A churn is a user or revenue loss in a given period. Customer churn is determined by the number of customers that end to use the product and service during a given period.
In a more refined way, the number of customers you lost in the quarter in comparison to the number of customers you started with the sales quarter. Customer retention is the major factor in a company’s success. If you have a customer retention rate is 75%, it means you have a low churn rate of 25%.
Most often SaaS companies face a high churn rate due to the falling demand for existing products and services. The SaaS business evolves constantly so they need to constantly upgrade their products and introduce new services to sustain old customers and engage new customers. If the product is not fulfilling customers’ expectations and marketing demand, the churn rate will increase. Losing customers means losing revenue. So, if you want to reduce customer churn rate follow these best strategies.
Customer churning is greatly affecting the business and if above than 10% of customers are cancelling the product, it is difficult for long-term growth. It also means that you are losing more customers than acquiring them and which is seriously impacting your revenue.
According to a survey, companies lose $1.6 trillion per year due to customer churn. You need to permanently fix the root cause of churning to run your business for the long term. Every customer is different, you need to make strategies to make existing customers stay content and happy with the products and services.
According to the Forrester analysis, acquiring new customers is 5 times cost more than maintaining the existing customers.
Customer Churn Rate in United States in 2020
Customer Churn Vs Revenue Churn
Customer churn is the number of customers you are losing in a given time frame. Revenue churn is slightly different from customer churn. Revenue churn is the loss of revenue that is not necessarily happening because of customer churning.
Revenue churning means that you are not making enough money from your existing customer base than you were making before. There could be several reasons for this such as, your customers might have shifted to lower subscriptions, declined a few paid features, got discounted features, and so on.
Analyze all the business metrics, competitors’ graphs, target customers, and long-term customers and determine the most useful customers that stay long with you. Retain your loyal customers and try to compensate for your revenue loss with flexible customers.
If you have a diverse customer base, most likely you cannot satisfy all customers. Hit the majority of your target customers and meet their requirements and expectations, instead.
How to Reduce Customer Churn Rate?
According to Gartner’s survey report, approximately 80% of a company’s future revenue come from just 20% of its existing customers. So, 60-70% of the marketing focus remains on selling products to old customers.
Many companies are understanding the importance of low churn and proactively implementing reduce churn strategy. They emphasize improving customer relationships and communications and removing all bottlenecks that come in between product and customer experience.
According to HubSpot’s 2021 State of Inbound report, over 50% of companies are giving top priority to increasing customer satisfaction and generating leads. They are incorporating occasional rewards, free offers, and promotions to retain customers for a long time with the product.
Implement a systematic retention process that brings you the actionable insights to generate new ideas to reduce churn. Break down your churn into its component parts (pricing, types of users, product features, support, etc) and experiment with different parts and resolve all aspects of churn.
Here a few strategies are given to maximize customer satisfaction and reduce churn:
Analyse the Cause
Analyze why customers are leaving? There could be lots of reasons for customer churn such as pricing, product quality, customer experience, etc. To track the problem in the right direction, collect customers’ insights and their issues through email, feedback, and surveys, and build strategies proactively to prevent churn.
The survey is useful and easy. You can get the survey through email, SMS, live chat, social media, etc. Analyze their response and work on the points which are causing you more revenue loss.
Moreover, find out the specific reason for leaving the product after 30 or 60 days of using it. Talk to your customers and offer a discount or incentive to engage them with the product.
If there is any technical issue regarding the improper functionality or lack of understanding about the product, communicate with them and provide all technical support to reduce customers’ dissatisfaction with the product. Ask cancellation reasons in the form of a survey to get valuable product insights.
Spot the customers who have not been contacted for a while. They might be in the risk group and can impact the churn badly. Take preventive measures to include them in regular conversation. Start email conversations, feedback, and survey to foresee the problems.
Engage with Customers
Ensure quality customer service for successful onboarding and implementation. Guide them in every step so they get familiar with the product features. Provide a guided tour for all functionalities, and give value-added support and FAQs so they don’t feel clueless on handling basic issues.
Offer free training, webinars, video tutorials, and product demos to make them comfortable with the product. Demonstrate the full potential of the product so customers can see the value of using the product.
When customers feel the product/solution is helping them to achieve target expectations in business they are less likely to leave the product/solution. You need to constantly keep monitoring and communicating with them. Constant feedback keeps you aware of customers’ inclinations and expectations. Amazon has excellent customer service that gives it leverage over its competitors.
Proactive Customer Services
Sometimes customers struggle to navigate the website and didn’t get exactly what they are looking for. Confusion around a product or service and a lack of effective and timely support around for a particular issue increase their disappointments.
Use Live chat to engage with them throughout their product journey and have your customer support system ready to address product-related issues. When customers get an immediate solution and it enhances their overall user experiences.
