or find disturbing, then it might drive them away.
• Increase the cadence of brainstorming sessions of what you want to push out to the market. No idea is ever really small. Everybody should be welcome and a concept or a philosophy of discussing problems, not solutions should be implemented to align marketing and product better. This will not only create a more inclusive environment, it will also increase the inflow of ideas.

Ameya Sawant

• During times like pandemic, it’s important to keep the customers engaged. It is important to reach out to customers. This can be done by launching social media campaigns and putting in more effort towards the social media presence of your company. This is because most of the people rely on social media for entertainment and killing boredom during times like these.
• One should avoid wasting time and effort in building something that has already been built well in the market. Your end goal is to provide the customer with the best experience and if that goal can be met by a technology that already exists, then you can simply avoid wasting the time, efforts, and resources to create an identical thing.
• It is important to have the right product analytics tool. Use it to engage with the stats. The right use of analytics stack and the product stack in product tweaking enhancement works well to create better customer engagement.

Kushal Manupati

• Learning how to innovate, finding lighter ways of bringing products or services to customers is necessary. Better innovations draw people to the platform without the company spending a lot on marketing. Thus, if done correctly, innovations can lead to reduced costs and better returns.
• Always maintain your marketing budget. The way one is driving the marketing budget will affect other decisions like bringing innovation or changes to the platform that determine customer engagement.

Panel 3: Crafting a Brilliant Omnichannel Experience

The session was moderated by Kunal Sharma (Senior Director of Growth, MoEngage) along with Vani Dixit (Head of Customer Management, Zee5), Brajesh Rawat (e-commerce Head, Marks & Spencer), Mahendra Dhiraj (Head of Business Analytics and Consulting, GTech Digital), Paul Bantayan (Head of Marketing, Cashalo) as expert panelists.

Here are the overall highlights from the panel:

• When a brand is creating an omni-channel experience for the user, it should be devoted to the needs of the consumer. Being customer-centric at the core of the organization is important to bring sensitivity to the whole process of creating an omni-channel experience. This can only be done when one has a very strong customer data platform.
• Customer segmentation data is of importance in order to identify, understand, and meet each customer’s requirements. In terms of differentiation and segmentation, one should use the data that the customer’s input and the behavior that they show and, put certain tags and certain values across certain milestones. You can create multiple segments based on permutations of these tags and values, each with different messaging, pricing, and the product being offered.
• Building a good customer experience across all channels is based on two major things- First; a consumer should see the same of you no matter what platform he or she is using. Second; personalizing the customer’s journey based on the product, messages, creatives, and channel.
• To remove hurdles from the omni-channel experience, use the following approaches.
• For a seamless experience, use the top-down approach of management
  – Bring data together to present a unified approach
  – Have the right logistics to support your efforts for a brilliant omni-channel experience
  – Pay attention to the technology and the connectivity according to the dynamics of the business
  – Communication and marketing should be highly targeted and personalized.
• Remember that it is not just customer 360. It is also about the product, it could be promotions and even customer service. At the end of the day, you need to have a unified view to actually go to the next level. In both online and offline worlds, it’s very important for a customer to have a seamless experience. You have to ensure that you are giving back to the customer. It’s very critical that you have a single unified view because before a customer actually purchases with the onset of all the social media, websites and internet, etc, they have at least seven touch points before converting. So, having a unified profile will help you to create a personalized experience for your customers.

Insights from individual experts:

Vani Dixit

• The starting point for crafting a brilliant omni-channel experience is by making customer-centricity the DNA of the organization. If everyone is thinking for the consumers, then this sensitivity will itself come into the process. The cornerstone and the starting point of all of this is to build a very strong customer data platform.
• Two things are important for a smooth experience:
  – Unified Segmentation- Whichever channel a consumer uses to interact with your platform, he or she is seeing the same of you.
  – Personalization- Finding out different kinds of things that go into optimization to see that it’s to the right user, the right product, through the right messaging, watching the messaging language in terms of creatives and communication, and also through the right channel is important.
• The pillars of building a good customer experience remain the same even when we are building differentiated communication strategies. One should be where the consumer is. Segmenting your consumers is also a good step. Seeing how many users are coming from a particular genre or language, and do you have enough from there helps create data to input into content strategy.

Brajesh Rawat

• Being conventional brick and mortar retailers, we often look at the omni-channel experience and a 360 view as an entirely different channel; channel largely for liquidation, or channel largely for giving more discounts. This should be avoided because it might make the core offline customers feel cheated.
• As a brand, it is important to think of the customers first. It is important to have a single view of the customer to understand exactly what the customer is doing within your ecosystem. This will lead to a better personalization of their journey across all the channels of your brand.
• There are some important KPIs that should be monitored to improve the customer journey. Some KPIs to be monitored are:
  – The channel which customer is using the most to give geo-targeting campaign offers or promotions
  – Information like operating time and days because right now those are also very fluid in nature
  – Observe customer purchase behavior across channels offline and online to understand how much you can cross-sell
  –  The channel where customers usually respond on
  – Last but not the least, the kind of campaign users react to

