S3
Episode 1
Winning E-commerce With Programmatic Campaigns
About This Episode
Discover the latest e-commerce trends and find out how digital marketers can leverage programmatic advertising for their e-commerce campaigns.
Praveen Victor | Head of Growth, Clutch
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
It’s high time, marketers should think about adapting to a full-funnel strategy because focusing on a low-funnel or mid-funnel silos are not going to help anyone to accelerate their growth. Keep all your top-of-funnel investment more addressable, create a shareable KPI between teams, work on your media mix, model and create focus groups within your team.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:25)
But then you think about the social landscape, the research and data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touchpoints. So that long-term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales,gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting and really is what’s going to set you apart if you’re tuning in, you’re tuning into the How Agencies Thrive podcast.
Matt (00:00:49)
A lot has changed post-pandemic in that light marketers have had to adopt new strategies to keep up with the changing digital landscape. Now the world has progressed so has advertising. Today we’re exploring how agencies and brands can thrive in the post-pandemic world. We’re joined by leaders in the industry to discuss the ways in which the digital marketing landscape has evolved the disruption that’s been brought on by seemingly irreversible changes to the advertising industry, and what digital marketers can expect moving forwards. In this episode, we have Praveen from Clutch and he brings in years of experience in the digital marketing space with a focus on e-commerce. The most exciting part about this episode is the inside scoop that we’re going to get by looking at the impact and growth that’s been possible with the inclusion of programmatic is a critical part of their digital marketing strategy. As always, thank you for tuning in and enjoy this episode of How Agencies Thrive podcast. So welcome, Praveen. Great to have you on the episode, as we always like to do, we want to pass it over to our guests to tell us a little bit about themselves. So in your case, tell us a little bit about Clutch your experience in the industry and some areas of expertise that you have.
Praveen (00:01:58)
Thank you, Matt. I’m head of growth and performance for Clutch. I’ve been in the industry for almost 15 years, primarily working on the e-commerce space in the last six to seven years. And Clutch, I joined Clutch around January of this year, it’s about six months, six amazing months, I would say Clutch is the first and largest online car retailer with 1000s of quality pre-owned vehicles available to be purchased online and delivered directly to your door. And we also like you know, kind of change the way how people buy cars, and sell their cars in Canada. So super excited to be a representative of Clutch, and really tells a great story about like, you know, how we are completely the disruptor in the industry, which Clutch has been pretty stagnant for years.
Matt (00:02:48)
Awesome. Well, it’s great to have you on this episode. And, as we were chatting before, what we’re going to do is we have about four main questions that we’re going to cover, and halfway through, we’ll take a quick break, and then finish out strong with some trends and strategies that advertisers and brands can be using. So to start out, I wanted to know, you know, and you can go as broad as you’d like to on this. Let’s talk about some trends in the last year that you’ve noticed in the e-commerce automotive space.
Praveen (00:03:16)
Yeah, I think like, you know, one of the biggest change, I’ve seen as people start to adapt to the concept of buying a car online, as like any other e-commerce business, like, we need to have a study on mindset and understanding around how someone can buy some of a big bucket items online. For example, when Amazon was launched, like, people, I don’t know, like how people perceive that as part of the concept of buying things online. I think that’s the same story happened in the automotive industry as well. But that has changed quite a lot over the last 12 months, I would say, especially like Canada, US audiences like to adapt to it like pretty quickly. But for Canadian market, like it’s fairly a new concept, the more and more credibility we have created over the last 12 months. I think like people’s consumption around like, you know, buying a car online kind of changed. And there is going to be an onward and upward journey going forward.
Matt (00:04:18)
And I’ll throw you a bit of an audible here. I guess from the consumer perspective, is this something that you’ve noticed that consumers have actually liked and found that it makes it a little bit easier compared to, you know, your traditional process of going into a dealership or going into like a used automotive car lot? Like is this something that consumers have been pretty warm to or is there still kind of that competition of the brick-and-mortar retail experience for buying cars?
Praveen (00:04:48)
Yeah, 100% I mean, like in a recent study, which we conducted, more than 76% of people said they prefer spending less time visting dealership to find the right car and from a brand perspective, like, you know, we ensure Clutch ensure a complete peace of mind for each car buying, we offer them like a 10-day money back guarantee, we also offer comprehensive warranty coverage. So I mean, like, you know, the more and more assurance and more and more customer obsessive service, we started giving, I think like, I think that number is keep on growing. One good example is like, if you check our customer rating on some of those revenue review platforms, we always get like more than 4.5. And we have more than like, you know, 1000s of reviews online as well. So it adds a lot of credibility to the service we are offering. And it’s yeah, as I said, like it’s onward and upward joining from now on.
