Growth Maestros

India is home to more than 600 D2C brands with a market size of a whopping 66 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.

To say the least, this market is buzzing with potential, fueled by a rising consumer population and increased disposable income.

And while D2C brands experience more freedom relative to realigning and launching new products, with the increased competitiveness in the market, the road isn’t all that smooth ahead.

Orcas, an e-learning platform from Egypt decreased its cost per lead by 30-35% with segmentation and automated campaigns with the help of a CEP (Customer Engagement Platform).

While there’s little doubt about the critical role of customer data and actionable insights, but only 30% of brands use deeper insights to personalize experience.

There still seems to be a gap in leveraging existing data to drive hyper-personalized customer experiences.

Customer adoption, growth, and maturity are customer success.

This function is a leading indicator of what a company can expect to face in the market - among its competitors, prospective customers and partners.

Customer success as a role could and should become a company’s heartbeat.

Over 55% of retail shoppers think loyalty rewards are the most valuable aspect of their retail shopping experience, with 63% willing to change spending habits to get the most out of a loyalty program.

It should therefore come as no surprise that in 2021 alone, 90% of businesses said expanding their loyalty program was a priority.

The debate around retention vs. acquisition is well settled.

Stats like potential cost savings being 5-25X, ~75% increase in profitability, and many more have pipped retention as a must-have strategy, more so in today’s environment.

To thrive in today’s world, brands need to evaluate their retention strategy and the tools they use for it.

There is no debate around the fact that consumers are more than willing to spend during a festive season.

While it is straightforward for a retail or E-commerce vertical, it is interesting to note the impact on brands in the travel industry!

The holy period of Ramadan is around the corner. A time of reflection, prayer, and community for those who observe the festival. 

As with such a period, we expect a massive spike in marketing activities as consumers indulge in going online or visiting a store to purchase their favorite items. 

At the same time, marketers pivot their engagement strategies as this period is more than just offering discounts and promotions.

Having female leaders in positions of influence is not only critical to women's career advancement but also stands to generate broader societal impacts on changing workplace policies. 

The holiday season is around the corner, and brands across the globe will devise various engagement strategies to engage, re-engage and retain customers. 

Growing at a compound annual rate of 40% to $2.8 billion by the end of 2022, it is safe to say the online gaming industry in India is growing rapidly. 

Remittances in the recent past have witnessed robust growth. Recently, the world bank stated that “Officially recorded remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are expected to increase by 4.2 percent this year to reach $630 billion.

Consumer brands across verticals and geographies are now leading with an insights-led approach, becoming more customer-centric and analyzing behavioral attributes and customer action (within the app or website). This is where the modern-day, end-to-end martech stack comes into the picture. In today’s episode, we discuss how to choose the right engagement platform and create an effective martech stack.

A modern marketing tech stack operates with many different platforms from CDPs to Engagement Platforms and more.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs) are often confused with each other. Some think it is a versus debate, an either-or situation, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

How do you build a modern-day ed-tech platform that encourages and equips learners to solve real-world problems?

Days of growing a business only on performance marketing are over. Organically reimagining commerce is the only way for digitally native brands to win by decreasing acquisition costs and delighting customers.

The focus needs to shift from only customer acquisition to customer education and engagement, which in turn will reduce the acquisition costs drastically and brands like Good Glamm or Mamaearth are great examples of brands doing that right! 

According to App Annie’s reports, mobile games are on track to surpass $120 billion in spending in 2021, growing 20% over $100 billion in 2020!

But with high adoption, there seems to be a problem of even higher churn in the gaming industry. In this episode, we look at the high churn phenomenon in gaming, discuss the factors involved, and provide actionable tactics that can arrest this high churn.

According to the Global Brand Shopper Survey, 55% of shoppers said they would directly shop with the manufacturer rather than a retailer. And as much as 81% of consumers say that they would buy from a brand directly in the next five years. The major advantage of the D2C model is that you develop a deeper connection with your customers, build loyalty, and provide a superior brand experience and personalized offers.

In 2020, global subscription revenue from the top 100 subscription apps excluding games, climbed by 34% year-over-year to $13 billion up from $9.7 billion in 2019!

Apps are increasingly turning to subscription models as a means of monetization. But to develop into a successful business model, subscriptions must be supported by a clearly defined mobile growth strategy.

Brands like Airbnb and Dropbox have made a fortune with effective growth marketing. While Airbnb reverse-engineered Craigslist forms and cross-posted listings, Dropbox offered extra drive space in exchange for referrals.