Mahendra Dhiraj

• Create a 360-degree view of the customer to offer a personalized experience to your customer. For that, it is important to have a unified profile. So, a customer data platform (CDP) layer on top of any platform is very critical for any organization. A CDP would have structured data and unstructured data. All this needs to be seamlessly unified into a single view to actually act on it and to give the customer the experience, which he actually deserves.
• Some approaches to take for crafting an omni-channel experience:
  – It has to be a top-down approach. At the end of the day, it’s about having a seamless experience and not about a price war. So the first thing you need to have is a top-down approach of any management
  – Sometimes the data and metrics are very disjointed. It has to come together to give a unified experience to the customer.
  – The logistics part has to be mature enough to support an omni-channel experience.
  – Communication and the marketing part should not be cluttered. It should be a unified single communication to the customer so that he or she is not confused at the end of the day.
• The key thing for B2B fleet management systems would be how nimble and how easy it will be to integrate to an existing platform. Broadly, it’s about scalability, flexibility, easy integration, and where it is hosted.

Paul Bantayan

• In terms of differentiation and actual segmentation, using the data that the customer’s input and the behavior that they show, put certain tags and certain values across certain milestones. So you can create multiple segments based on permutations of these tags and these values, each with different messaging, pricing, and the product being offered to meet the customer requirements.
• In FinTech, in terms of omni-channel, definitely use up all the data that you have in order to make your predictions on when customers are most likely to repay when and where they are most likely to repay. You can use that data to push them to certain channels where they can actually repay.
• To run a collection campaign, it’s really important to collaborate between the marketing team and the collections team. Use and leverage all that data that you have in order to improve collections campaigns. So it’s a collaboration between the two. Leverage all this data that you have to lead customers to the best place that they can actually pay back the loans.

Panel 4: How to Effectively Scale Personalization Across the Customer Journey

The all-women panel moderated by Divya Jagwani (Growth Manager, SEA, Moengage) had Olivia Kurniawati (Head of Product Marketing, Tokopedia), Agnes Lie (Head of Growth Marketing, OVO), Jenna Kosasih (Chief Commercial Officer, Mapemall), Christina Lee (Senior Director of Client Success, Verticurl) on the panel.

Here are the overall highlights from the panel:

• Personalized one-on-one experience can increase sales and influence customer behavior. According to a short report, 40% of surveyed customers said that they actually purchased something more expensive than they planned because the customer experience was personalized. Better word-of-mouth promotion and increased customer loyalty are some of the outcomes of personalization.
• According to the panelists, it is important to create a solid foundation for a personalization strategy. A solid foundation ensures that the user experience is good from the very beginning and simplifies the retention process.
• Panelists also answered various questions from the audience about personalizing customer journeys in different business environments. They discussed a few common mistakes that marketers make while attempting personalization.

Insights from individual experts:

Olivia Kurniawati

• When one is building a customer journey, it is important for all the team members to be on the same page, i.e., everyone must be customer-obsessed. It is imperative for the marketers to be aware of their collective end goal in order to not let any of their efforts or strategies go in vain.
• To be able to build campaigns, one needs to be aware of:
  – Frequency: Does the user transact frequently or do they visit a product page multiple times?
  – Intention: Does the user ever purchase or do they just check out but never pay, and are they loyal to the brand.
  – Monetary Value: It defines the value of the buyer and the geographical segmentation because every geographical area is very different from one another.
• A customer should not feel threatened by the way a company uses its data for personalization. The company should only leverage things that are really able to move the needle, so don’t use any data that will not have the customers moving their purchase intention.

Agnes Lie

• More sophisticated personalization would require a vast amount of data but in the end, personalization is quite worthwhile for a need-based product despite all the complexities. Sending out the best offers or sending out the best communications at the right time is important in cases like this.
• One shouldn’t wait for their product to be ready to start user research. They must start it early so they can gain insights at an earlier stage. Get insights on what it takes to get a buyer to purchase a product and start from that point. This will help the company remain one step ahead.
• Keep experimenting. Experimentation provides marketers with insights about the consumer’s experience with the product and enables them to improve personalization and thereby the experience.

Jenna Kosasih

• Take a holistic approach to personalization by aggregating offline and online consumer behavior. Most offline brands understand what the customer wants offline. However, by aggregating it with data online, they can make personalization more effective.
• No matter how good your platform is, never assume that every customer will understand your platform journey completely. A company can actually show them what they want based on their previous digital path or based on their previous history and simplify their journey. It is advisable to create a journey according to the consumer’s digital path. That will help to redirect them to shortcut their journey.
• While balancing the costs and personalization, prioritize the data that you want, so you can manage with a limited budget and ensure that you do not end up exhausting the entire budget in experimentation.

Christina Lee

• While shifting from brick and mortar to online stores, it’s critical to take an online strategy towards personalization and engagement so that the experience is personalized for customers in the virtual space.
• Organizational alignment between sales and marketing teams is a necessity scale personalization. It makes it easier for both the teams to be aware of marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads. It makes the crafting of personalization easier.

Panel 5: Modern Growth Stack for the Mobile-First World

The panel was moderated by Ben Desailly (Senior Martech Advisor, The Lumery) included Kshitij Hastu (Senior Director of Growth, SEA, MoEngage), Sherry Chao (Senior Solutions Engineer, Segment), Ben Glynn (Head of Growth, APAC, Mixpanel), Govind Kavaturi (Director of Partnerships, Branch) as experts.

