User retention is a critical way for driving growth of companies of every scale. Companies need to have a fine balance between user acquisition and retention, given how expensive it is to acquire a customer versus retaining one. Sumeet Singh, Group CMO Info Edge India Limited, takes us through her thought on customer experience, acquisition, and retention.
“Our mantra for customer retention at Info Edge is to ‘Be Valuable’ at every stage. We believe that customers today appreciate a personalized touch, better listening as well as a consistently good experience and that is what we work towards for all our brands. Digital innovations have changed the world today and are at the heart of any brand’s customer acquisition strategy. At Info Edge, we keep digital innovations at the centre of our marketing strategy and continuously keep experimenting and innovating new ways to drive business results. Versus landing our acquisition campaigns on a static registration page on Naukri.com, we developed a Chabot for registration in-house. This helped jobseekers answer relevant questions on their profile, post their CVs seamlessly and in a conversational manner the profile gets built. We saw considerable improvements in our conversion rates. For our real estate business, 99acres, conceptualizing and executing webinars during the pandemic and monetizing them to the builder community was another innovation resulting in acquiring new users and also an additional revenue stream. Apart from this, launching online property tours helped us acquire and engage more,” she says.
What is your advisory on customer acquisition strategies?
Empowered by mobile, the digital consumers today can get exactly what they want, super quickly. I think depending upon ones target segments, target markets and marketing objectives both work. Digital media has enabled us marketers to dabble into content marketing and done well content definitely is very effective in customer acquisition and retention.
While we know the consumer today begins their search online, reads reviews etc. of various products and services, but content goes far beyond just product reviews. Sharing trends, insights on what seems to be gaining demand, salary trends, insights around jobs etc. are definitely areas that help a jobseeker keep abreast with changes happening in his or her vertical/ industry /function and eventually will help keep the brand close to them.
Good content helps SEO. While contextual or high interest content will attract many eyeballs and traffic, I feel it’s important for marketers to know what quality of traffic they would like on their platforms and devise their content marketing strategy from there. We at Info Edge are very conscious of this and thus mostly create content in or are of expertise.
When it comes to customer retention, how do you specifically handle it or what is your mantra that you closely follow?
User retention is a critical way for driving growth of companies of every scale. Companies need to have a fine balance between user acquisition and retention, given how expensive it is to acquire a customer versus retaining one.
Our mantra for customer retention at Info Edge is to ‘Be Valuable’ at every stage. We believe that customers today appreciate a personalized touch, better listening as well as a consistently good experience and that is what we work towards for all our brands.
We are in touch with are customers and consumers. When the hiring activity declined by over 60% in April last year owning to the pandemic, Naukri.com launched its ‘Step-Up’ initiative to help jobseekers sail through tough career decisions. Apart from the live company hiring tracker that could aid jobseekers find relevant jobs, we curated useful content and courses that could help jobseekers up-skill. To build optimism and inspire them, we brought HR heads from top brands across India to give practical advice on job search and hiring trends through live webinars conducted weekly.
As a real estate brand that has stood by its consumers, at 99Acres, we continued to data mine and share a lot of rich insights around the real estate market with the buyers as well as the builders, thus engaging with them meaningfully. We also conducted live webinars with top real estate clients to share credible insights around the future of the real estate market with the buyer and renter community.
At Jeevansathi, we had launched the video profile and video calling feature for our consumers last year since physical meetings were not possible. Many consumers went ahead, explored video calling with their potential matches, and wrote back to us with their success stories on finding the right match even in these times, thanks to the brand.
Customer experience plays a very big role for any organisation. How do you ensure that the experience they get from your business is holistic and cut out for them?
Our mantra for a delightful customer experience at Info Edge is to ‘Be Valuable’ at every stage of the journey, be it finding a job or buying a house or zeroing on the perfect partner. We believe that customers today appreciate a personalized experience, better listening as well as a consistently good experience and that is what we work towards for all our brands.
As a company we invest heavily in data science, business intelligence, product and tech and in latest technologies that help us to serve a more personalised experiences. Using AI/ML, we also analyse the data backed by millions of customer interactions that happen on our platforms daily. Basis these interactions, we understand what is delighting our consumers and serve similar recommendations across our platforms be it mobile, app or desktop. We use predictive analytics at various stages and also in our acquisition strategy.
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