Heaptalk, Jakarta – Considering Southeast Asia’s success in recent years, Netcore aims to make more waves with its substantial presence in Indonesia by incorporating scalability, security, and reliability in its offerings: Marketing Technology (Martech) solutions and Communication Platform as a Services (CPaaS). As a company that has overflown a long journey for the last 23 years and has achieved attractive measures; currently handling 50% of Asia’s email traffic, 75% of it are unicorns, Netcore seems to have a convincing journey for this new expansion.
According to Netcore’s latest release, the company also sends over 15 billion emails a month. It empowers more than 5,000 brands to elevate their customer experience through email delivery, AI/ML-powered marketing automation, and a customer engagement platform. This also makes Netcore’s presence in Indonesia interesting to follow, considering that many notable companies and brands in Indonesia already have partnered with Netcore Cloud, including Gojek, Traveloka, Tokopedia, Smartfren, Bank BCA, and Payfazz.
Then what is Netcore’s plan for this new market, and what value will clients obtain after they experience it, given that automation is required to succeed in today’s digital industry?
The following are the findings of a one-on-one interview conducted by Heaptalk.com Journalist Fardil Khalidi with Gaurav Tandon, Regional Marketing Head, Netcore APAC/MEA/EUSA.
Could you tell us a glimpse of Netcore Cloud? What services do you provide? What makes this technology so crucial in consumer experience?
Netcore Cloud is a globally recognized marketing technology SaaS company that offers the best Martech and CPaaS world to help CMOs, product and growth managers with intelligent consumer acquisition, engagement, and retention methods.
By building a unified view of customers, orchestrating omnichannel communication journeys, personalizing the apps and websites, optimizing user experience, real-time reporting, and providing actionable analytics, Netcore Cloud represents an all-in-one solution for a marketer.
Today’s users have many choices, and thus, most B2C businesses, be it websites or apps, are facing customer retention issues. For example, 75% of app users churn on their first day. By Day-30, the churn often goes up to 96%. So, focusing on the user experience and delight is the only way to retain them. This is where Netcore Cloud’s customer engagement & experience stacks come into play.
Reaching the target audience is the key to business growth. What factors do you think need attention?
It is imperative to deliver the right message to the right customer on the right channel at the right time. Otherwise, there will be too much clutter in our digital lives.
We also find it critical to understand customer demographics, needs, and actions to effectively segment the audience & personalize the experience to create a “wow” moment for them.
‘Time to value’ (TTV) matters to businesses – For instance, how long will a user take to perform a transaction after they’ve downloaded an app? Having a smooth onboarding process leads to a lesser time to value (TTV), which increases a business’ revenue.
Retention is a new acquisition, and it costs five times cheaper than acquiring new customers. So, it’s essential to care for your existing customers and expand your share of your wallet rather than chasing new customers. Brands are beginning to understand this and are increasing their marketing spend on MarTech instead of just focusing on AdTech & acquiring new customers.
Technology plays a critical role in assisting businesses to achieve their objectives. To what extent can Netcore help businesses, specifically through automated processes such as nudges, advertisement, and product suggestions?
Netcore Cloud’s full-stack MarTech solutions can instantly personalize users’ brand journeys through automated processes such as nudges, product recommendations, and triggered communications.
Brands that leverage Netcore Cloud’s full stack of solutions will be able to streamline both their offline and online marketing technology components into one unified AI-powered platform. This will enable a complete overview of a brand’s digital marketing metrics while also promising higher business impact through inbox placements, customer insights, and conversion rates, among many other benefits.
Simultaneously, consumers will engage in meaningful exchanges with their favorite brands, including more accessible access to relevant products and campaigns, meaningful app walkthroughs, and personalized experiences that feel like friendly suggestions.
To what extent does AI assistance increase marketing effectiveness? And what, in your opinion, are the critical factors of a successful marketing campaign?
AI can hugely impact the effectiveness of a marketing strategy. For instance, our AI engine, Raman, can keep track and analyze a business’ customer and campaign performance data round the clock. The data gathered will help business owners quickly understand what is happening with their campaign, why, and the following best approach.
