Episode 8 – Moving Offline to Online, Marketing Setup and Generating ROI

[00:16] Kaushal: This is episode number eight of The Growth Genius Podcast, powered by Infidigit. Welcome, friends, to the Growth Genius Podcast. My name is Kaushal Thakkar. I am the founder of Infidigit and your host for the show. Each week, I interview geniuses who have created phenomenal digital growth for their organization. We discuss the key techniques and share insights to help you learn and create your own growth story. 

The COVID pandemic gave us several different experiences. Meeting friends became online, shopping moved online for many of us, even many traditional jobs which had never thought of work from home transformed and enabled their teams to operate remotely from their homes. This taught us one thing that every brand and every business needs to be online.

Today, we are going to discuss the topic moving offline to online. We’ll learn the marketing setup process and how to generate ROI. We have a growth genius who has created digital growth for brands like Aditya Birla Online Fashion (ABOF), and Reliance Retails’ AJIO. He now heads project delivery and business growth for Mozak Labs and helps several brands to transform from offline to online. Nilay started his entrepreneurial journey with Mozak Labs and has created data driven 360-degree digital marketing campaigns for several offline brands. Let us understand from him the nuances of taking a business from offline to online. Nilay, thank you so much for being on the show. How are you doing today? 

[2:01] Nilay: I’m doing good Kaushal. Thank you for having me here. 

[2:04] Kaushal: And you’re joining us from Bangalore, right, if I’m not mistaken?

[2:07] Nilay: Yes, I’m joining from Bangalore. 

[2:09] Kaushal: So, how’s the climate out there in Bangalore?

[2:11] Nilay: It’s raining at the moment, but it has been like that for the last week, I think, for the whole for this last week. But it’s wonderful to be here at Bangalore right now. 

[2:20] Kaushal: That’s very pleasant. And Bangalore rains is something that I love. They are not that heavy like Mumbai, and at the same time, it’s really pleasant to be there in Bangalore. So, Nilay for the people who do not know about you, could you help our audience with a quick introduction of yours? 

[2:37] Nilay: Sure! My name is Nilay as he already mentioned, and I head the business here at Mozak Labs. We are an ROI driven digital marketing agency. I love marketing, analytics and football. At Mozak Labs, I am helping MSMEs in their online growth, and also helping offline businesses in going online. When I’m not doing any of these things, you can find me usually watching sports or reading a book usually a fiction.

[3:011] Kaushal: Oh, great! Any recent books which you would like to share with our audience that they must read.

[3:05] Nilay: Right now, I am reading the biography of a writer it’s called Kaghazi hai Pairahan. It’s a Hindi Book a Hindi pressbook.

[3:13] Kaushal: Oh, nice! Moving on to the topic Nilay, one thing which we would like to understand is many of the people who are listening to this show may not know how to move online. And even before knowing how to move online, the one question which is there in their mind is why go online? It would help if you could throw some light on this particular topic. 

Why Online Marketing & How to Move to Online Marketing?

[3:36] Nilay: Whenever a prospect comes across your brand for the first time, what is their first reaction? Their first reaction is to Google your brand name to find some details. If you have an online presence, say a website or a social media page, then it helps in establishing your reputation and increasing your credibility. So, first of all, this helps in improving the sales of existing offline businesses too. That is one.

The second point is that so when you have a well-established offline business which is already driving say X amount of revenue for you. Now, if you foray into the online world, you’re just leveraging your existing infrastructure and building a layer of additional revenue, which eventually helps you in increasing your sales by let’s say another Y percent. I would also like to add that…see going online enables you to target a global market. If you trust your product or your service, then why would you not want to go global? Why would you want to be limited only to the city or region where you operate? Going online also enables you to expand across the country and beyond that too if you want to.

Finally, the most important point, I think is that in these tough times of the COVID-19 situation, it has become even more important to go online as more and more people these days are shopping online. See, people don’t want to go out of their house anymore. The e-commerce adoption rates we are seeing it’s increasing month-on-month and people are preferring to pay for the orders via digital payments also. 

