Brief Buzz: Marketing in the age of e-commerce - Kunal Tomar

In this article of Brief Buzz, Kunal Tomar, GM, Experian Marketing Services, India, writes about the marketing strategies e-commerce players are looking to deploy to stay ahead of the game. 

462,124,989 – The number of internet users in India as on July 1, 2016, making India the second largest internet population in the world. As the funnel goes, there are over 350 million smartphone users, 153 million active social media users, 100 million plus always logged in users and projected 70-75 million e-commerce consumers by end of 2016. With the Government’s digital India thrust, the e-commerce user base could well go over 300 million users by 2020. 

With this kind of scale, it becomes imperative for the e-commerce players to be prudent with the digital marketing spends. Email, which remains the preferred channel for e-commerce, is seeing a shift from the spray and pray methodology to a connect, segment and target philosophy. 

Three major transitions can be witnessed in the Indian ecosystem:

1. Offline and online analytics to optimise time, channel and content and to segment and retarget consumers
2. Deployment of multi-channel marketing CRMs and Marketing Automation tools to gather and process data from CRM, POS, web, social media, mobile and email platforms.
3. Deployment of comprehensive marketing suites for cross-channel marketing and optimisation 

In the next 12 to 18 months, most of the e-commerce players will be deploying one or all of the above to ensure they stay ahead of the game. A good marketing workflow would include a mix of offline and online analytics integrated with a cross-channel marketing platform.