Here are the overall highlights from the panel:

• Like finance owns the flow of cash in and out of a company, growth owns the flow of customers in and out of a product. Growth is about identifying the different tactics and levers that you can play with at every stage of the funnel from the top of the funnel right through the bottom of the funnel. Earlier much focus was placed on just acquisition and not retention but now it is also about the retention and increasing the lifetime value of the customer so that he/she keeps coming back. This change is brought by martech. So martech initially paved the way and then SAS and e-commerce businesses really accelerated the growth function.
• In current times, traditional companies are also being forced to adapt to mobile-first ways. Traditional businesses are trying to take on that change that is coming rapidly in the world and sometimes struggling, taking a while because it takes a long time to change anything in large organizations and having all those mobile-first startups disruptors coming through and just kind of owning that space. It’s on all of us to educate them about the martech and growth stack scenario.
• IDFA is core to the app attribution industry since the beginning and it’s unique and consistent across all apps and devices. The possibility of deterministic matching is brought to life with it. If the developer has no right to collect the IDFA, there cannot be any deterministic matching. So when the user clicks on an ad or any link outside of the platform, the app cannot say that this user came from that link. This will bring a huge impact on the entire industry of attribution, ad networks, and engagement, re-engagement, remarketing as they bring about personalization, and are basically living on it.
• The toughest part about building this growth stack is figuring out the exact tools you want to use and then also finding the engineering resources to implement them all. A platform requires an analytics tool for gathering insights, a communication tool for sending notifications and email, etc. to the users. You also need to see if you still have some leftover budget that can be used for running ads across platforms to target and acquire new users.
• When you need to add some kind of technology to your platform, there is mostly an option of building it yourself or buying it from someone who has already built it. At times building something like that might take a lot of time and resources that can be utilized in something else. So it is better to acquire technology from outside that someone has already spent a lot of time on to direct your resources towards better things.

Insights from individual experts:

Kshitij Hastu

• When you’re looking at a growth stack, if you’re looking at the CDP that you need to start tunneling data to the right places, you start looking at the analytics, the marketing automation piece, the messages you should be sending, the attribution of what’s working. Having such a broader view of the entire growth tech stack is definitely one of the best ways to reduce the confusion of differences between your products, the other products, and just the noise that exists in a space.
• There is definite value in using some out of the box machine learning system. It is critical to remember that machine learning is only as good as how much data you’re able to collect, understand, and draw trends. So always go with a solution that knows what it is doing. Rather than trying to build everything from scratch, focus on what you do best. Invest in a platform that allows you to get to your end-goal quicker.
• Sometimes companies think that sending out a huge number of notifications will get them as many conversions, but that doesn’t hold true at all. If one is able to personalize at the user level with the growth stacks out there today, think that your conversion rates are a lot higher. Your retention rates are a lot higher because consumers actually trust the brand and they know that you’re not just selling the same thing to them that you are to everybody else.

Sherry Chao

• When starting from scratch, you definitely need a tool for gathering insights about your app or your website. So this is going to be like an analytics tool. Then you need to actually be able to see specific users and what they’re doing and create funnel reports. For communication use push notifications and SMS. Beyond analytics and an email or a marketing automation tool, if you still have budget left, definitely invest in AD platforms to acquire new users.
• The focus should be on reusability; getting multiple outputs from one effort. Features vary significantly across every single CDP. The basic idea of segmentation is to create standards and libraries that are specialized for collecting customer behavioral events or data. And then it allows you to use it for multiple purposes to maximize its value. So they serve as a single collection point and we allow you to create a 360-degree view of the customer. They also maintain integrations with like 300 plus different tools.
• A person has multiple channels to use. You have to make sure that those channels are integrated in a particular manner. It is a challenge to stitch them together but one has to be conscious of that as it will give a better experience to the user. And then also, mobile-first means having to stay on top of mobile trends and things that are happening in the market.

Ben Glynn

• While working within a limited budget, prioritization is the key. One should start by thinking about the experience they want to give the customer. Only after the customer experiences a good experience, they are going to stay and repeat the purchase. So, it is important to think about what is going to drive this behavior. Once you identify this, you must find the right tools to deliver that experience.
• For enhanced personalization and creating efficiencies, one can use machine learning across the stack. Keep in mind that machine learning could have a good effect or impact on the bottom line of what you’re trying to achieve. You need a certain element of data to start with in the first place. And then at the other end of the spectrum, if you’ve got all that data available, there’s kind of this decision that businesses need to make whether they’re going to build their own machine learning capabilities at a very basic level or they want to buy that technology.
• The mobile-first landscape order has created two problems – One, it has become very complicated for businesses to build technologies for a great mobile experience. Second, some amazing brands have really set the bar high in terms of what the customer expects. With mobile-first interaction, customers prefer getting on-demand and real-time access to services.

Govind Kavaturi

In terms of choosing or thinking about growth stacks, it is important to first think about where you are as a company in terms of maturity. If you are a mature company like e-commerce or short video formats, where you already have successful models, then you need to divide areas there. But if you’re dealing with a new segment, there should be a lot of trial and error there. Keep yourself out of growth stack and think about what you need to do in terms of creativity there.