Very likely, customers may overlook small glitches if they get timely support and stay with the product. You also get time to improve on technical things without losing your customer base.
According to a Harvard Business School report, 65% of the company’s business comes from existing customers.
Build a personalized relationship after onboarding the products and maintain a friendly rapport with your customers. The Starter Story and Pigeon had reduced their churn rate with personalized emails and customer support, only.
Build Customer Loyalty
Make your customers feel that they are a part of a brand community. Invite guest posts, question-answer discussions, and community forums where they can share their views and suggestions. It keeps them engaged with the product and if there is any issue or dissatisfaction, it can be solved within the community.
You can also get insights into customers’ perspectives and get time to resolve them early. Offer discounts, promos, and loyalty programs to keep them stuck with the product. Occasional discounts and incentives are offered to show how much you value your customers for the business. If the customer is approaching to end of their subscription, you can offer discounts to elaborate the subscription and retain your customer.
Be honest and transparent with your customers and share your revenue report and business metrics openly.
Reeboks and Nike have huge customer loyalty bases. Smaller SaaS brands like Ahrefs and e-commerce software Shopify also have a big loyal customer base that contributes to their growth.
According to research from Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits margin by 25% to 95%.
Improve Customer Experience
According to Forum Corporation’s research, 70% of churning is happening because of slow services and uncooperative support staff. Delight your customers with Thank You or Welcome Note after their subscriptions or purchasing the product. A Reddit uses a handwritten thank you message for its subscribed customers to give them value and importance.
If your customers are happy, they may refer you to others and help your business to expand. Celebrate your long-time customers by rewarding them with badges or highlighting their success on social media and your website. For example, freelance marketplace Fiverr highlights its customers’ stories on its blog.
Good customer service can reduce churn for a long time. Improve customer services to hook the customers with your brand. Attend every complaint seriously so the customers stay with the brand.
Conclusion
Nothing is going to change overnight! Follow the process and observe closely what areas in the company are causing churn problems. Retention is cheaper than customer acquisition. The KPMG survey revealed that customer retention drives 52% of the company’s revenue. You already have customers, engage with them and make sure they too stay with you.
FAQs
What is the churn rate?
A churn rate is when your customers stop using your services within a certain period of time.
Why is the churn rate important?
Calculating the churn rate is important, as it shows how many customers you have lost and lost customers mean less revenue.
What is a good average churn rate?
A 5% – 7% churn rate annually is considered an acceptable churn rate.
Marketing gamification is the process of using game mechanics and psychology in order to engage and motivate customers. It can be used to increase sales, encourage customer loyalty, and deepen engagement with a brand.
There are many different types of gamification marketing strategies that mostly rely on using rewards, punishments, or other motivators to influence behavior. If done correctly, marketing gamification can be an incredibly effective way to boost your business. However, it is important to understand the basic principles of gamification before you get started.
Gamification Market Value Growth Worldwide (2016-2021)
What is Marketing Gamification?
The basic premise of marketing gamification is the use of game mechanics and game thinking in marketing campaigns and strategies in order to engage customers more effectively and target consumers. Gamification can be used in various ways, but some common examples include using points, badges, and leaderboards to encourage specific behaviors, offering discounts or prizes for completing certain tasks or incorporating game design elements into marketing collateral.
The use of gamification in marketing is a relatively new concept that is quickly gaining popularity. Gamification can take many forms, but essentially it involves using game-like elements and mechanics to engage customers and promote desired behaviors. When used effectively, gamification can be an extremely powerful marketing tool.
Marketing gamification can be an extremely effective way to increase customer engagement and loyalty and drive conversions and sales if it is incorporated smartly. However, it’s important to note that gamification should not be used simply for the sake of using game mechanics. There needs to be a clear purpose and goal behind any gamification strategy, otherwise, it runs the risk of falling flat and coming across as disingenuous.
If you’re considering incorporating gamification into your marketing efforts, do your research and understand how best to use it before moving forward. As with anything else in marketing, always test and measure your results to ensure that your gamification strategy is working and achieving the desired results.
How Can Marketing Gamification Help You Increase Sales?
Marketing gamification is a strategy that uses game-like elements and mechanics to engage customers and promote desired behavior. It can increase brand awareness, drive sales, or promote other marketing objectives.
Gamification can increase customer engagement by making interactions more fun and engaging. It can also lead to increased brand loyalty and customer retention. Additionally, it can prompt customers to take desired actions, such as making a purchase or referring a friend.
There are many different ways to gamify your marketing strategy. Some common tactics include offering rewards for taking desired actions, using leaderboards to encourage friendly competition, and adding elements of chance or mystery to pique customers’ interest.
