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Become A Startup Insider With Inc42 Plus
Join our exclusive community of business leaders &makers for in-depth tech stories and intelligence on India’s tech economy you won’t find elsewhere.
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Inc42 and Karix recently held a panel discussion titled How Ecommerce Startups Can Leverage Marketing Automation To Amplify Sales, exploring many critical areas such as:
- Identifying user drop-offs and how marketing automation tools can deal with it
- Leveraging martech tools to build relevance and lower customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Boosting user conversion by managing contextual communication across customer segments
- How martech solutions can drive personalisation and amplify user experience
Moderated by Sonia Kaul, VP of product Marketing and digital enablement at Karix, the discussion included Rashmi Gupta, head of D2C at Vahdam Teas; Shreeram Ganesh, head of growth at Fraazo, and Kapil Mittal, CSO at Power Gummies.
How Ecommerce Startups Can Optimise CAC Through Marketing Automation
These are exciting times for ecommerce startups in India. A recent Inc42 report suggests that the country’s ecommerce market is estimated to grow at a 19% CAGR during 2022-30 as startups capitalise on India’s fast-growing ecommerce opportunity. Understandably, many ecommerce companies have adopted a critical operational strategy to make the best of this opportunity and opted for marketing automation tools.
Incidentally, a wide range of marketing automation tools has been introduced in the past few years. But with too many choices come greater confusion and inefficient deployment of capital, resulting in lower return on assets (RoA). So, how can ecommerce brands identify the right marketing automation stack for optimum growth?
Power Gummies’ Mittal says that each user logging into an ecommerce website or app has different personality traits and mindsets. As the number of users rises, ecommerce companies tend to group them into various segments to help optimise conversion and customer engagement. But managing and communicating with these customer segments can be cumbersome and inefficient when carried out manually.
“Therefore, most startups essentially employ multiple martech tools to drive user engagement across customer segments” says Mittal.
“In an ideal world, there would be a single tool to deal with different issues, but this isn’t the case now,” says Fraazo’s Ganesh.
So, how do you zero in on the marketing automation tool that best suits your requirements?
Rashmi Gupta, Head-D2C at Vahdam Teas believes that most startups agree on one key identifier – companies must choose a tool that helps cut through the noise and hear the ‘voice of the customer’ loud and clear.
Chipping in, Ganesh says that “Compatibility with an ecommerce brand’s internal marketing stack/ecosystem along with a quick and seamless integration are other factors”.
Another crucial point that Gupta adds is that ultimately, the effort required to implement the system matters most in such cases as the company’s employees set and monitor parameters and logic.
Relevance and personalisation are integral to CAC as the higher these factors, the lower the CAC. Marketing automation helps drive these factors with conversational communications across multiple segments by leveraging user data and thus boosting user conversion, which is essential to improve the overall user experience, Kapil states.
While it is important to gain maximum reach, the right kind of reach is also critical. Flooding users with random notifications and communications can turn them off a particular brand.
Ganesh believes that “the core reason most users stay loyal to a specific ecommerce brand is the seamless experience and the value provided when required.”
However, there is no one-size-fits-all tool in the market. If ecommerce brands know the types of consumers they are addressing and the outcomes they desire, identifying the right marketing automation tool becomes a whole lot easier, which will eventually help them drive sales and achieve a higher RoA.
