In 2021, InsideIIM launched for the first time the
E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge, an exclusive program to give India's top talent at business schools a flavor of Marketing and Growth Hacking in E-commerce set-up. To participate, MBA students were asked to create a marketing strategy for their favorite E-commerce platforms. Amongst all the entries that came in from India's top talent, five stood out! Here is a glimpse into the marketing strategies formulated by Gunjan Kishor, an IIM Kozhikode student and a winner of the InsideIIM E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge!
InsideIIM's E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge - The Case
As a part of one of the E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge rounds, participants were asked to share their top three favorite E-commerce platforms, along with reasons to justify their predilection for these platforms. They were asked to create a short PowerPoint presentation on how they would market one of the above e-commerce platforms differently. The participants were given the objective to create a marketing strategy that would:
- Increase user acquisition, i.e. the number of account registrations of the e-commerce site.
- Increase user conversion, i.e. the number of transactions on the e-commerce site.
Participants' presentations would then be evaluated on components such as their marketing goals, the smoothness of the customer journey, frameworks incorporated, strategic tactics, marketing channels employed, and measurement of success.
The Winning Case - Gunjan Kishor's Simple Break Down of An Improved Marketing Strategy For Nykaa
Amongst the five winners of the InsideIIM E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge 2021 is Gunjan Kishor, a second-year MBA student at IIM Kozhikode who is enthusiastic about carving a niche for herself in the E-commerce sector.
Gunjan's winning case in the E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge revolved around Nykaa, a beauty, and wellness website that has revolutionized the beauty shopping experience. As an active user of the platform, Gunjan chose to create a strong marketing strategy for Nykaa with the objective of increasing user acquisition and also increasing the conversion of those users into consumers.
To begin with, Gunjan focused on understanding the average consumer's journey to Nykaa, both online and offline, by creating a buyer's journey that began with awareness of the E-commerce platform and ended with loyalty to that E-commerce platform. Gunjan broke down the various touchpoints, pain points and customer moments at each step of the buyer journey.
Then, Gunjan created a two-phase omnichannel business model to drive awareness and purchase by educating the buyer about the concept of a healthy skincare routine, a diet plan, personalized offerings, and also by creating an emotional appeal to bring about a change in attitude of the customer. The objective of this was to capture the 'micro-moments' of a customer.
Gunjan then created a clear marketing and promotions plan to bring her strategy into action. She listed out the various promotional strategies a brand like Nykaa could employ for marketing purposes, including modes of digital marketing such as SEO, SEM, email marketing, influencer marketing etc. Gunjan even broke down the percentage of the target audience that existed on various marketing channels, along with a quarterly engagement timeline to run marketing and awareness campaigns.
Finally, Gunjan evaluated and chose metrics to measure the success of her marketing strategy. The four key areas to track in Gunjan's marketing strategy were the effectiveness of the Nykaa website, engagement with visitors on the Nykaa website, social media reach that indicated the efficacy of the social media marketing plan, and the most important of them all: customer conversion.
Gunjan chose metrics such as percentage of repeat visitors on the platform, the average bounce rate of the top landing pages for potential customers, user sessions, social media mentions and impressions, customer conversion rate, etc. to create a holistic system of tracking each focus area.
What did you think of Gunjan Kishor's marketing, user acquisition and user conversion strategy for Nykaa? What holes can you poke in the proposed strategy? Think you have a better, more effective strategy in mind? Let us know in the comments! Read more about the InsideIIM E-Commerce Prodigy Challenge here.