The key to successful marketing gamification is to ensure that the game elements are well-designed and add value for the customer. The goals of the gamification should be clearly defined, and the rules should be easy to understand. Additionally, the rewards should be attractive and meaningful.
Tips to Increase Sales Using Marketing Gamification
Gamification Statistics
The following are the top 10 tips to increase sales using marketing gamification:
1. Offer incentives for customers to take actions that lead to sales. This could include discounts, points, or other rewards.
2. Make the process of taking action easy and fun. Use game mechanics such as badges, leaderboards, and progress bars to keep customers engaged.
3. Let customers know how their actions impact the company’s bottom line. Show them how their efforts are translating into real results.
4. Encourage social sharing by offering additional rewards for customers who spread the word about your company or product.
5. Use data from customer interactions to improve your gamification strategy over time. Constantly strive to make the experience more engaging and effective.
6. Be sure to integrate gamification into your overall marketing strategy. Do not rely on it as a standalone tactic, or you may risk turning off customers.
7. Keep an eye on the competition. See what they’re doing with gamification and try to stay one step ahead.
8. Be prepared to change your approach if you do not see the desired results. Gamification is a dynamic field, and what works today may not work tomorrow.
9. Have fun with it! The more you enjoy what you’re doing, the more likely your customers will too.
10. Remember that gamification is just one tool in your sales arsenal. Use it alongside other techniques to create a well-rounded approach.
Create a balance between competition and collaboration
Test and refine your gamification approach
Following these best practices will help you ensure that your gamification implementation is successful. By defining your goals and objectives upfront, you can ensure that your selected game mechanics are aligned with them. Identifying your target audience is also important, as this will help you choose game mechanics that are most likely to engage them. Creating a balance between competition and collaboration will help keep players engaged while testing and refining your approach will help you further optimize your gamification implementation.
Brands that Use Gamification in Marketing
Starbucks – Starbucks Rewards
Starbucks’s “Starbucks Rewards”
M&M’s “Eye-Spy Pretzel”
KFC’s “Shrimp Attack”
Hilton’s “Honors guest loyalty program”
Sephora’s “Beauty Insider” loyalty program
Conclusion
Gamification is a hot topic in the world of marketing, and for a good reason. By understanding how to use it correctly, you can tap into your customer’s psychology and drive more sales with fewer efforts. Moreover, gamification is the new trend and both big and small brands are using it effectively to gain amazing results.
Thus, in today’s time, marketing gamification is an effective technique that helps in improving customer engagement leading to a higher success rate.
FAQs
How does gamification help marketing?
Gamification improves engagement that ultimately leads to a higher conversion rate. It does not feel like traditional marketing, thus people are more likely to respond more.
Is gamification a marketing tool?
Gamification is an important tool in a marketing strategy as the end-user gets to enjoy the benefits of his/her activity.
Does Starbucks use gamification?
Starbucks uses gamification for marketing in the form of ‘My Starbucks Rewards’ to increase engagement and retention of customers.
What prominent companies use gamification techniques?
Your business website is loaded with useful content. You notice heavy traffic every day. But how many of your visitors convert into your customers?
You are here to sell your product. It is better to have 10 visitors who turn into customers than 100 visitors who just stop by. If the sales and subscribers do not increase with the number of visitors, you certainly need some changes in your copywriting technique.
A good copy will engage your audience entirely and persuade them to take the action you want.
Today, in this blog we will dig deep into the world of copywriting and give away the secrets of the most successful businesses. Here, we will discuss 15 copywriting secrets to increase your conversion rate. So, let’s begin…
As per the Content Marketing Institute, it is crucial to engage with people if you wish to maintain long-term success in your business. This would require detailed information about the persona of your audience. However, drawing this information can be slightly tricky.
When a person visits a website and buys a product, it is usually due to their internal desire.
As Eugene Schwartz has said:
Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires that already exists in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product.
Therefore, to persuade your audience to turn into your customers you must understand their inner desire.
But, how do you do that?
Going through the analytics data of your website is one of the best ways to do it. You literally get to know what the audience is looking for. Note their expectations and relate them with your product while writing your copy.
If you are using Google Analytics, you can see the analytics data using the following path: Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries
Directly asking questions to your audience is also a great way. You can keep small surveys for your visitors. This does not mean bombarding them with questions. Just a subtle few words query that may help you understand their requirements.
Once you receive the feedback, analyze them thoroughly and compare it with the already existing information on your site. This will help you pinpoint your mistakes and suggest fitting alternatives to correct them.
Creating buyer personas may also help you understand your audience better. This can be done by creating simple fill-in-the-blanks type forms. Here, you can also divide these personas into your primary and secondary audience to get a better view. Currently, several big businesses are relying on the buyer persona strategy.