So, people who have never bought anything online are now happily buying online. And the ones who always used to pay via COD are now happily  willing to pay online. At Mozak Labs we have reached out by June by various offering verticals like restaurants, medical laboratories, schools, apparel, and footwear sellers, who already have a brand offline. And they wanted consultation to understand whether they should go online and if yes, then how we at Mozak Labs can help them go about it, and what should be their current strategy. In summation Kaushal, I think I can say that it’s time now that businesses should stop asking why to go online and they should be asking how soon can I go online?

[5:33] Kaushal: Great! That’s wonderfully said Nilay. And one thing for our audience when Nilay mentioned COD, he was referring to cash on delivery. That was the usual mode which people used to prefer in India specifically while making digital payments earlier. And now we are seeing a huge shift in digital payments as Nilay rightly mentioned. Nilay, you mentioned that your presence on a website on the social media is really crucial. 

But let’s look at for some people who are finding a challenge to create their own website, should they list themselves, let’s say, if it’s an apparel brand should they list themselves on a Myntra or an Amazon or a Flipkart? Or do you think creating their own identity on the internet should be the first step followed by listing themselves on any of these platforms? 

[6:21] Nilay: Okay, so I think for any business, it would make sense to go online first on a marketplace. The reason why I’m saying is that because that is faster. You don’t need to set up a website, because setting up a website, setting up a delivery arm, setting up your operations in the backend, it will take some time. Why to waste time? You already have these platforms, go live there. It also helps you in establishing it as a proof of concept that this thing is working. So, both the things happen. 

By the time your business grows on a marketplace, you can take that time to establish your own operations and you own website, and then you can go live there also. After three months or say six months, once you have enough data, on both the platforms, you can clearly see which one is working out better for you. So, you can either go for coexistence on both the things on a marketplace and on your own website or you can devise a strategy, which helps you being present on both platforms, and you change your strategy depending on the situation. Like if it’s a Prime Day Sale, like which is going on right now, you would rather want to be on Amazon at this point of time or there’s a sale going on Flipkart also. So, you have that option  the flexibility to devise a strategy if you’re present everywhere. 

[7:31] Kaushal: Okay, that’s good. And when we speak of online, there are multiple things which, let’s say, a user would like to sell. Let’s say, there could be a product company, which is an apparel company, as we took in the previous example, who wants to sell their products online, or it could even be a services company, let’s say a legal professional or a chartered accountant, who was predominantly offline till now and now wants to go online. For the first use case yes creating platform and or selling on an Amazon or a Myntra would be possible. What about the services business? How do they go online? 

How service company should go online? 

[8:07] Nilay: For a services company, I think, the only difference which comes if you compare it to a product company is that how you are getting to interact with your prospects. If you have a product to sell, then you have the option to show the image of your product, the video of your product, you know. So, you can have ‘how to videos’ also. This is how you interact with your prospects when you have a product. When you have a service on the other hand, this thing becomes important because services cannot be an image as such. And for those cases, these companies can resort to other alternate options which I say you make a video testimonial, you make a case study. 

So, in both the format and for both businesses, for both categories rather the products and services, I think the only difference is how you’re interacting with your prospect by other mediums that you have. But apart from that only the operational part of it is different. Otherwise in both cases you need a website and you need to reach out to your users. So, the pre and post part I think would not have a major difference. It’s mostly how you interact with your prospect and how your operational things are aligned. 

[9:12] Kaushal: Okay, perfect. I would agree with that creating the website would be one of the basic process which both the products companies and the services company need to follow if they need to create a digital identity. But at the same time, for the services business, YouTube videos or the other assets, which you mentioned, that also could create a better differentiating factor as compared to their other competitors. 

[9:36] Nilay: Yeah! Their credibility increases or decreases depending on what people are talking about you for the services industry, especially.

[9:42] Kaushal: Sure! And let’s say when these people would like to create their online identity in the form of a website or any other medium, are there any important aspects or things which they need to keep in mind while creating this online identity.? 

[9:58] Nilay: So, online identity  can be broken down into two parts. One is your website, which is your property, which is your home, which is your business, basically. The other thing is your social media presence. So, there are two different aspects of it. Let me break it down one by one. So, the start with the social media identity.

