Khatabook, after its launch 3 years ago, has reached the grassroots of India. It has created awareness about their app solutions to MSME across the country. As per details, there are 10+ million active users using Khatabook apps to maintain their ledgers digitally. Last year the brand launched an ad campaign featuring MS Dhoni. The campaign focussed on MSMEs and urged them to switch from traditional bahi khata to an automated digital solution.
Ved Prakash Yadav, CMO & VP (Growth and marketing), Khatabook speaks to MI about their marketing and growth strategies.
Let’s read:
Q) How are you planning to acquire more users in 2022?
Ved: User acquisition is always a top priority for us. We will continue with our two main focus areas. One, engaging users across different messaging channels, and two, minimizing drop-offs across funnels and boosting retention rates. For the acquisition of more users, our focus includes various organic and paid initiatives to build a quality user base. We drive various experiments to increase the position of our listing to make Khatabook Business Apps rank in the Top Business Utility Apps across Search Engine Optimization, App Store Optimization initiatives. We also continue to focus on a multi-channel approach in order to gain low-cost and high-value users. Overall, we have seen a shift in installs from paid to organic. Today, more than a Million merchants are uploading data and engaging with the Khatabook app daily. The high engagement has resulted in more than 25% of the total active merchants joining the platform through word-of-mouth and referrals.
We will continue engaging users across different messaging channels, minimize drop-offs across funnels and boost retention rates. We will continue to explore fresher channels in order to find our target audience in more unique and effective ways.
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Q) What are your marketing strategies for 2022?
Ved: From a messaging perspective, we intend to focus on talking about product evolution over the last couple of years showcasing how Khatabook is a user-centric brand that has evolved by understanding the user requirements better. We would also be focusing a lot on educating users on Khatabook and Biz Analyst operating systems. User acquisition and retention are always our top priority. We will continue engaging users across different messaging channels, minimize drop-offs across funnels and boost retention rates.
Our approach has always been to utilize the full funnel and reduce drop-offs via communication experiments. We start by educating users for building awareness as well as consideration. Post which we invest in user acquisition and retention to lead the user down the funnel in a more organic manner. User experience is always our top priority; hence, we do not chase after users who might not find utility in the products we have to offer. We will also be doubling down on our localization efforts in order to make messaging more relevant and contextual.
On our social media, we are looking to grow a community of engaged users across all channels that caters to the target audience on each channel. We understand and create communication strategies for each product and audience persona keeping in mind the channel and best-suited mediums for them. While this helps build visibility it also helps us build a community of MSMEs who look to us for all Business Solutions.
In order to consistently improve our retention rates, we utilize various mediums to stay top of mind. Right from product engagement to remarketing campaigns, we measure in a real sense using incrementality to understand the true impact and retention seen.
Q) What kind of response did you receive from the campaign featuring MS Dhoni?
Ved: Dhoni is seen as a captain who is able to solve problems, is extremely reliable, and is able to think on his feet. It is this reliability factor that we wanted to optimize our communication on. His personality reflecting our brand voice made him the ideal choice as our brand custodian. We are a sincere, reliable, down-to-earth, honest, and cheerful brand that people can trust and Dhoni defined this brand archetype in our campaigns.
At a fraction of the cost of reaching out to our TG offline / or through other channels, we were able to garner more than 2 billion Impressions via a comprehensive digital plan to run in parallel with HotStar. With additional sponsorship on major cricketing platforms like ESPNcricinfo, Cricbuzz, etc., we were able to bring down our engagement cost and overall notional cost of reaching out to our target audience. The lift that we saw in terms of conversions as well as brand lift, provided us with a high ROI on our investment.
Some key highlights were:
- We reached out to almost 65% of unique users via HotStar through the campaign out of the total impressions.
- Installs from the ads had significantly higher conversion rates as compared to overall historical conversion
- The conversion was better across the funnel – Login, Transactions & Activation.
- 5% additional reduction in the cost of re-engagement due to Dhande ka Doctor brand campaign with Dhoni launched in September 2021.
- 6% increase in the number of re-engaged users in October due to the campaign
- Experienced increase in Average sessions per day
- There is an increase in the Request Money/Payment feature as we saw a corresponding increase in link usage.
Q) With the campaign, you urged businesses to ditch the traditional ways. How easy are the features for a layman to use?
Ved: Since its launch, Khatabook App has been very convenient for the users of its simple UI, and we still maintain simplicity as a guideline for product development. More than half of the MSME segment comes from Rural to semi-urban regions. One interesting aspect we noticed with this segment is that your product transformation has to be incremental and not radical. Hence, user listening, and feedback have to be at the core of everything we do. The user behavior we are addressing is very different from conventional tech users.
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The MVP for building Khatabook was keeping India’s Bahi khata alive within the app. While we wanted our users to digitize their offline workflows, we were mindful not to change the style of maintaining bahikhata. Other significant considerations were building a common language to capture upstream and downstream supply chain transactions for retailers and SMS integration between merchant users and their customers. Also, the App is available in 13 languages. All these factors have made the usage extremely easy. Hence, we have more than 25% of the total active merchants joining the platform through word-of-mouth and referrals.
Q) Is there a process of learning for businesses?
Ved: We are an experiment-driven company. User feedback and experiments are at the core of everything we do. We have multiple channel feedback models in place. Besides AB experiments with different cohorts of users, we have a customer support team that gets thousands of calls every month and also reaches out to users to understand their requirements; From Time to time, we roll out product feature specific surveys, and Product Managers and designers are constantly in touch with users on a weekly basis.
We feel that Khatabook users are very open to having long conversations and sharing their detailed app experiences. This user characteristic has contributed a lot to the growth of the product.
Q) How are you reaching MSMEs?
Ved: IPL has been one of the very effective platforms for reaching MSMEs for us in the past, given the reach and connectivity of cricket to this segment. We understand and create communication strategies for each product and audience persona keeping in mind the channel and best-suited mediums for them.
We experiment a lot with local apps and gaming apps such as ShareChat and Chingari. We use them for different purposes. For example, we see our audiences overlapping on these newer apps that are coming up. Wherever we see traction, we launch an experimental campaign and wherever it works for us, we double down there.
We like to be accessible and welcoming. We value clarity above all. A genuine and straightforward brand, we understand our customers and speak to them in a friendly and approachable way. Our communication approach is to go regional through multi-channels. Khatabook is a brand used by people belonging to the remotest regions in India. Besides engaging and relatable brand campaigns with our Brand ambassador Dhoni, we also focus on personalized, educative communication around the use of digital to improve finance.
We have taken a concentrated effort to reach out to merchants specifically to explain features. We have focused on creating various user segments to help drive the featured utility based on various factors like their activity on Digital Platforms, Geography, Category of the business among many others.
Q) What are your growth strategies?
Ved: A huge amount of digitalization is still left to be done in the space with a large number of small businesses to be tapped. We aim at tapping into a large scope in the number of use cases that are yet to be digitized. Rural will likely have a larger digital user base than urban in the next couple of years. With widespread digital adoption, especially post-pandemic, SAAS-based delivery systems can solve the problem of distribution. Fintech companies help streamline financial solutions targeted toward MSMEs in an accessible form. With digital, It is much easier to build digital touchpoints to disburse the services. We have a real opportunity to define the new age of finance.
This year’s strategy will be similar. We will be doubling down on various creative and communication experiments on fresh channels. In the meantime, we will use standard performance marketing channels such as Facebook and Google. We will continue with experimentation in terms of re-engagement and remarketing.
What sets us apart is that we have the best localization and content teams. When it comes to clarity in the creatives as well as the variation and taking care of the diversity in communication, it creates a huge impact.