2. Use the AIDA Model
The AIDA model stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. It runs in four steps:
Attracting Attention
The introduction must be catchy. It should make you look trustworthy to the visitor. This increases the probability of visitors engaging with your product and ultimately in increasing the conversion rate.
A few simple ideas can make your content intriguing. You may add statistics or specific numbers to make it sound more accurate. Using targeted keywords is always great. The power words like smart, unknown, free, secret, etc. can also help to attract the attention of your audience.
Trigger interest
Your audience must feel hopeful as soon as they start reading your blog. Make them realize that you feel their problem and have the best solution for it. Everyone appreciates a good deal served on the platter. Your audience would love to know that you are giving them exactly what they need without making them work for it.
Fulfilling desires
A good marketer knows that the key to selling a product is to make your audience crave it. Making them believe that this is the product they have been longing for. Personally speaking to your visitors through a compelling copy is exactly what you need to do.
This includes eliminating any doubt from their minds by explicitly telling them the advantages of your product. The visit must be stress-free and capable of strengthening their inner desire to buy your product.
Call to action
It is the actual motive of the entire process. Therefore, it should be written in clear and compulsive language. The reader should not see any reason to back out. The only thing they should have in mind at this point is to buy your product.
3. Communicate in Your Customer’s Language
Going through the analytical data of your website and conducting surveys would also introduce you to the language being used by your viewers. You can actually get to know the exact words or phrases your audience uses to find a product.
If you find certain repetitive words or sentences, note them down for your copy. Use the exact words in which your audience describes their problem. This makes you appear highly understanding and thoughtful towards your audience.
A copy can be extremely compelling if written in the language of the audience. This reflects a similar mindset and genuine understanding. It is quite powerful and helps you build a psychological connection with your audience.
4. Write Attractive Headlines
Nothing can make a viewer stay at your website more than a strong, convincing, and attractive headline. It is the key action driver. A perfect headline is capable of accomplishing a lot of tasks.
When a viewer asks a query in Google he/she gets bombarded with tons of websites. This means they have uncountable options to choose from. Whether or not they will click to enter your site depends upon how effectively you have written the headline.
However, just being catchy is not enough. Your headline must also provide the audience with a clear picture of what to expect inside the blog. Keep it specific and use the right keywords alongside the power words for better results. Using confusing language can make your viewers leave for good.
5. Tell Stories
As per Harvard Business Review, the human brain loves good stories. They generate a feeling of empathy by triggering the release of oxytocin. Including good stories on your landing page can help increase your conversion rate several folds.
This is especially true in today’s scenario when customers are getting pitched about similar products from every direction throughout the day. According to the Search Engine Journal, brand-building stories have become an essential element of advertising and marketing companies across the globe.
The stories not only give the audience a break from regular advertising but also keep them wired to the product emotionally. A good story must include people or incidents that your audience can connect with.
The stories most admired by people are those in which they see themselves as heroes. As every hero faces challenges your product can serve as a guide/ mentor/ helping hand to overcome the challenges. Finally, after facing all the obstacles the hero wins.
The most important aspect here is consistency. Even when you have nothing new, you can simply repost your earlier content. The key here is to make your audience feel your presence.
Share the positive comments from your Twitter or Instagram or Facebook handles on the landing page of your website. This increases your credibility by making you appear genuine and trustworthy to the new customers.
7. Use Psychological Triggers
Most marketers know about the psychological boosters that entice your visitors to take prompt action. These are like the magic tricks that multiply conversion rate like wonders.
All you need to do is to get into the mind of your audience. Here we have listed a few smart ways to do this.
Include privacy statements and money-back guarantees on your landing page. These work as click or action triggers for your audience.
Strengthen the desire of your audience by creating scarcity. No matter how old you have grown, every time you read “offer valid for a limited period” or “only a few left in stock” or “order within one hour to avail extra benefits”, it becomes really difficult to not buy that product. Scarcity persuades your audience to take quick action.
Build trust through risk reversals. Taking a risk with money is the last thing your audience wants to do. Ensure them their money is going to the right place by including money-back guarantees and easy return or replacement policies on your landing page.
8. Present the Information in an Organized Way
Providing information is great but, overloading it can do more harm than expected. No one is going to explore your entire website for a small piece of information, especially when they have tons of other options available. Keep the information handy for your audience by organizing it wisely.
In fact, there are ways to make your audience crave more information. “Bucket Brigade” the term given by Brian Dean refers to words that are compulsive for your audience to keep reading. The words or phrases like “listen!!” or “see” or “you have to agree when I say”. Try using these on your landing page to make it more striking.
At the same time, it is important to avoid fancy language. Your aim is to make the information reach your audience and not to display your language skills. Keep it simple and avoid using technical language as much as possible.
9. Use Relevant Images
Giving visual effects to your landing page by including relevant images can really increase your conversion rate.