First of all, there are so many platforms, you have Facebook, you have Instagram, you have Twitter, you have Snapchat. So, it’s important for you to do a survey or competitor analysis and first figure out where your consumers are, where your prospects are. And then you need to figure out okay, if my prospects are mostly spending their time on Instagram, for example, they need to ensure that your Instagram profile is very strong. Your presence there and your engagement with your followers there is very strong. So, that is basically the bottom line. You have to ensure that you know where your prospects are and where they’re spending majority of their time. 

The second part is your online identity in terms of your website. So, that’s your home that’s your representation, and that’s purely you. You can do anything there. The only thing important there is that you should ensure that you’re giving the best experience to a user. So, if it’s a product company or a service company, whatever your offerings are, it should be loud and clear when someone lands on your website, and they should be able to navigate through the website easily. These are the two most important aspects I think one each for your own website and one for your social media presence. 

[11:25] Kaushal: Well said, Nilay! In fact, I would like to add over there I saw one of the companies which had recently moved online. One mistake which they were making is they were spreading themselves really thin and they started the social media platform. So, they said “I need to be on Facebook, I need to be LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Twitter, and at all the places.” But they were doing a really poor job since that one person who was doing campaigns across all these different channels. You rightly mentioned that, okay, do it properly. Even if you’re doing one particular channel let’s say if you’re an online painting store, you’re transforming yourself into an online painting store, Instagram could be the right place or Pinterest could be the right place where you would like to focus on. But yes, do justice to that particular social identity which you’re creating. Or if you are a services company, and you are creating just a YouTube channel, cover as much knowledge as you can on that particular channel that will help your customers at least discover you on that one platform and separate you from the other people. So, focus on that one identity initially when the bandwidth is lesser and then you can definitely expand into more channels later on. 

[12:32] Nilay: Exactly, exactly. I would also like to add, Kaushal, here that sometimes one thing which we have seen a lot of times is that people make their pages but they don’t ensure they have enough followers. They don’t put any effort behind that. So, what happens is while a prospect is researching your brand and lands on your Facebook page, and then they see that you have hundred followers, that leaves sometimes a negative impression. Because you’re expecting the brand to be a huge brand or at least a brand with a good following and seeing 100 or 50 users  and seeing the last post being say from three months back. These things sometimes can also lead to a negative image. So, it’s not just about creating an identity, as you said, it’s also about ensuring that you are there and consistently talking to your followers. 

[13:17] Kaushal: Okay, and that you are able to create a trust also for the new people who are coming to visit your brand.

[13:22] Nilay: Exactly.

[13:23] Kaushal: So, Nilay, a question over there that while the identity is created, let’s take an example of Facebook itself you mentioned. So, a person created a Facebook account and it’s a large brand in the offline world. But now it is coming online and definitely such kind of brands may not have initially those many users on day one. How do they go around with the initial let’s say, thousand or two thousand users which they need? What are the options available for them? 

[13:50] Nilay: There are two ways to go about it. One especially if you’re talking about Facebook at this point of time, and then there are two options that a business can take. One is the organic part and one is the paid part. So, Facebook provides you an opportunity or they have an offering where you can run page like campaigns. The objective of these campaigns is purely to drive likes or followers for your Facebook page. So, that becomes a direct correlation with how much you’re able to spend. So, that is the paid part. 

The organic part is you create viral content. Viral is a word which has been used a lot in the industry these days, but if not viral then at least get content which is engaging, and which has an appeal to your user base, to your target group, essentially. And then you ensure if not by paid mediums, then by organic mediums. You can promote social sharing. You can try to share those content across Facebook, across Twitter, on WhatsApp to your friends to your family, get that initial 100 to 1000 likes from this organic source. Of course, it’s a longer journey. It won’t be as fast as taking a paid campaign, but from organic perspective, this is what you can do. Consistently post and post the content which has a high appeal in your target group. 

[15:03] Kaushal: Perfect! Many of the users in such cases, at leastm, who are the established brands and have the money to invest, they may directly go for the paid option, since organic may take some time. Now, you mentioned that via the paid route they can definitely get more page likes more followers on to their particular page. So, let’s say if a brand wants to get the first thousand followers for their particular brand page which has been created on Facebook, how much do you think that would cost them? It will be a tough number it won’t be an exact thing, but at least a tentative benchmark that hey, it should roughly take you this much to gain the first thousand followers. 