When a user lands on a website or a mobile app, our personalization engine, Raman, can evaluate their past behavior and traits. This information allows us to recommend products that are relevant to customers. If they inadvertently browse a different part of the website, our nudges will ‘ever so casually’ push them towards the right set of products. When not on the website or app, our AI engine uses emails, SMS, WhatsApp, WPN, and APN to send tailor-made communication to drive them towards the website or app.
Using the Send Time Optimization (STO) feature lets you send messages to individual users when they’re most likely active based on their behavior. STO learns more about your user preferences with every new campaign and adjusts email sending timeslots accordingly, increasing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by many folds.
To what extent can a brand that employs Netcore technology streamline its marketing process? Is there any more significant conversion rate resulting from this platform?
Netcore Cloud’s solutions help marketers achieve a wide range of goals, from acquiring more customers, engaging with them, retaining them, and converting them into lifetime customers. We help build a unified view of all customer engagements on a single platform. Marketers can automate omnichannel journey orchestration and engagement for their users with less human intervention. We utilize AI to plan and optimize marketing campaigns smartly. We create personalized customer experiences at scale.
Below are a few examples of how our customers in Indonesia see the results:
● Indodax, Indonesia’s most significant crypto asset marketplace, achieved a 158% uplift in email open rates and an 82% uplift in email click rates using Netcore Cloud’s AI-powered email delivery.
● Payfazz, a leading financial platform in Indonesia, delivers app push notifications to over 90% of opt-in users with innovative push technology. Their delivery rates increased by 45% after using Netcore Cloud.
● Bank Danamon hit a 14% clickthrough rate (CTR) through email marketing automation and saw 3.5 times higher open rates than industry standards.
From a customer’s point of view, what are their benefits? Since some people find adverts to be bothersome, especially those irrelevant to their preferences.
Here are some of the preferences of today’s customers:
● Personalized “user-centric” buying experience
● Contextual communication with users on the channel they prefer at the time they prefer
● Easy onboarding for first-time users by using guided walkthroughs
Some people find adverts to be bothersome, so we also introduced “Nudges” last year, which are less intrusive and a more subtle way to redirect users to go where you want.
Our platform has the capability of frequency capping that allows brands to optimize & control the number of ads, nudges, emails that any user will see. Also, we provide consultancy to create unique user experiences from our expertise of serving 5000+ brands across various industries.
In the Indonesian market: To what extent do you believe the Indonesian market demands the adaptation to the MarTech platform? And how significant will it be?
Almost 80% of brands we are speaking to in Indonesia have allocated the MarTech budget for 2022. We are seeing outstanding growth of mobile app first companies for bookkeeping, gaming, etc. They rely highly on user data to determine the next best action and need the help of MarTech platforms. We are also seeing a high adoption of new technology. Many brands want to build new tech in-house to automate their processes but find that it isn’t feasible; hence they opt for players like us.
And for the marketing challenge in Indonesia, how do you see the situation for digital penetration in Indonesia, especially in light of the pandemic? Do you find any significant growth?
Internet penetration is very high in Indonesia. Out of the 275 million population, 73% are internet users. Before the pandemic, organizations were less inclined to MarTech and focused more on Adtech for customer acquisition. But as for post-pandemic, everyone has a clearer understanding of MarTech’s importance in helping them understand customers better and create contextual experiences and retain them.
Also based on these facts:
● According to Hootsuite’s data – 78% of users in Indonesia shop via mobile app.
● Indonesia saw a massive growth of mobile-first companies during the pandemic.
● E-commerce remains as the growth driver of the digital economy in Indonesia with 52% YOY growth, but at the same time, Fintech & BFSI are coming out strong too. Many banks also came up with digital arms for their banking. For instance, BCA came up with Blu, OCBC came up with Jenius, and Gojek supported Bank Jago. Their customers consist of the masses and thus drive Indonesia’s digitalization process.
In the wake of the pandemic, this overall digitalization has led to a much bigger inclination toward MarTech platforms.
We also found the fact that the majority of Indonesian unicorns use your MarTech platform. Apart from that, can startups or MSMEs use this platform too? Is there a specific service scale that allows them to use your platform at an affordable cost?
The clients using our platform are primarily B2C brands, including unicorns, early startups, mid-market, and enterprise accounts. Therefore, we have different plans and offerings tailored to their requirements, use cases, and the size of the customer base that they want to engage using our platform.