Science says that the human brain processes visuals 60,000X faster than written information. Almost 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual. Moreover, images are easy to share and get more engagement. They convey ideas quickly and clearly.
Companies using infographics and detailed images claim that including visual content has increased their conversion rate by as much as 86%.
10. Add Videos for Better Communication
According to Eye view, digital adding a relevant video to your landing page can increase your conversion rate by as much as 80%. You can also tell your brand stories using videos for better connection.
Just like pictures videos help build a connection with your audience more quickly. It is often seen that people tend to avoid one page of reading but easily indulge in watching a 5-minute video. This makes communication rather effective and easy.
11. Use Words That Convert Better
The sad truth is no matter how efficiently you write your copy no one is going to read more than 20% of it. So, this 20% actually decides whether or not your audience will engage with you.
For better results, you have to be wise in your choice of words. Believe it or not, some words sell more than others. That is why they are known as power words. Try using such words while writing your copy.
A few examples of such words are: “you” directly referring to your viewers while talking about their problems is an excellent way to build a connection with them. You can also use words like “because”. This way you are giving your audience the reason to do what you are persuading them to do.
12. Show Gratitude
Say thanks to your customers by showing some extra love through gifts coupons, vouchers, or maybe cashback. Doesn’t matter how small the gift is, people are always delighted to receive it.
This is also one of the psychological tricks. Here, you persuade your audience to buy more by bribing them with some extra items.
You might also fix a time frame for the visitors to avail of these gifts. For example, “50 % discount for first 5 customers” or “Avail your bonuses by applying within an hour”.
13. Write Clear Call to Action
A good copy is all about persuading your readers to take action. So, no compromise on this. Do not shy away from telling your audience what you expect them to do. Use loud, clear, and compulsive language to write the “call of action”.
You can use words such as “Do it now”, “What are you waiting for”, “Your happiness awaits this click”, or “transform your life here”. You can choose the language suitable for your product.
Do not confuse your audience by giving them several tasks. The call of action should be one single objective. The action phrases used on your call to action button have a serious impact on your conversion rates.
14. Overcome Objections
Your viewers might be just a click away from the “call to action button” but, may change their minds due to a small doubt at this point. To avoid this from happening, you must take measures to overcome any doubt that they might get in their minds.
How to do it? Let us give you some quick hacks:
Include screenshots of comments from satisfied customers. The happy customer faces can convince more potential customers.
Reassure your buyers about the authenticity of your product by writing the firm guarantee clauses.
Earn their trust by displaying your business certificates and licenses.
Again remind them about the limited availability of your product to keep them engaged.
Write your easy return and replacement policies in bold. This will help the viewers trust you with their money.
15. Avoid useless content:
The customers only invest their time at places that appear promising. Therefore, it is extremely crucial that you provide valuable content to your audience.
Resist using useless words that add no extra value to your content. Try to write a copy that is crisp and clear. You have to feed information to your audience’s mind without forcing it. Don’t make them work for it, they will not like it.
After you are done writing your copy, spend time cutting off any irrelevant information or even extra words or sentences.
It’s no rocket science. Just with small changes in your copy, you can considerably increase your conversion rate. Completely understanding your audience by walking in their shoes is the key to successful copywriting. Satisfy the desires of your customers by giving them what they desire.
In this blog, we have provided you with 15 copywriting secrets that have proven to work wonders with several businesses. We are pretty sure you will choose the best ones for you and use them in your next blog.
FAQs
How can copywriting increase sales?
Copywriting can persuade your customers to buy your product and will make you stand out among your competitors.
What is copywriting for conversion?
Conversion for copywriting is a technique where the goal of writing is to convert a customer or persuade them to purchase something.
How do you increase the conversion rate?
Write attractive headlines, leverage social media, use words that will convert better, understand your audience and use the AIDA model to increase conversion rates.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Gallabox.
Digital technologies have revamped business processes, culture, and customer experience across verticals.To be competitive and profitable in a growing digital environment, end to end transformation is necessary for every business, be it a SME or the big giants.
Gallabox is an easy-to-use, no-code conversational growth engine on WhatsApp for SMBs.
Gallabox helps businesses increase sales and streamline all customer interactions. By deploying intuitive workflows, the tool puts an end to mediocre and broken conversations.
Gallabox helps companies run their business on WhatsApp empowering them to market, sell, and support better — via a communication channel that feels robust to the core. Whatsapp is becoming India’s favourite super app and that has left room for a plethora of opportunities in the fast growing super app genre.
In terms of vision, Gallabox believes that all organisations – small, medium, and large need a powerful messaging platform like WhatsApp to manage their inbound and outbound customer conversations. Thus, Gallabox is proving to be a key player in providing customised business solutions over WhatsApp.