[15:42] Nilay: As you rightly mentioned, Kaushal, there is no fixed number. So, if we have to talk about a ballpark number, the cost that you will incur for every like that you get should vary somewhere between, you know, 20 paise to say sometimes even two rupees. It’s a very huge gap. But it completely depends on the kind of business. While at Mozak Labs, we have been practicing the same approach. And we have seen these number range from 0.26 from 20 paise to 2 rupees depending on the type of plan it is. For example, for you know, for especially for ecommerce, for apparels, for footwear, if you have say boxers and all these things, you will find people liking your page, following you more easily. But if you compare this to say, another domain, say edutech , then there the same amount goes a slightly higher, because at that point of time, your audience is also different and the way you’re able to capture them is also very different. 

[16:42] Kaushal: True! So, Nilay that was about Facebook. But let’s come to the main entity which was again the website. And let’s say if a user successfully transformed their offline business to an online world, they created their website. And let’s take again a small apparel company which moved online, and now they are ready with the website, a user has a mechanism to select a particular product and buy it online. So, the entire website is ready on some platform. Now, the next challenge for them would be marketing and getting more and more customers on this particular website. So, what would be the marketing approach that you would recommend for such a kind of website? 

What would be the marketing approach for a website? 

[17:23] Nilay: To answer this question, I think one basic principle that lies with any marketing effort, I think you would also agree Kaushal here is that you have to test and then you have to proceed. So, that remains true here also. At Mozak labs what we have done is that we have created a proprietary framework that we have for various business verticals. So, we have one for fashion, we have one for edutech, we have one for health checkups websites…health laboratories websites, we have one for schools, for example, for lead generation. So, we have different proprietary framework. This helps us with the performance marketing campaigns and initiatives.

So, how we go about it is that we first start small with the performance marketing campaigns. This helps us get a jumpstart, right? And it makes the growth faster because you get very quick returns in a very small amount of time. So, that’s the first step that you take. You start with performance marketing campaigns at a very small scale. Now once you have done that, and you have ensured that you have activated one line of revenue, then you move to other channels which can work in parallel, like SEO, like content marketing. So, you work on these in parallel, because they take time to ramp up. 

So, it’s better to start working on them sooner rather than later. So, while the performance marketing piece is running, you start working on your SEO and content marketing channels, and say after a couple of months, once both the things are in a bit of motion, then you start looking at diversifying your paid marketing efforts. If you started say with a couple of channels, then you move to other channels. The reason behind that is that now your product… your proof of concept is done. You know your product is selling, you know, people are there outside who want to buy it. Now you need to reduce a dependency on say a set of three or four channels. 

So, then the diversification part comes when you start activating and optimizing other channels also. At any given point of time, if you have your marketing strategy divided across say 8 to 10 different channels then it puts a lot of flexibility in terms of changing the budget, or changing the priority of your campaigns. I want to run this channel; I want to run that channel depending on the performance. If you are only stuck with two channels or three channels, for example, then you are  always stuck with options. You don’t know where to… what to do right now at that point of time. 

[19:42] Kaushal: True! Then it would be better to go ahead and implement a holistic strategy over there.

[19:48] Nilay: Yeah, once the proof of concept is done start diversifying, I would say.

[19:52] Kaushal: Perfect! Nilay, the other question which comes to my mind with this particular thing is users or people who are offline brands usually are worried about the cost. And they would like to understand that, hey how much is this going to cost? So, do you have any example? Or we had to answer this question because it varies. Now let’s say, if they go for a channel like SEO content, it’s going to take more time, as well as it’s going to take a bit of investments also. 

[20:20] Nilay: Right!

[20:21] Kaushal: But I think, let’s say if they’re restricting themselves to the performance campaign, and if you have to just give them a ballpark number that, hey when we got a particular brand like this online, it did cost them this much or something or any ballpark number which comes to your mind.

[20:35] Nilay: Of course, apart from the setup costs that you have to incur for the website and everything, I think as far as marketing is concerned, I think strategy ideally would be to start slow with a minimum spend. When we say minimum spend, what we essentially mean is that there are different types of campaigns and all campaigns need a minimum amount of data so that they get enough learning to start optimizing themselves based on the machine that are in place for all these campaigns. 

