Let me start by wishing everyone a very happy new year!
For those who have missed about our story, you can read it here.
We have been live for about a month now, and have started growing in Delhi, as well as Bangalore. However, we are still not seeing any growth in the transactions rate. Even today we are seeing an average of 2 transactions a day.
The problem from what we see is that consumers are not aware that the merchant they are buying from, now supports card on delivery as a payment mode.
We have tried running Facebook ads and Google ads specifically targeted to keywords related to the merchants, but we are not seeing any significant ROI from these. We have also given pamphlets to merchants that they are giving away with the orders, but that also isn’t helping us much, since the customers who get the order, are not coming back any time soon.
The major challenge we have is that we can’t reach out to consumers, since we have no touch point with them. Mass advertising could be done, but it doesn’t fit well in our limited financial budget.
User feedback has been great till date, and we have also had repeat transactions, but we are quite stuck with marketing strategies we can use. I thought asking on THRS will definitely bring some amazing ideas to us! Looking forward to hearing from you!
Vikas Gupta
Hi Amit,
Please visit: http://www.smejoinup.com/market. We have almost 25000+ businesses in our network. Share your direct number to discuss the possibilities.
Regards
Vikas Gupta
asha chaudhry
gosh vikas – that just sounded like an ad for smejoinup.com!
if you have some suggestions for amit – why don’t you share them right here? we would also get to learn from your insights!
Aswin Natarajan
Hi Amit,
You are right when you say pamphlets won’t a huge impact right now as customers are not coming back. I saw your website and from what I understand your target market are customers who do not want to use COD and shopkeepers who cannot afford / maintain a payment gateway.
I saw an interesting marketing ploy by a bean bag maker. Here is a detailed link : https://bombayjules.blogspot.in/2013/12/who-is-beanbag.html
Something of this sort, in a localized manner might work for you?
Cheers,
Aswin
Vikas Gupta
I apologies for that.
Leaving few blogs link on branding which might be useful for all the rodinhood members.
Regards
Vikas Gupta
Amit Kumar
Ashwin,
Amazing read! However, the problem we are facing is, what we are doing is not a colloquial term, causing it tough for us to make the consumer understand what is it that we are selling in a single line.
Plus the biggest problem is, people who are visiting us, are not customers of our customers. So they have absolutely no use of our service as of now.
Our merchants have told us that a lot of their customers ask for card payments, however, since none of them know that these merchants now accept cards, they are not going for it.
Aswin Natarajan
Hi Amit,
I noticed that your website does not have videos that explain your concept. Have you tried putting up some videos that explain your concept? Try : https://www.powtoon.com/. I agree it is tough to explain your brand in a single line, but visuals in a regional / colloquial language might help.
If your budget permits, can you co-brand your brand on the plastic carry-bags the merchant uses? You can put a small generic message that the merchant accepts cards now and a QR code on the plastic carry-bags so people can download your app.
Cheers,
Aswin