Gallabox – Industry
Gallabox focuses upon three major problems:
1. There are about 50 Billion WhatsApp messages that get sent and received every day, but unfortunately, businesses struggle to manage their customer interactions on WhatsApp at scale.
2. Businesses are still sending around 1.3 billion SMS Per day whereas their customers have already moved to WhatsApp
3. Businesses find it very hard to build their workflows on WhatsApp, integrating their existing databases with APIs require coding knowledge.
In terms of the industry size, they see a huge opportunity in the related circles. There are 500 million users that use WhatsApp, and at least 95% of this demographic opens the app once in a day. From this we can infer that WhatsApp has swiftly become apart of their daily lives. Among 500 million users of WhatsApp in India, there are at least 20 million WhatsApp business users. Assuming that about one-third of these businesses require a more sophisticated solution, where they are able to leverage the possibilities of WhatsApp makes this opportunity worth $4 billion per year.
The second opportunity is that the SMS market globally has reported revenues of $90 billion dollars. According to a recent study about 40 million SMS’s get sent per month and the estimation is that there are a hundred thousand businesses in India sending SMS till date. SMS is really analogue in nature and it really doesn’t allow for any kind of interactivity. So, Gallabox took this as an opportunity.
The two large opportunities for Gallabox are:
To move businesses that are already on WhatsApp business to offering them a more sophisticated solution that can help them leverage the possibilities of this super app: better team collaboration via a shared team inbox, streamlining marketing efforts through broadcast campaigns, simplified support with chatbots and easy integrations to build better workflows.
To move companies that are sending SMS today onto the WhatsApp messaging platform thereby empowering them to increase sales and support efforts to scale their business.
For the last three years, Gallabox’s founders have been observing and working very closely with the WhatsApp team, they recognized the kind of feature functionality that is possible. In the market today, there are some companies that are building their product to use WhatsApp as a messaging channel but over the next couple of years, Gallabox predicts that WhatsApp could transform into an end-to-end business platform where customers can literally do everything from discovery of products, to purchasing, and accessing required support. Gallabox at this position is being able to leverage this opportunity ahead of us.
Gallabox – Founders & Team
Gallabox Founders – Yogesh Narayanan, Karthik Jagannathan, and Yathindhar Panchanathan
Karthik Jagannathan, Yogesh Narayanan, and Yathindhar Panchanathan are the founders of Gallabox. Karthik is the CEO of Gallabox, Yogesh serves as CTO, and Yathindhar serves as CPO at Gallabox.
A common denominator among the three co-founders has been that they have worked at Sulekha for almost A decade together starting from 2007/2008. All three of them have worked in different roles. It gave an in-depth view of how SMBs and midsize businesses were digitizing the marketing operations, trying to acquire leads from the internet and that was another generation where they saw the SMBs up-close.
Yogesh has 13 + of experience in full life cycle software development for consumer internet, digital marketplaces and products. Just after Sulekha, he spent three years building the fintech Marketplace at Cred Avenue. Yogesh is a largely self-taught self-made engineering person who has a fantastic balance between Engineering Technology Outlook as well as a business Outlook. He is able to toggle between the two.
Yathindhar has 17 plus years of experience managing the SMB facing product while at Sulekha, where he also managed the entire value delivery piece so they were collecting money from SMBs which means delivering value back to them in some form. Yathindhar built entire infrastructure to be able to track that and he has also spent a significant part of his career on digital marketing. Just before Sulekha, he was with Xerago, a digital marketing company that manages large clients and after Sulekha, Yatin spent a couple of years at Matrimony where he helped build wedding services Marketplace.
Karthik has 20 plus years of experience in marketing sales and overall P&L management. He has a strong India SMB focus and mid-market customer expertise. He started his career in advertising and then he spent a good part of his career at Sify between 2000 and 2005. Then after that, he worked at Tata Teleservices in telecom sales for a couple of years after which he was at Sulekha for a little over a decade, where he was part of the original founding team that built this Sulekha local services business and subsequently, Karthik spent a couple of years at Matrimony where he was the business head for the wedding service marketplace business.
They came from a very strong consumer internet background and were very interested to see how businesses can be helped using technology. This was their core focus as they dabbled in multiple Ideas.
Towards the end of 2019 is when the three of them decided that they want to start something of their own and noticed a commonality of thoughts. One was the burning desire to be on their own and found a company. Second, was their passion to genuinely help businesses using technology. Third, they felt that an era of digitisation is coming up and they should be ready for it and contribute in some form to the digital transformation. After 6 months of brainstorming they incorporated the company in June 2020.
Yathindhar manages the product design and the digital marketing piece. Yogesh takes care of the entire Technology architecture, the Visioning as well as the actual building of the product and deployment.
Karthik takes care of overall distribution which is the sales marketing piece and fundraising activities. The company currently has 24 employees and is actively growing.