Session 1: How Best-in-Class Brands Onboard New Customers

In this session by Govind Kavaturi, Director of Partnerships at Branch (industry leaders in mobile measurement, deep linking, attribution, and persona mapping) talks about the importance of UX in onboarding new customers. Govind further drills down into the impact of a consistent experience across various channels on user retention and the approach employed by customer-obsessed brands with use cases from his experience at Branch.

Here are the overall highlights from the panel:

• A rough cross-platform experience can lead to frustration in the users. While using mobiles, everything is in one particular device. Whether a user wants to watch something, buy something, perform an activity, running, walking everything they do is on the mobile and if they are not given a seamless experience, they are not going to continue with that brand.
• Smoothness in cross-platform working helps enhance the customer experience. The three-step cross-platform provided by Branch includes:
  – Linking- When a user clicks a link, they should get the best possible experience. Linking experience allows the users of a particular brand to interact with the brand in a much simpler way.
  – Attribution- Once the user clicks on the link, what is the user doing, where is the user going, what is the journey of the user until the user gets into a particular page into an app and then purchases? By tracking this, the entire ecosystem is taken care of in terms of attribution. Regardless of the channel or the platform, brands should be able to bring together user activity no matter where it happens.
  – Persona Graph- Because a number of users would be clicking on a link, it would be possible to actually create a graph of these users that will in turn show accuracy in attribution and linking. By using integrated brands, it is possible to recognize users even when they are not logged in.
• User journeys have evolved to cross-platform interaction from single touch-points. To stop users from abandoning your app at any time soon after they install it, it is necessary to provide the best-in-class app and web experiences to reduce the friction that occurs in multiple activities. To ensure customers stay, brands should try to provide the customers with information about what the app does even before they log in. Building such direct onboarding experiences relate directly to the user flow.
• The ease and quickness of users in completing their first task in an app determine successful onboarding.
  While onboarding B2B customers, it is possible to focus more as one might have a lot more data of that user as compared to B2C. With B2B, one can build user experience with available data in a much more advanced way. In B2C, one deals with millions of users. It is necessary to take care of each user’s experience at a scale that can be challenging.
• The discussion for this panel revolved around the needs of modern consumer marketing, and what technologies & tools are must-haves to be cutting-edge in consumer marketing. In this exciting session, the experts from Mixpanel, Branch, Segment, and MoEngage unpack the complexities of modern growth stack: what it means, the tools and APIs (analytics, communication, marketing automation, and ad platforms) required, resources required to build it, expected user experience use cases it aims to resolve, and how it can be implemented to overcome challenges in the mobile-first world.

Session 2: How OYO Maximizes Mobile Push Delivery

One of the most popular brands in India’s hospitality sector, OYO has optimized customer engagement through efficient push notification delivery as a channel. In this session, Arjya Nathvani (Head of Growth Marketing, OYO International) and Nalin Goel (VP Product, MoEngage) discuss push notification delivery rates and how it depends on the OEM, factors affecting it, and how it can be resolved using MoEngage’s Push Amp+ offering.

Here are the overall highlights from the panel:

• While deciding the right channel to use for communication with users, it is important that a brand keeps in mind the efficiency as well as the efficacy of the channel. Channel like email is low cost but then its engagement rates are also low. WhatsApp and SMS are very costly so they cannot be used for scale. Push, despite low CTRs, is very cost-effective. So it is important to make the right decision based on your purpose and these two factors.
• One of the most important factors impacting delivery these days is the OS. The second would be the OS level controls. The communication and factors of recency and frequency of engagement are also really important. Most of the OEMs have similar problems with regard to push delivery. They all have these custom OSs written on top of Android and everywhere they are handling it in very different manners which sometimes leads to the user not receiving notification.
• To work at the OEM level with push amplification, try to understand which of the OEMs are having low delivery but high share, so they can maximize the impact for a marketer if the delivery is amplified for those OEMs. And this solution works across all OEMs. It has a special booster for Xiaomi and the impact of the push notification delivery rate for Xiaomi goes from 40% to 80-85% also in some cases.
• Other than the delivery rate metric, the efficacy of push channels can be measured by looking at the CTR and CVR. CTR is Click Through Rate and CVR is Conversion Rate. Focusing on both of these would add an amount of value for the consumer, which one should always try to achieve. Keep communication highly personalized in nature, use a recommendation engine to send better notifications. This leads to a direct impact on the conversion rate also.
• The optimum amount of communication that needs to be sent out to the consumer should be figured out for each segment. Look at the uninstall rates, and look at consumer response, etc, to determine what is the best and optimum amount of push notifications as far as frequency is concerned for a particular segment. Too many notifications might disturb the user, leading to turning notifications off.

