The global eCommerce industry is rapidly changing and growing. This has disrupted the traditional retail sector, leading to many businesses shifting to the eCommerce space. With new players entering the eCommerce market, the competition among the brands is also rapidly increasing, and every brand wants to stand apart from the rest.
What makes a brand stand out is its ability to provide quality products and services and satisfy its customers by offering the best possible experience. But not every brand knows how to do that. To help brands leverage the power of conversations with customers, there are certain platforms that can assist them in doing so.
One such amazing platform is BIK. BIK is a multi-channel conversational marketing platform. It is designed to spark high engagement and exciting conversations for customer-focused brands, helping the brands increase their ROI.
In this article, discover more about BIK, its founders, products and services, marketing strategy, and more.
BIK – Company Highlights
| Startup Name | BIK.ai |
|---|---|
| Industry | Ecommerce Marketing |
| Founded | 2019 |
| Founder | Sonakshi Nathani, Ashutosh Singla |
| Website | bik.ai |
BIK – About
BIK – Industry
BIK – Founders and Team
BIK – Startup Story
BIK – Mission and Vision
BIK – Name and Logo
BIK – Products/Services
BIK – Business and Revenue Model
BIK – Customer Acquisition Strategy
BIK – Marketing Strategy
BIK – Competitors
BIK – Future Plans
BIK – About
BIK is a multi-channel conversational marketing platform that was built from the ground up. The new generation is always looking for fast and quality responses to complete the purchase cycle, and brands are looking to achieve the maximum possible return on investment. The platform is designed to spark high engagement and interesting conversations for the brand centred on customers.
BIK – Industry
BIK’s product is built for eCommerce brands all across the globe. Global eCommerce is a $3.3 trillion industry. The Indian eCommerce market is predicted to reach $74.8 billion, while the US eCommerce market is predicted to reach $875.2 billion in 2022.
Most eCommerce brands use Shopify or other website builders. There are about 3.9 million Shopify stores globally.
In India and the United States, eCommerce brands are expected to grow at a 20% CAGR over the next five years.
BIK – Founders and Team
Sonakshi Nathani and Ashutosh Singla are the founders of BIK. They were college batchmates and are both Computer Science graduates from IIIT, Hyderabad. Sonakshi has earlier worked at Microsoft, and Ashutosh has worked in Canada for startups like Zenfits and Square. In terms of tasks, Sonakshi takes care of the business aspect, and Ashutosh takes care of the tech side of the company.
BIK – Startup Story
WhatsApp is core to India; the founders closely observed the rise of businesses selling things unofficially on WhatsApp for either sale, marketing, or customer support. They felt that WhatsApp and other social media channels would play a huge role in how commerce would be conducted in the future. They believed that social apps would be the next era after websites and apps. That was when they decided to partner with WhatsApp and launch BIK.
Most of the initial customers came from their known contacts. They started a pilot with them and worked closely with the contacts to understand which features were valuable. Working closely with the merchants and businesses helped the founders get insights that shaped the product.
Cold approaching and referrals were also used by BIK to acquire the first few users. LinkedIn came in very handy for cold-approaching potential brands.
BIK – Mission and Vision
BIK’s mission and vision is to be the best platform in the world for brands, that helps them drive the maximum possible ROI. Also, it aims to make brands limitless and help them leverage the power of conversational marketing with BIK.
BIK – Name and Logo
BIK.ai – The founders wanted to go upmarket and enterprise and deploy cutting-edge technology in ML/AI to enable data-backed decision making
BIK – Products/Services
Today, businesses and eCommerce brands are unable to effectively engage with potential customers through conventional channels such as SMS, emails, and ads because they have lower open rates. Personalized messages provided by BIK make customers 70% more likely to make a purchase, thus assisting brands in boosting their sales.
In the ever-expanding market, BIK enables brands to gain a higher reach by targeting over 2 billion active WhatsApp users every day. The ability to re-engage with lapsed customers and encourage them to complete their purchases is one of the biggest strengths of BIK.
BIK offers BIK Campaigns, BIK Bots, BIK Growth, and BIK CRM—all 4 products enable your consumers with high intent to purchase from you, enabling your growth.
The founders launched another business line w.r.t. to the previous product, Bikayi. They felt that it was not that easy to monetize the SMBs, rather, it was easier to engage them and help them get revenue, but relatively hard to monetize. That was when they decided to launch another business line for enterprise customers. While the impact in both businesses is equally high, BIK is financially more sustainable.
BIK – Business and Revenue Model
The company’s product costs $20k per year for most brands.
BIK – Customer Acquisition Strategy
The company places the right emphasis on customer success and fulfilling their needs. Great customer success and the speed of releasing new features are its moats. The company’s success team works very closely with these brands to drive ROI on social channels. The brands really like the amount of effort and dedication that BIK’s team puts into each and every task.
Now that the company has more confidence in its product and the market, the next steps are to go international and increase the number of sales folks in the company. It is planning to double down on sales and reach out to a lot of potential brands. BIK is a little conservative when it comes to performance marketing; for them, it is mainly cold reach outs and referrals.
BIK also uses a few tools like Salesforce, Notion, Jira, and Figma to support its functions and make them more efficient.
BIK – Marketing Strategy
When BIK was launched, the founders did a lot of research and, based on the insights, began using personalised emails addressing the problems of the brands that they wanted to target and pointing out how D2C brands were still using traditional ways of interacting with their customers.
This marketing tactic initially helped the company onboard its first few D2C brands. BIK provides modern solutions to D2C brands, helping them increase their ROI.
Shalini Rath
BIK – Competitors
Some of the prominent competitors of BIK include:
- Yellow.ai
- Haptik
- MoEngage
- WebEngage
- Attentive
- ActiveCampaign
- Sinch
- Vonage
BIK – Future Plans
BIK is making its product ready for the US market as well, as it is a hub for eCommerce companies and opportunities. Its growth plans revolve around scaling up; it has already hit more than 1 million messages within three weeks of launch. The scale-up would majorly involve geographies like the USA, ANZ, and the UK, apart from India. BIK will continue to invest heavily in research and development, evolving itself towards its vision of making brands complete their journeys through conversations.
From a team point of view, they believe in quality over quantity and continue to keep their high-quality team lean to deliver quality products.
FAQs
What is BIK?
BIK is a multi-channel conversational marketing platform that was built from the ground up. The platform is designed to spark high engagement and interesting conversations for the brand centred on customers.
How much does BIK’s product cost?
BIK’s product costs $20k per year for most brands.
Who are the competitors of BIK?
Some of the prominent competitors of BIK include:
- Yellow.ai
- Haptik
- MoEngage
- WebEngage
- Attentive
- ActiveCampaign
- Sinch
- Vonage