So, I don’t think there’s any minimum number that is there in the market, but I think a small budget of 50,000 to one lakh rupees is good enough to give you that jumpstart that you were talking about earlier, when you can start with a couple of strongest campaigns or strongest channels which you know are always going to give you good results. And you can start building up from there onwards. So, it’s a monthly budget, I’m talking about a monthly budget of 50,000 to one lakh rupees should be enough for you to get a jumpstart. 

[21:30] Kaushal: Okay, perfect. And when we speak of this particular jumpstart, and  let’s say investing one lakh rupees, as you mentioned per month, yeah, right? The other question definitely in the nation of “kitna deti hai” comes across what would be the returns on investment or what would be your return on ad spends? So, how do we justify that okay, if you invest one lakh, you will be able to sell this much. How do we answer that question? 

[21:55] Nilay:  I would honestly say that this strictly varies from business to business because the margins differ for each business. The only thing I can say is that once you start getting a… you need to know what is the ROI, the minimum ROI that helps you make some sense out of the business that you are running and you should aspire for that to start with. Once you start getting those healthy returns, right, you automatically start making more money. 

This can be pumped up into the marketing efforts in the subsequent months.  So, the point basically is that have especially for the initial three, four months as a business owner, you need to know what is the minimum marketing ROIs that you need to drive, which can help you in keeping the business sustainable for the first three to six months. And then you should try to optimize as per that, keeping that as a target. If you’re able to hit it on day one, nothing like that. If you’re not, then try to aspire to reach that number. And it is only then when you start scaling up.

[22:50] Kaushal: Okay, but in your past experience, let’s say, you’ve been instrumental in bringing many offline brands to online, could you give us that, “hey when I did this for this particular brand, this is how much returns they got?”

[23:05] Nilay: I think it is not really a simple straightforward answer like that, but what I can tell you is that these ROIs they differ from business to business and it ranges from say 1.5 to say an ROI of 20, for example. It’s all about what is the product that you’re selling the product or the service that you’re selling. So, hence, ROI… and of course, it doesn’t mean that if you have an ROI of 20 then your business is very healthy because your expenditures might be that much high. So, that’s why I’m saying that there cannot be a specific set answer for this but it ranges from 1.5 to 20 I think as per my experience across the different verticals that we have worked in.

[23:41] Kaushal: Okay, fine. And Nilay since ROI has multiple different ways of calculating, what I’m understanding is when you say an ROI or ROAS of 1.5 to 20 you’re saying that okay, for every one rupee spent, the user may generate revenue on his website of 1.5 rupee or it could go up till 20 rupees is the understanding correct? 

[24:05] Nilay: Yeah!

[24:06] Kaushal: Okay, perfect. That should be interesting. And based on the information that I have available with me, many a times it also depends on the kind of aggressiveness which the customer shows in the promotional campaigns. So, for large accounts, what we have seen is sometimes the return on ad spend is also negative that is lesser than one in the initial days because they want to be really aggressive and they want to capture the market really fast. They don’t have that time to wait for a longer period. 

So, for the larger brands, if you’re going really aggressive, let’s say Nilay mentioned a budget of around one lakh but let’s say if you are spending a crore, and you would like to do campaigns like this, I have seen sometimes negative or lesser than one rupee. So, let’s say you’re spending one rupee and maybe you’re getting 90 paise back. Would you also agree with that or you’ve never seen a negative ROAS? 

[24:57] Nilay: No, no, no. We have all seen I think negative ROAS at some point of time in our lives I think across different businesses, in fact. So your point is very much to the point. I think it’s actually very correct. There are a lot of businesses who are willing to operate at a negative ROAS because their business objectives are different. Hence, it’s very important to know what are the KPIs the key performance indicators for your business, and then…

[25:20] Kaushal: And how much…

[25:21] Nilay: Yes they need to optimize it as per that or plan according to that.

[25:25] Kaushal: Perfect! And how much money you can spend is also a factor over there that, okay how much risk taking capabilities you have would also help you in understanding this. 