Insights from individual experts:

Arjya Nathvani

• A channel can be looked at from two dimensions- channel efficacy and efficacy. Push is not the most effective channel in terms of getting the highest CTRs but when looked at from both the dimensions, its cost, and efficacy make it the most important channel. So with a cost-benefit analysis, push definitely is the better performing channel than most of the other ones.
• The world is going to move to a place where users will not want to be probably disturbed as much and everyone is going to see new rules come up. Brands have to continuously adapt to coming changes. With almost every channel, it starts off as a channel where you can use it at will, you can use it in scale in volumes, but then slowly you have to put guardrails around the same to ensure that customer experience remains the topmost priority for your brand.
• In order to solve the deliverability issue that you can face due to Chinese OEMs for smartphones, using Push Amplification is surely one of the things that help to drive delivery rates up.
• The two solutions to fix deliverability are- one, use the Notification Center on the app. So if pushes aren’t delivered, they are at least there on the app for the person to see. Whenever the person opens the app, the communication that we wanted to convey is right there. Two, internally begin some experiments, such as trying to schedule or rather include a few scheduled push notifications in code to see if that works. We call it to pull base notifications and we are trying that as well.

Nalin Goel

• Push delivery is dependent on multiple factors starting from the device that the end-user is using, or how recently the user has been active on the app. In most cases, the low delivery rate in the mobiles for push notifications happens because of the OS rating. The recency and frequency of engagement plus communication are really important at this point in time.
• The ecosystem at this point in time is really large in terms of there are only limited variables that you can control. What everyone should largely be working on first is- understanding the problem. Next, attend these problems and try to see what can you pull out on your side to improve the push notification delivery. Based on this, Moengage came up with something called Push Amplification in 2017.
• At Moengage, we believe that push can be made more engaging. There can be multiple form factors of push, in terms of the capability. Push can actually act as a mini app on the notification tree by the kind of functions that they can do. There can be different kinds of push on which you can engage the customer in a very different manner. You can make them more interactive and get higher CTRs and conversions out of it.

What’s Next In Store?

Since #GROWTHAsia 2020 broadly covered topics around growth structure and stack, omnichannel marketing, and customer engagement strategies, here are a couple of articles for further reading on the above-mentioned topics and themes:

• Discover why every organization needs a growth team and how you can build one from scratch!
• Find out the answers to 30+ of the most pertinent marketing questions!
• Evaluate your mobile app’s performance against industry benchmarks across different regions. Check Now!

2020 was an unprecedented year for businesses across geographies, spanning several verticals and industries. In order to provide actionable strategies and bounce-back frameworks to our community of marketers and product owners, we conducted #GROWTHAsia 2020. Continuing our effort of providing top-notch, thought leadership content, we organized #GROWTHAsia 2021, on 24th March 2021, in collaboration with AppsFlyer and Mixpanel.

#GROWTHAsia 2021 consisted of expert panel discussions centered around customer centricity, brand engagement, effective segmentation, leveraging user data, and building a modern engagement stack. The event also shed light on how businesses can drive customer happiness in a mobile-first, post-pandemic world, thus boosting the bottom line.

Our illustrious panel comprised of marketing leaders from Asia’s biggest and most customer-obsessed brands, the likes of POPS Worldwide, OVO, Kredivo, KapanLagi Youniverse, Kompas Gramedia, Amar Bank, Zilingo, U Mobile, NTUC, theAsianparent, Klook, AWS, TM, Chope, AppsFlyer, Tiket.com, and Amanotes.

If you happened to miss out on #GROWTHAsia 2021, don’t worry we got you! In this blog, I will summarise all the interactive and insightful sessions while providing bite-sized key takeaways that you can emulate and grow your business.

Without any further ado, here’s an overview of all the panels and sessions covered during #GROWTHAsia 2021. Let’s jump right in.

Keynote: The Impact of Customer Happiness on Business Revenue

The keynote session of #GROWTHAsia 2021 was spearheaded by Sarika Tulsyan, Chief Revenue Officer at POPS Worldwide. In this session, Sarika talks about the biggest threat to a business in today’s unpredictable environment is not a competition but bad customer experience. She also stresses the need to collaborate and drive customer happiness with a focus on sustainable revenue, i.e. one that reflects the overall business growth and strategy to achieve long-term, organic success.

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Actionable Takeaways:

• For businesses, it is common knowledge that 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the business. Since the cost of acquisition is usually higher than the cost of retention, it is critical to understand the difference between customer satisfaction and customer success.
• While customer satisfaction is an efficiency metric, customer success is a revenue metric. Typically, there is always a disproportionate gap between the two. Not every satisfied customer can be regarded as a successful customer. Hence, the number of satisfied customers will always be greater than those who can be considered as successful customers. The real challenge lies in understanding why this gap exists and how to minimize it.
• One way to do this is by considering the multiple metrics across a consumer journey that impact customer satisfaction. In other words, businesses need to focus on the “micro-moments” that lead to a customer’s journey and drive business growth. For instance, for an e-commerce site, the micro-moment could be an offline moment a user experiences (word-of-mouth or a billboard) that triggers them to do an online transaction through a smartphone.
• Understanding these types of micro-moments and leveraging them to drive business growth should be the end goal instead of just looking at the customer journey. This can minimize the customer satisfaction and customer success gap.