Despite different approaches, what unites top brands like Airbnb and Dropbox is having an effective growth engine.

In this episode, we’re looking at the festive season in the Middle East.

With the holiday season fast approaching, it is time to start planning an effective customer engagement strategy.

But how can brands analyze and leverage data to create winning engagement strategies? And how can data analytics help in creating targeted campaigns, optimizing price, and reduce cart abandonment?

In the UK alone, e-commerce sales have seen a record rise in 13 years with an increase of 36%. This indicates how busy the festive season 2021 is going to be!

It’s beginning to feel a lot like festivities!

In this series of holiday special episodes, we'll catch up with experts and discuss what the holiday season 2021 looks like, the importance of data in framing engagement campaigns, key lessons to learn, and share actionable insights. 

Starting with 1 million users in June 2020, US-based mobile-only, challenger bank, Current stands at 3 million users a year later. Current has achieved this through its purpose-driven brand actions, honest and open communication, and brilliant usage of influencer marketing. In this episode, we speak to Adam Hadi, VP of Marketing at Current about the bank's influencer marketing strategy and understand how they use it as an acquisition and engagement channel.

In this episode, we’ll be looking at an effective Offline-to-Online (O2O) strategy, how it can provide a personalized and delightful customer experience, and how to build a cohesive omnichannel strategy to attract and retain customers.

Joining us for the discussion is Lesley Hensell, co-founder and co-owner of Riverbend Consulting. Listen to the full episode for an interesting and insight-packed session on #GROWTH Maestros. 

In this episode, we will peel back the layers of Canva’s extraordinary organic growth and discover how their product-led approach drives that growth.

You can also discover Canva’s free to paid conversion strategy, as we talk to Anshul Patel, Product Growth Lead, Canva

We also break down the framework to approaching product-led growth for consumer brands, how to build growth teams from the ground up and how to set KPIs considering North Star and pirate metrics.

In the modern-day market, it has become essential for all verticals to offer a seamless and consistent cross-platform experience to users. 

In this episode, we will try to peel back the layers on a connected customer experience merging the physical and digital channels, how brands can do so, along with use cases and examples from one of the biggest and most renowned fashion and lifestyle retailers in the Middleeast, REDTAG. To help us understand more, we have got a very special guest with us today, Mr. Mahboob Reza, CRM Manager at REDTAG.

In this episode, we peel back the layers on Acquisition vs Retention and explore which should be your organization's growth lever.

By the end of December 2020, $60-65 million worth of Bitcoin trades on average were happening in India, every day. Mumbai-based CoinDCX reported a stunning growth in user base from 150K to 400K investors in just 15 months! To discuss the marketing and communication strategies driving this massive growth, we have with us Ramalingam Subramanian, CMO, CoinDCX.

In this episode, we chat with Nikhil, VP of Product Management at ZestMoney about the post-pandemic growth in the consumer lending space and overall emergent trends from India's fintech vertical along with the role of product in driving this growth.

In this episode, we sit with Louis Alston, Head of Operations at LifePay, one of the leading fintech players in the region, and discuss the growth of the vertical along with emerging trends in terms of digitization, consumerization, growth of digital banking, financial inclusion and literacy and the role of technology viz. open banking, blockchain and more!

It wasn’t long ago when the term “growth” was just used in passing while talking about marketing as a function. In a few short years, growth has become synonymous with good marketing practice. We are on course to seeing a similar evolutionary path when it comes to growth product management.

In this episode, we'll discuss growth product marketing as a career choice, core competencies required, everyday roles and responsibilities, along with use cases and examples. Joining us on the episode is Ameya Sawant, Growth and Special Projects, at ONE Championship, Asia's fastest-growing global sports media property based out of Singapore.

In this episode, we speak to Vera Rabkina, Head of Product at AppFollow about the hottest topic in ASO right now- Review Management.

In this episode, we speak to Sneha Shitut, product owner at Decathlon India about their omnichannel product strategy and how quickly they were able to roll out the signature, high-touch, offline customer experience onto the online platform, during the peak of the pandemic.

In this episode, we talk to Data Strategy expert and Principal at Practico Analytics, Ruben Ugarte about the role of gut feeling and intuition in the world of data analytics, the right way to approach data with examples of analysis models, resolving delay in decision making due to time-consuming data collection process, addressing data shortage through concurrent thinking and data adoption lifecycle model, use cases and examples from data-driven organizations like Spotify and Airbnb.