[25:33] Nilay: Exactly, yeah.

[25:35] Kaushal: Perfect! And other than the ROI metric which we are speaking of, what are the other metrics, which you would suggest that our listeners do measure when they are specifically transforming themselves from an offline business to an online business? 

[25:49] Nilay: So, from an owner’s perspective… from business owner’s perspective, if you’re running a business, I think apart from ROI, the other important metric for you would be what is the cost of acquiring customer, which we call as CAC or customer acquisition, which is basically how much money you had to spend to get one person to convert on your website. The other metric that I think is very important is that how is your repeat rate moving? So, if you’ve been in the market for say six months, and if you’re not seeing your repeat rate…repeat rate is basically the percentage of users who purchase on your website and they are coming back to make a repeat purchase. So, this repeat rate is another very important metric because it helps in improving your ROI further. So, if you’re not seeing your repeat rate consistently growing over months, then that should again be a concern for you. So, I think CAC and repeat rate these two are the most important metrics apart from ROI of course.

[26:46] Kaushal: Perfect! Fine! And just to add on to that, the other important metric at least which I usually prefer to look at is also the sessions or how many visits a website is able to gain on their particular website. Sometimes what happens is many businesses are such let’s say a painting business or an art business, which is selling artifacts online for them, the sales cycle is a little longer. So, even the first customer may come after a period of time. In such cases, at least start looking at your sessions or the visits so that you know that yes these many people are visiting my website daily and that could also be considered as a metric, which you should look at so that at least it helps you that okay, you’re spending the money in the right direction.

[27:28] Nilay: Completely agree with you, Kaushal. And when we talk about sessions, I think we should also talk about conversion rate, because that’s where the magic happens finally. So, it’s also important to maintain a consistent flow of traffic to your website, and also important that the rate of conversion of those people are not going down. So, you need to maintain both these metrics. Of course, apart from what we discussed

[27:49] Kaushal: Definitely, that helps. Other than this, Nilay any other guidelines or best practices that you would suggest for the users when they are moving online?

[28:00] Nilay: So, I think this is something which we also follow very particularly and very closely at Mozak Labs and that is, you know, being on top of your website analytics. There are tools I think most of the people use Google Analytics and then there are some other tools like Omniture, which you can use. So, these platforms, what they do is they measure the traffic on your website alongside traffic, they also measure how those people are interacting with your website. So, understanding your website’s users’ behavior and engagement with your website is very important, I think. So, this is something I would encourage every owner or every marketer, in fact, to keep a close tab on. When you monitor this data, you will consistently keep finding some small insights, which are going to help you a lot in causing a bigger change. Some Small changes can lead to huge difference basically in the performance. That would be one I think. The other thing which I think I would say is very important is that ecommerce is now quite old in the world. And there’s a bunch of case studies available online with learnings from the past decade. So, people should always be aware of those learnings. So, that there’s no point in starting from the scratch when there’s so much knowledge already available online. So, do not start from ground zero, whatever good learnings or the best practices that are already in the industry from the last decade please be aware of them and ensure you have implemented them. 

[29:30] Kaushal: Got it. That’s really true that okay, learn from the others. And we tell our users that at least listen to more and more podcasts. One thing which people are finding a challenge making users listen to podcasts, because this is where the knowledge is being distributed and people are not yet on the platform, at least in India. With international geographies, we see lots of listeners joining in. But yes, knowledge is available and people should look at it. The same thing would hold true for this particular example that you mentioned. 

[29:59] Nilay: Right!

[30:00] Kaushal: Nilay, while we understood some of the best practices and some of the metrics from you, any particular story that you would like to share which you were able to transform successfully from an offline world to an online world?

[30:14] Nilay: Let me take the example of a fashion ecommerce client that we have. And fashion is very close to my profession also because I’ve been AJIO and ABOF before this and been in the fashion ecommerce industry especially in India since a long time. So, that’s why this is special for me. And also for Mozak Labs this story is very special, because we were directly involved in this success story right from the beginning. 