Expert Insights:

• Sometimes, over-personalization based on customer segments doesn’t help businesses. For example, a great job of customized content may lead to an increase in conversion and checkout rates, but it may not necessarily lead to higher RPO or average revenue per viewer/user. Why? Because customers are not discovering anything new. Hence, over-personalization might actually be plateauing your business rather than growing it. So, finding the balance between the two is critical.
• As next-gen marketers, it’s our job to drive the business by understanding the next ‘trigger’ that’s informed by data. This also helps acquaint customers with that ‘unknown new’ to enable lasting business growth.
• Organizations tend to define their success metrics in silos for different departments rather than look at it as a common success metric; one which can then cascade into individual departments. Having a common metric can help minimize the gap.
• This can be done by aligning our organization’s goals to department goals with respect to marketing, product, or customer service. Doing this creates a certain level of competencies between the department in terms of defining the clarity and understanding key responsibility towards the goals. When you map those success metrics to department success metrics, you create a harmonious, well-oiled business where everyone is aligned and works towards shared goals, maximizing revenue. In short, the three P’s i.e. People, Process, and Product should be in complete harmony.
• Customer satisfaction metrics are great only if they are being measured by the right people, monitoring the right things, and working towards the big picture. Only then will we as marketers be able to score a victory.

Session 1: Effective Segmentation Strategies to Fuel Customer Engagement

The first session of #GROWTHAsia 2021 was moderated by Divya Jagwani (Senior Manager, SEA, MoEngage) with Agnes Lie (VP of Growth Marketing at OVO), Cahyanto Arie Wibowo (Head of Product Growth at KapanLagi Youniverse), Indina Andamari (VP, Head of Marketing & Communications at Kredivo), Dian Gemiano (CMO at Kompas Gramedia), and Khalid Raheel (CMO at Amar Bank) joining as expert panelists.

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This session covers the various practical and efficient segmentation strategies that can be the biggest game-changer when it comes to driving customer engagement. It also highlights the importance of having an impactful segmentation strategy, shedding light on diverse segmentation strategies used by various industries.

Actionable Takeaways:

• Segmentation as an engagement tactic is of prime importance with organizations that segment effectively experiencing higher profits than those who don’t.
  The idea behind segmenting users is to provide a personalized experience instead of generic and spammy communication.
• If you are just starting out, use unique preferences and behavioral patterns to build your segmentation campaigns. You can focus on behavioral patterns, year-on-year aggregated consumer data, current preferences (on a granular level), repeat behavior, purchase drivers, incentives resonating with the audience, and communication channel. For advanced segmentation, look at the user’s predictive lifetime value.
• To run a targeted campaign, look at the user journey and work backward depending on the business targets you are trying to achieve.
• Finally, when it comes to managing the thin line between personalization and privacy, GDPR works as the gold standard. Transparency with users is key and has to be embedded in the DNA of every organization.

Experts Insights:

Agnes Lie

• The most refined form of segmentation is the behavioral segmentation approach which entails dividing audiences based on how they act on our platforms from in-app behavior to actual transactions.
• It enables us to be more precise with our targeting and opens up room for A/B testing
• It yields better results because the treatment we are giving to the users is based on real data rather than using presumed knowledge
• It allows us to combine the behavioral data with both predictive and deterministic modeling to pursue business objectives
• When segmenting users, look at the product funnel journey and see where the traffic came from and if it was acquired through big channels such as TikTok, Facebook, Google, etc.
• Look at the different segments within the channels and study their behavior before you dive into data relating to a behavioral or transactional relationship.

Indina Andamari

• In addition to looking at the cash transaction behavior of the user, we map out the customer journey first and identify the key drivers of each stage. We then prioritize users based on which group would bring the biggest impact. It could be the size of the pool or the ones that are getting the highest revenue. The focus is to gather enough data to work with so that your hypothesis can be more accurate.
• We use a data science model to score the demographics, geographic, and psychographic information. This results in a heat map, which helps us to prioritize which segment to focus on. Once we collect this data, we profile each segment to get a user persona. Within that segment, we then see if you have similar characteristics and then personalize the messaging for when A/B testing with a control group. The idea is to test your hypothesis before you make it a full-fledged campaign.

Cahyanto Arie Wibowo

• Based on the user data collected, we bucket user data into three categories:
  i) demographic data such as gender and age
  ii) behavioral data to divide our user action and
  iii) technographic data which is about which technologies our users use.
• We use these factors to analyze our internal theme. You can also factor in metrics such as usage frequency or time on-site to bucket users on their state of engagement and activity, and improve your product’s features.

Dian Gemiano

• Since in the media industry, we cater to different target audiences, our segmentation tactics differ. At KG media, we have three groups: the flyby, the moderate, and the loyal. So we look into the content consumption behavior and truly understand what kind of content will resonate with them the most. The goal is to shift the fly by into moderate and moderate to loyal because the loyal customer gives you more revenue.
• For advertisers, we are more passive and surf to understand what the advertiser needs by looking at the basic demography, consumption behavior, and purchase intent segmentation.

Khalid Raheel

• When we look at the segmentation, the goal is to look at the need-based segments (people who ‘need’ a loan) but also factor in the outliers who are ‘want-based’ users (for example, someone looking to buy a second-hand phone and may be interested in a loan).
• At Amar Bank, segmentation tells us what our TG isn’t as it is equally important to understand what our customers don’t want in addition to grasping what they do want.
• From a segmentation standpoint, it is important to understand what is the need, what is the necessity, and what is the demand at every stage of life as all these three elements change continuously. Once the user data is in, you can focus on creating the relevant micro-moments in these people’s lives that are based on highlighting the demands and benefits for the user.
• Before you start your segmentation, start with empathy and understand what it is that the customer is lacking in his/her life so that you can fill that gap. It’s important to backward integrate the product to a forward integrated behavior or vice-versa.

