Why Paytm and Tokopedia are going for this marketing startup

Photo credit: Indi Samarajiva

Serial entrepreneurs can get inspiration from the strangest of things, even from a coffee machine. That’s how Ankit Maheshwari, his wife Nandini Rathi, and his brother Arjun Maheshwari came up with their newest venture.

Between them, they could already boast of startups like Instamedia Network (acquired by a Dubai media company), Born Rich, and ContentCloud.

“We (Arjun to be specific) had ordered an expensive coffee machine from one of India’s leading ecommerce sites,” says Nandini. It was delivered in a day’s time. But after a week, they received an email marketing message, offering a 25 percent discount on the same product.

“It was our light bulb moment!” The incident helped them figure out what was wrong with the marketing channels of ecommerce companies.

“There is a clear disconnect between the tools used by them. Sales has no insight about tech. Tech has no insight about customer care. The customer team has no insight about marketing, and so forth,” Nandini tells Tech in Asia.

As a result, ecommerce firms end up sending marketing messages to customers across the board, even to those who have already purchased the product.

The experience led to the birth of Betaout, a cloud-based marketing software provider that enables all the marketing channels of an ecommerce company to work together.

Pushing ecommerce

Noida-based Betaout was founded by Nandini, Ankit, and Arjun along with Raghubir Thakur and Mayank Dhingra in 2014. Some of its prominent clients are Paytm, Goibibo, GOQii, and Tokopedia. “We are working with over 150 ecommerce companies worldwide,” says Nandini.

The Betaout founders.

The ecommerce market in India is expected to double to US$31 billion by the end of this year.

So it’s a good time for a marketing software product that offers a customized set of tools, especially when most marketing tools used by ecommerce companies and B2B sites are generic in nature.

The aim, ultimately, is to lead to higher sales for ecommerce companies.

Nandini gives the example of a travel company. “We were able to pinpoint where the online sales were coming from and where the gaps were. By using cart recovery mailers, we were able to on an average recover six to eight percent abandoned carts.” It helped the travel company increase its orders by 15 to 20 percent, she says.

The trick

Photo credit: Insomnia Cured Here.

If you want to improve business, try knowing your customer.

Austria-based Emarsys, for instance, enables one-to-one interactions between marketers and customers. US-based AgilOne integrates customer data, analyzes customer behavior, and lets marketers engage with customers.

Like them, BetaOut is a customer intelligence and marketing automation platform.

Betaout collects a company’s consumer interactions across multiple channels like web, mobile, and social into a single centralized consumer repository that has their multichannel activity, profile data, and behavioral data.

Then it provides tools like email, on-site engagement, cart recovery, mobile push, live-chat, and SMS so that clients can do contextual marketing across channels.

“Our integration is quick and simple. We put a pixel on our client’s website (a JavaScript code) and then we automatically start tracking all the activities done by every single customer, including abandoned cart, items viewed, and so on,” explains Nandini.

This data is stored in an individual customer profile known as the Single Customer View.

Here’s what the Single Customer View looks like.

The picture above is of a centralized consumer profile. It shows the buying trends, intent behaviour, and future buying estimate for an online shopper.

The Single Customer View is the building block of BetaOut. “All our clients have access to it for every single customer they have. And it captures all activities, events, intent, purchase, browsing history, social footprint and more in real time.”

Betaout has built plug-ins for Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, OpenCart, Prestashop, and Drupal.

Making money

The company charges clients based on the number of contacts they have.

In April this year, the startup bagged US$1.5 million in a pre-series A round from investors like Beenext, Stanford Angels, Letsventure, and Chennai Angels,

Now it has set its sights on Southeast Asia. “We started by expanding to Indonesia, and have similar plans for other countries in the region. At the same time we are also scaling up our team by hiring for key positions.”

The startup is also working on a tool to predict the behavior of ecommerce customers, that is, when a customer is likely to buy a particular product and at what price.

Photo credit: Tech in Asia’s Kathrinna Rakhmavika

Nandini has been building businesses for the last eight years.

Her online media startup Instamedia Network was doing over 20 million page views per month when it was sold in 2012. Online luxury website Born Rich was initially a part of Instamedia.

ContentCloud was launched by Ankit and Nandini as a content collaboration platform for publishers working with huge teams in different locations. “It’s still live and we are working with clients like Viacom US. But we realized quite early that publishers don’t have deep pockets to pay.”

In case you are still wondering what the Betaout founders did with the coffee machine they ordered from the ecommerce company — well, they sent it back and asked for a refund.

This post Why Paytm and Tokopedia are going for this marketing startup appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/betaout-marketing-software-for-ecommerce
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