So, I’ll just give you some context behind it before I start. So, this business is… so they already had a very good offline sales [Indiscernible: 30:44] so the conviction in the product was very strong. So, when we started this project, we also did a quick survey to establish this theory further. And we found that really, people were liking the product and were enjoying using it. So, this basically helped us to have that conviction that this can go a long way. So, what we did was we started with the website and once the website was ready, we started with the testing. Testing was done across all devices, all browsers, all the various touch points. By the way, that remains a work in progress forever, I think. At no point can you claim that a website is perfect. 

[31:24] Kaushal: Certainly, that doesn’t ever happen. 

[31:26] Nilay: Yeah, so that remains a work in progress. But yeah, as soon as we got that part out of the way, next step was basically to get a last mile courier service, who could handle pickups and returns. And again, there are a bunch of options available in the market right now who do a fantabulous job out of it. Som that was done. In parallel while all of this was done, we also, you know, started working on their social media pages as we’ve already discussed before this and we kept a very engaging monthly calendar for posting on these social media pages. 

We created some creative guidelines, we set up a brand voice for communicating with our clients. And then we started regularly posting and engaging with our followers on our platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram, because that’s where our target group was spending most of their time. So, that was done. So, once all of these things were done, and we’re satisfied with all of this, the website was working fine as we were hoping it to, then we started with the performance marketing campaigns, again in line with what we have already discussed. So, we started, we picked up two channels, I think we started with Google and Facebook, because that gives you the highest penetration in India, at least. 

And we started very slow with these campaigns, as we have discussed this strategy. So, we started very slow, and we gave the campaigns enough time for learning. Meanwhile we consistently tagged the user journey on analytics on Google Analytics, and we kept making tweaks here and there to sort out any minor issues that were coming up. Once these campaigns picked up in a few days, right. It was all about then scaling up or down based on the performance. Data being the consistent guiding light for the process. So, started then ramping up and ramping down depending on the performance on these channels. 

Next step was basically once this again, this was again a very small proof of concept to see okay the website… product was good done now, the website are people interacting with the website, are they buying on the website? So that proof of concept was also proved that, okay this is working. Next step was to activate basically other parallel channels. We started working on the SEO of the website, we started working on the affiliate marketing side, partnerships with other businesses, and this started helping us in reducing the dependency on the two channels that we had started with. So, yeah, that’s been pretty much the journey till now and it’s been over like in less than two months and from zero orders we have now scaled up to 40 orders per day. And all the while… yeah, we have been consistently maintaining a healthy ROI which has been the requirement or the guiding light from day one. So we wanted scale but we wanted it at a healthy ROI.  

And of course, it’s a long way to go from here, but I think this has been a very good story for us, and for the business also. By the way, we have also seen a very consistent improvement in repeat rate also in the two months. So, we started from zero, but we have also seen an improvement in the repeat rate from the first time purchasers. So, it’s been quite a ride and we are excited to grow stronger from here, I think. 

[34:18] Kaushal: Great, that’s really nice. Thanks, since it’s just two months, and you’re seeing repeat users already on the website, that’s really interesting. 

[34:26] Nilay: Yes, it also instills more confidence in us even in the business owners, that, “hey, my product is fine. People are coming back. They’re coming back and buying again,” which is what you would expect in a fashion vertical also, because it’s not like you’re buying a washing machine that you bought once and then you don’t need it for the next 10 years. Fashion is an impulse buying segment, which you buy once and you can buy again in a week, if you like the product or the product that you had seen. 

[34:52] Kaushal: And definitely, you already mentioned that the ROI is also positive and 40 orders per day. Any rough number of the investments which you are doing right now, which you can share with the audience for this particular client?  

[35:05] Nilay: So unfortunately, we won’t be able to share that data in particular.

[35:08] Kaushal: No worries, that’s fine. Nilay that were some of the core questions and what we would like to know more is about you now, and specifically would like to understand that digital marketing is a stream of continuous learning. So, while you’re sharing your knowledge with the audience out over here, who do you follow?

[35:29] Nilay: So, I’ve always been a fan of success stories of brands. So always reading about brands like say what Amazon has done, what Google has done, what a company like Uber has done. So there’s already so much learning from them. So, I really follow the brand success stories a lot. And any small or big brand especially the big ones because you have a lot more books and everything published, which is easy to read and take away from. So, that’s what I follow. I follow brand success stories. 