Gallabox Team
The culture of the company is of shared ownership. The early team members bring a larger dose of passion into the team and new team members are equally amazing with the ability to quickly understand the business, understand the customer and being able to deploy it in the market.
Their core values are that of focusing on the customer first. They believe that they exist to grow their customers business. They like to raise the standard. The team is always curious to know more and hungry to improve its best performance. They work fast to completion. They think simple is beautiful. Simple is the most sophisticated thing that you can ever ask for. So Gallabox team work hard to make products simple and light to use.
They nurture talent, embrace the diversity of ideas and team members respect & rely on each other. They place integrity on a very high pedestal because integrity is about doing the right thing even when nobody’s watching. Each of the founders owns the cost and takes accountability for decisions & actions.
They have a lot of fun at work. They have a Badminton Court next door. So, they go out there and play once a week at least. They also have a Gallabox Shuttles League (GSL). They arrange and play tournaments. They believe that Sports brings people together and it’s a great team-building exercise even if that goal is not team building it inadvertently happens.
Their hiring funda is that they want to have people who want to build something. They want to build a product, they want to build on an idea, want to build on the career, want to build on the conviction. They look for builders. They do not look for managers. They look for team players who can take something up, own it and go about building it.
Gallabox – Idea & Startup Story
With the rapid digitization that we came to see through the last decade businesses started to rely on the Meta, Facebook, Alphabet, and Google ecosystem to attract users. They became the discovery engines to aid businesses in showcasing their product offerings and increase revenues by doing so. A key take back from this new workflow was that customer satisfaction was of utmost importance.
Brands needed a platform that is readily available to be of service, personalized, and easy to access for users and team members. When Gallabox’s founders started to ideate on the best possible solution for digitising businesses, they realized that at least eight out of ten companies had the components to put together a better workflow but they did not have a platform to bring it all together. Either they were having a CRM or they were getting a CRM done, or they had integration partners that were aiding the workflow but, they weren’t able to unify all these processes into one singular flow.
Apart from partnering platforms/services, businesses were ready to improve their customer services at scale. This meant for most of them that an increase in resources was the best possible solution. The founders of Gallabox wanted to change this thought, they truly saw potential in this grey area. This was how Gallabox was founded.
They brainstormed the best solution for any small to medium size business – a single collaborative platform that allows for engaging interactions with customers, predefined or custom integration workflows, no-code conversational bot flows to services customers 24×7, an easy to use tool to launch marketing campaigns at scale and, a shared inbox for teams to better communicate without having to switch between channels.
Gallabox – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Gallabox was named after the cash register – Galla Petti. The Galla Petti symbolises healthy business.
They focus on minimising marketing wastage, improving efficiencies in marketing as well as in sales effort and customer support efforts and focusing on enabling winning conversations with prospects and existing customers. Gallabox is building a product to streamline and reduce the multiple efforts of sales, support and marketing teams.
The three large touchpoints of the customer are – Discovery, purchase, and support. Gallabox helps businesses to manage these customer conversations across 3 milestones. The goal is to provide their clients/customers with a tool that works like a charm, is simple to use and feature rich to scale their business operations.
The Gallabox logo has two perspectives. One perspective is, it is supposed to be a box, a cube and therefore drawing parallel to the brand name. The other perspective is that of the blue arrow that is pointing towards the right side. It symbolises the rising graph of a business. The focus is to enable their clients’ business to improve. This Arrow symbolises what Gallabox wishes to provide to their clients business.
Gallabox – Products & Services
Companies want to be able to deliver a great experience to the customers across three milestones – Discovery, purchase, support and of course, there are multiple in between. In pursuit of these goals, most of them have a website, some of them have a mobile app and which is where their products, services and their profile and their reason to believe – all of these things really are sitting out there.
Several of them also have CRM which is a repository of customer information. Often, CRM is integrated with the website so therefore there is a way in which the discovery, purchase, and support functionalities could be delivered to a certain threshold level of quality but unfortunately, their customers are sitting on WhatsApp and the island is not connected to any of these. So what WhatsApp is allowed to do and what Gallabox is building on – is being able to connect the website, mobile app, and the CRM with WhatsApp and be able to offer an end to end business solution for clients.
Through Discovery, Purchase, and Support, Gallabox offers a set of features or a way in which teams can collaborate with each other, with the multi-agent team inbox, clients can run marketing campaigns with the WhatsApp broadcast feature, they can run automation capabilities with a chatbot and start a conversation with the prospect or with the existing customers and then hands off to an agent at some point of time. Gallabox can integrate nicely with that including CRM and payment systems and so on. Gallabox is working on building the E-Commerce engine and the business app templates.