Session 2: Leveraging User Insights to Boost User Retention

The session moderated by Arijeet Rana (Senior Manager, SEA, MoEngage) with Kushal Manupati (Head of Digital at Zilingo), Rajeshwari Kanesin (Innovation Manager at U Mobile), Joshua Tan (Head of CRM at NTUC), and Vineeth Kallarakkal (Head of Marketing at theAsianparent) as attending experts.

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This session was centered around huge data volumes concerning user journeys and how they can be overwhelming for modern growth and product teams. The need of the hour is to avoid analysis paralysis by understanding the critical user insights that need to be monitored and how these insights tie into the larger goal of boosting engagement.

Actionable Takeaways:

• In today’s business landscape, customer retention is key. And one of the surefire ways to do this is by leveraging user insights to boost user retention. However, often, product teams and growth teams get lost in the mountain’s worth of user data and fail to understand what are the user paths that they should be following.
• So, the real question becomes: What are the most important engagement metrics you should look at and track? Some common options you can use include using the RFM model across the digital buyer journey, running gamification campaigns, analyzing your customer’s spending analysis, and looking at the typical marketing channels such as push notifications, SMS, etc.
• That said, user paths and user journeys are becoming more and more complex. So businesses need to understand the key user insights they’re trying to derive as well as key metrics that can help monitor engagement, and create a feedback loop between the lifecycle team, the marketing team, and the product team. Plus, they need to analyze what are the red flags for a user who’s about to churn so that you know the extremities of a life cycle of a user on your app/website/any other medium.
• This invaluable data can ultimately be used to drive user retention tactics via referral programs, greater personalization, optimal message frequency, building a like-minded user community, and so on.

Expert Insights:

Kushal Manupati

• Engagement metrics need to be looked into from the context of the stakeholder and across the different stages.
• The user journey is becoming more complex with the plethora of channels available and users have their own affinity towards a channel.
• It is important to have a good lifecycle framework to understand what life stage the user is in, understand where you want the user to go, and what relevant KPIs matter for that particular stage. You can use a robust tool to achieve all this and more.

Rajeshwari Kanesin

It’s important to actually have a separate user journey for different users so that you can classify them as “trusted,” verify them, and ensure that the user data is clean. You can then score the data accordingly.

Joshua Tan

• To understand the type of engagement metrics you should look at, first understand what is your ultimate North star goal that you’re trying to achieve.
• Then, look at what is the job of the channel that you’re using to reach that goal and understand how a user interacts with that channel, which becomes the engagement touchpoints that you want to really capture.
• You need to not just look at what engages the customer but also what disengages the customer.

Vineeth Kallarakkal

• Your engagement metric will differ based on the channel you are measuring–be it an app or a website. You also have to look at how you are catering to the different user stages. It’s also important to identify what kind of metrics make sense for your user segments and the tools that the user is using and then identify the data points accordingly.
• You need to build user journeys, map them out, and customize them because the wants of the users are changing at every stage. Building a proper path helps address different segments of users differently, and building a journey specifically for them ensures the stickiness of your product to the user.
• When evaluating the risk of churning, first look at the usage pattern and see if there is a decreasing trend in any of the usage of your product. Dig deeper and understand why user engagement dropped off.

Session 3: Building The Best-In-Class Customer Engagement Tech Stack

This session was moderated by Scott Pugh (APAC Director, Mixpanel) along with Bibaswan Banerjee (Director, CRM, Klook), Mark Birch (Startup Advocate, APJ, AWS), Khairold Safri Ibrahim (Digital Product Manager, TM), and Dr. Raymond Chan (Head of Data Science, Chope) as experts.

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In this session, subject matter experts came together to discuss the evolution of the customer engagement tech stack and how to go about building a best-in-class tool that suits your business use cases.

Actionable Takeaways:

• There has been a paradigm shift in modern customer engagement, and subsequently, new technologies and tools have emerged to provide brands the much-needed cutting-edge.
• Whether you’re an early startup up or a traditional telco company, each company at different stages of their life cycle has to decide on what kind of tooling works for them at that specific time in their lifecycle. In other words, the customer engagement stack is ever-evolving and needs to be constantly monitored.
• It is important to hold your tech providers accountable and have a consistent dialogue going. When you’re buying technology, view it as an extension of your own team.

Expert Insights:

Bibaswan Banerjee

• The biggest challenge which we are constantly solving is how to stitch things together, as working in tech silos can be dangerous. Why? Because it paints an incomplete picture. So the key to using an ever-evolving tech stack is to ensure that as you get more and more new tools into the mix, you get them to talk to each other properly.
• When choosing a tech stack that offers scalability and customization, look for a stack that offers a solid foundation which big providers can provide through their cloud-based solutions. This can serve as the base. Then focus on having layers on top of that which are unique to your business. In short, leverage a hybrid stack to be more agile in customizing your solution.
• The trick lies in striking a balance between what you can onboard from the third party and which parts are critical to be super agile so you can work on it in-house.