[36:02] Kaushal: Great, that’s good. And you have grown really well since the time when you were working as a digital marketer, and now as a business owner at this particular company. You’ve grown really well over the last few years, what makes you remain growth focused? 

[36:19] Nilay: I think, acceptance of the fact that there is always some room to grow further, it helps me remain growth focused. 

[36:26] Kaushal: Okay! And Nilay let’s say if you could time travel at this particular moment if you were sent back to the time where you had just started with your first job, what would be the advice which your current self will give to that particular point of yourself? 

[36:44] Nilay: Okay, that’s interesting. Well, I think I would tell my younger self that, hey Nilay don’t be afraid of trying new things. And don’t be afraid of doing multiple things together. 

[36:58] Kaushal: Great, why multiple things together?

[37:00] Nilay: So, I mean, I think maybe when I was very young, I always used to take things one at a time. And when I say one at a time, I mean purely one at a time. But of course I think I’ve realized now that you can have three-four things running in parallel of which one can be your primary objective or primary thing on which you’re focusing and that 2-3-4 can be your secondary and tertiary. So, you can keep doing multiple things together. 

[37:24] Kaushal: Great, that’s really nice. Nilay, we would now like to move into the ‘Speed It’ round and try to answer these questions in a few words. 

[37:33] Nilay: Okay, cool.

[37:34] Kaushal: Any quote that you live by? 

[37:37] Nilay: It’s a very cliched code, but I think it holds true always but it’s ‘success is not final and failure is not fatal’.

[37:44] Kaushal: If not digital, what would you be doing?

[37:46] Nilay: It’s easy this one is easy. I would be playing football as an attacking midfielder hopefully at Manchester United. 

[37:53] Kaushal: Oh wonderful! Which one daily habit has been a game changer for you?

[37:59] Nilay: I think spending quality alone time with data for a few minutes every day. This is a daily habit and it helps me stay aware and on top of things. 

[38:08] Kaushal:  One thing that you would want to change in your life. 

[38:11] Nilay:  I would like to find more time for myself.

[38:13] Kaushal: Everybody wants that. 

[38:15]  Nilay: I am sure.

[38:16] Kaushal: Define Nilay Shrivastav in one word

[38:18] Nilay: Perseverant.  

[38:20] Kaushal: And that’s about the ‘Speed It’ round. How does the audience stay connected with you? 

[38:25] Nilay: Well, you can visit our business website. It’s www.mozaklabs.com. Or you can connect with me personally on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilay-shrivastav

[38:40] Kaushal: Thank you. Any parting words which you would like to share with our audience? 

[38:45]  Nilay: Well, I mean, regarding the topic that we were discussing today, I would just like to say that going from offline to online is something that I would encourage all offline businesses to try. It is not easy for sure, but it is definitely achievable with the right strategy and strong efforts.

[38:59] Kaushal: True, perfect. That’s really good. 

[39:02] Nilay: And of course, I wanted to thank you Kaushal for having me here. It was, indeed a delightful pleasure, I think. And I hope I can come again soon, perhaps on some other season discussing some other interesting topic with you. 

[39:14] Kaushal: Definitely! We would be happy to host you again with another interesting story. So, definitely, let’s look forward to that. And Nilay it was a pleasant experience having you also on this particular show. It was great to learn the different ways in which a small business when they come online could transform themselves into an online identity or become an online large brand also. So, thanks a lot for sharing that particular piece of information with us. We look forward to connecting with you again. 

[39:46] Nilay: Thank you so much, Kaushal. Thank you so much. 

[39:51] Kaushal: Thank you friends for listening to this episode of the Growth Genius. I hope you learned something today that would help you with your digital journey. If you did, please share this episode with your friends and family. If you are listening to it on the Infidigit website, I would request you to use a podcast app on iPhone or download Google Podcast or Spotify on your Android phone. Subscribing to this podcast will ensure you get the episodes regularly on your phone. If you have enjoyed this show, consider giving us a five-star rating. It helps other people like you discover the show and helps us creating more digital awareness in India that is required for an ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat.’ Thank you so much for listening. Now go out there and create growth for yourself and your company! Thank you.