The entire journey is multiple touchpoints with the customer, from the time the prospective walks in – to the time the prospect is converted to a customer, customer conversation leads to the engagement and then some kind of support to the customer request. Gallabox really offers all of these features covering the touchpoints of the customers.
It’s not easy to be able to imagine this kind of ambit. Gallabox wants to make it as easy as building a templated website. There are several tools available now on the internet you know if you have a couple of hours, people sit down and create a good looking website for yourself. They are developing the capabilities to be able to do that on WhatsApp. Gallabox builds plug-n-play tools supporting hundreds of workflows.
Let’s take an example – A travel portal integrates with Facebook & Razorpay’s payments gateway or an Edtech company integrates with Stanley to generate leads. The integration will help them send message notifications through a bot on WhatsApp or they can send automated reminders to the users on Whatsapp. They are building a library of industry-specific templates and workflows. They have already built more than 250 such workflows. Working with more clients will help the company gain more experience and expertise.
A client can come in, filter by industry and pick the workflow that they want and start deploying. So, Gallabox is really building a do-it-yourself toolkit for companies to build their business app on WhatsApp. However, the founders are also Cognizant of the fact that India and several other emerging economies are where the do it yourself phenomenon may not be as prevalent and therefore there is a dependence on developers to build software products.
So, for instance, Shopify has a fairly robust do-it-yourself toolkit for people to be able to create a website but , businesses still depend on developers to be able to build the shopping website and so is the case with Magento, woo commerce, Wix, and several others. There is a huge ecosystem of developers offering such services to clients. What Gallabox is doing is it is building a product initially which is a do-it-yourself toolkit for companies and, it is also building a platform that necessarily is a developer tool for them to build a WhatsApp business app.
Gallabox – Revenue & Business Model
Gallabox is a product, therefore, it’s on the subscription business model. Customers can pay on a monthly/annual basis. They have very comfortable pricing starting from 2500 rupees or even lower depending on prepaid going up to 9000 Rupees.
They have experimented with what clients really require and therefore based on that they have treetop rising over the last six months. The core philosophy behind the pricing is it ought to be a small ratio of a benefit that the client accrues by using Gallabox. As they focus on improving the quality of customer conversation with that two benefits accruing to their client – one is it can increase the sales and or it can reduce their support cost, which means there is an ROI by using Gallabox.
Gallabox aims to get a small percentage of the lift or on the cost savings that they are able to enable for their clients. This way they have figured out a pricing model. Gallabox pricing includes the cost of the business, WhatsApp business API and all the other related costs.
Their focus is not on profitability at a unit level but to ensure that they get the pricing right and should be fair on both parties and should ensure that it is easy for customers to adopt Gallabox and help scale the customer acquisition engine.
Gallabox – Customer Acquisition
Gallabox can be used by anyone without any coding knowledge. Most of the businesses in India does not prefer DIY and instead hire individuals like freelancers or outsource to small companies.
However, very interestingly, Gallabox is enquired by these freelancers and companies who ask them how they can use Gallabox to make their work easier for integration. Gallabox has got a great connection with the developers’ community and this is how they acquired most of their initial customers.
Gallabox – Funding
The founders bootstrapped the startup since its inception while the MVP was being built. In April 2021, Gallabox raised a pre-seed capital of Rs. 3 Crore from angel investors by issuing CCPS.They began deploying this capital from June 2021 to augment the team and acquire customers using a variety of GTM tools.
Gaurav Kumar (Founder, CredAvenue), Pramod Kumar(Cofounder, Wealth Advisors India), Kapil Ramamurthy (Cofounder, Spark Capital), Swaroop Reddy (Founder, SeedTime Ventures), and Kris Karaikudi (Global Data Strategy Lead Slalam, US) are Prominent angel investors of Gallabox. They are also the advisors for the company.
Gallabox has Received TANSEED GRANT from Govt. of Tamil Nadu and CM MK Stalin.
Gallabox received the TANSEED grant funding of Rs 5 lakhs from Hon’ble Chief Minister MK Stalin on the 23rd of December, 2021. Gallabox was one of the 19 startups from across the state that was selected in the second edition of the Tamil Nadu startup Seed Grant Fund. The Grant is for a total of Rs 10 lakhs per winner, the first tranche of which is Rs 5 lakhs.
Gallabox – Future Plans
Customers make great efforts to discover and interact with a brand or business. In these countless interactions — lie opportunities for you to make the right impression. These touch-points where customers and your teams meet are sacred for a business. Gallabox powers these connections to make them more impactful.
FAQs
When was Gallabox founded?
Gallabox was founded in June 2020.
Who is the founder of Gallabox?
Karthik Jagannathan, Yogesh Narayanan, and Yathindhar Panchanathan are the cofounders of Gallabox.
What is Gallabox pricing?
Gallabox pricing ranges from 2000 – 9000 depending upon the client requirements.