Mark Birch

• Early-stage startups should focus on their core product and on getting the right features by using a consolidated tool that allows them to work as quickly as possible.
• In terms of the kind of tech stack to choose, remember that you should not be sacrificing the uniqueness of your offering and not diminishing the differentiation. So, look for a solution where you don’t have to build your own analytics.

Khairold Safri Ibrahim

• When zeroing in on a tech stack, the first question you need to ask is if it is even necessary in the first place, whether you need to automate those integrations or if they can be done manually.
• Another challenge you’ll need to tackle is changing the mindset of the people within the company to get them to try new things.
• You also need to keep the stack simple. Don’t try to do everything at once. Always start with the customers first rather than focusing on the technology, modeling or
  the framework.
• We learned that the attractiveness of the solution is only half of the story; the other half is making it work within the context of the company–taking into consideration the culture, the openness of the new technology, and of course, the resource availability.

Dr. Raymond Chan

• The main driver for our engagement stack was basically to understand how to achieve personalization through search and recommendation. To achieve this, we track behavior at a granular level, making the use of some kind of event tracking tool important.
• Here’s how we work: We feed a lot of the data collected into data warehouses and store it. We then build models that basically predict what interests the users. This information is then integrated back into the app, so our tech style is basically optimized through and through.

Session 4: Recalibrate, Recover, Reopen? Bouncing Back from the Pandemic

This session was moderated by Ronen Mense (President and Managing Director, APAC, AppsFlyer) with a panel comprising of Lakshmi Harikumar (Marketing Director, SEA, MoEngage), Dyah Wulandari (VP for Performance Marketing, tiket.com), and Alicia Vo (User Acquisition Lead, Amanotes).

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This session talks about what it will take for businesses to recalibrate, recover, reopen, and bounce back from the pandemic. It sums up how the pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of businesses by several years and answers the following important questions:
i) How are businesses recalibrating?
ii) Do businesses need to recover at all?
iii) What’s next for digital marketing with regions starting to fully reopen?

Actionable Takeaways:

• According to the recent AppsFlyer & iPrice report, the overall online spending among consumers in SEA increased by 19% in 2020–people who never bought online are starting to embrace online shopping. In other words, the pandemic has sped up the digitalization of businesses–not just by several weeks but years.
• It is important for businesses to reconceptualize their marketing initiatives and understand whether every segment and industry behaves the same. It is equally important to engage in ‘mindful marketing’ to the extent that you keep a happy tone but are not insensitive towards people’s feelings.
• Every brand might have a different reality, but the common theme going forward must be ‘positivity,’ ‘agility,’ and being ‘adaptive.’

Expert Insights:

Lakshmi Harikumar

• What helped brands differentiate themselves as winners are how agile they were in adapting their entire business model. It also involved not just looking at mobile as a channel but looking at mobile as a business model itself.
• A good example would be one of our clients in Australia, Jimmy, who’s in the online alcohol delivery service. He quickly added toilet papers to their entire supply of inventory, given the skyrocketing demand from the consumer. This is how brands can adapt and stand out in the long term.
• According to a report we recently published, one thing we’ve seen is this pandemic is the expedited adoption of digital and mobile. Traditional organizations were forced to go digital or go mobile, and organizations that were already digital had to completely reinvent themselves to break through the entire clutter.
• Going forward, businesses need to focus on innovative partnerships, business model changes, and keep the whole communication channel open with their customers. It is about being one with the consumers and being transparent about the business. For example, say your supply chain is broken right now, and order deliveries may be delayed. Communicating the same through increased transparency will help businesses reinforce their strong image and qualities.
• There’s been an increase in the marketing budget for obvious reasons. One, because brands want to maintain their share of voice and do not want to lose the momentum that they’ve built over all these years. And two, because paid activities have a direct impact on the organic traffic. All in all, they want to keep the whole brand positivity going right.

Dyah Wulandari

• Businesses need to be agile and focus more on short-term planning (say for the next three months). Plus, they need to be positive and redirect their focus on “maintaining people”, the biggest asset of the company.
• Our marketing strategy is to balance the needs of the user’s discovery phase up to the level when they make a purchase. From the marketing and the product point of view, we are empowering users with enough information within our apps to make sure that whenever they are in the ‘consideration’ phase, they can make the right choice.

Alicia Vo

• Along with driving light-hearted, warm, and cheerful campaigns centered around the “stay at home” theme, we have been sensitive to all the anxiety and stress that the users are constantly bombarded with. So, we ensure that our message is not too serious and basically want our users to use our apps for some much-needed escape.
• As a business, we need to establish a strong foundation with our partners with the industry, be it our marketing partners, our hotel partners, etc. to reinforce a strong business environment and offer mutual support.
• The communication and coordination between different stakeholders, both internal and external, can help maintain the effectiveness of your business and offer positive opportunities in the future.

What’s Next in Store?

Since #GROWTHAsia 2021 broadly covered topics around customer centricity, effective segmentation, leveraging user insights and boosting retention, building modern day customer engagement stack, and bouncing back from the pandemic, here are a couple of articles you should check out:

• 11 steps to building a customer-first culture
• Learn how to better segment users via RFM
• How to measure retention using cohort analysis
• Modern customer engagement platform: Should you build or buy?
• Actionable bounceback frameworks for the post-crisis business world