Matt (00:05:47)
Yeah, that’s great to hear. And one final question I had on this was, you know, we’ve looked at, especially on the programmatic side, we’ve looked at how, how the pandemic impacted kind of online industry, you know, how e-commerce platforms seem to develop and how the pandemic was almost a blessing for a lot of businesses. And it seems like online, purchasing a vehicle would have been something that benefited greatly from the pandemic, because people didn’t have the luxury of going into a dealership like they traditionally did. So it’s, well, if you need a car, you have to figure out a way to get one in a way that at the time was going to be very safe. And it was going to be reliable. So is this something that Clutch, you know, really benefited from? I know, you said that you joined Clutch in, you know, just the last six months, but kind of going back candidate before your time, was this something that they’ve benefited from a lot?
Praveen (00:06:44)
Absolutely. I mean, like in a world where inventory demand are super high. And availabilities are super low, I think like that whole persona around, you know, where am I gonna get my car, like, you know, I’m in need of a bigger car for my family, like all those important decision-making steps. I think like, it is critical for us to be there. Whenever people think about the next big purchase, apparently, it’s a second biggest purchase in, in Canada, right, like, so, I think, in this post-pandemic, or, yeah, in the post-pandemic world, it is important, we make a brand we are making, you know, we are improving lives and earning trust by delivering the driving needs of our customer in a greater scale. One good example is like we are almost serving all of the provinces in Canada, except Manitoba right now. And we are planning to expand it to almost like 90% of Canadians by 2023. So it’s a testament of how futuristic we are thinking about this industry, and the opportunity in this industry is like, quite large.
Matt (00:07:56)
Awesome. That’s really great to hear. What we’ll do now is it shift gears a little bit more because you know, as we all know, StackAdapt is a programmatic DSP want to talk a little bit about how you’ve leveraged programmatic and how it’s benefited, you know, building awareness and driving conversions for Clutch. So, you know, with respect to to measurement, what has your experience been with, with programmatic as opposed to, you know, a traditional social media strategy that a lot of brands were running before?
Praveen (00:08:30)
It’s always tough to attribute to full-funnel model, especially like you know, if you’re starting investing around a lot of brand activities, like it’s always a tougher attribution to achieve so, I think like what StackAdapt brought into our table this year especially is it creates addressable top-of-funnel media investment for us like we started leveraging some of those, you know, really strong conversion and cross channel, and cross-device conversion paths to identify some of our early stage customers who are still in awareness and consideration stage and leveraged StackAdapt, you know, different type of tactics and strategy to target them throughout the different stages of the funnel. And it also helps us to, you know, move them away from an awareness stage into like a consideration and all the way down to purchase decision stage and the biggest success for us is we will be able to measure all of this within the platform. So number one addressable top-of-funnel, media investment and number two is like the shareable KPI and also the number three years It also allows us to create a media mix model where we can tap into this user cohorts in whatever journey they are and whichever stages they are.
Matt (00:09:52)
And I am curious though, with automotive, is I would assume the sales cycle is actually pretty long. So it’s important to continue to engage with customers at every single stage. Is that fair to say? Is that something that you guys have experienced? Because you did say, you know, it is the I’ve heard that too, that it’s one of the second biggest purchase decisions that people make. I think the first biggest is probably their house. But you know, it’s not like people are just going and picking a car off of Amazon and having it shipped to you the next day. It’s something you have to research and make sure you’re making the right decision for your needs.
Praveen (00:10:32)
Yeah, absolutely. But you will be surprised to see, you know, the purchase cycle is a vastly different depends on individual user persona and user cohorts. For someone who are in market for car generally, like they start the research process about like two to three months before they making their purchase decision. But some also make some immediate, trigger-based decisions. For example, let’s say if you’re moving away from from downtown, you’re moving into suburb, and then you realize, like, you need a car, or let’s say, like, you know, you’re about to have a baby, and you realize, like, you need a bigger car. So those are like, you know, lifestyle, and life changes even, which also triggers a lot of car purchases. So for those users like that’s ideally like a shorter purchase window for someone who is passively looking, I think it’s important for us to be omnipresent wherever they are, like whether they are in market right now, or whether they will be in market in the next six months. So I think that having a full-funnel programmatic strategy allows us to be in that space and effectively, like communicate and engage with those user cohorts throughout their journey.
Matt (00:11:50)
Perfect. And we had a second part to this question, it was more around, you know, how advertisers and brands can find success in their media mix, it seems like, you know, Clutch is using a lot of programmatic, but for someone that is, you know, traditionally using social and they’re trying to kind of transition into the programmatic space, or even mix the two and reach different personas and different platforms, is there any kind of secret to success or any best practices that you found doing this?
Praveen (00:12:22)
I think like you can measure this in two different ways. Like, one is through the platform and the tools available through those platforms. The other way is using some internal data to really like up our media mix model analysis, we actually tried it both ways, like one is through the internal studies, like you know, Brand Lift, measurement, social measurement, and any organic or direct growth left. So that’s like number one, which we internally run. But we also work with external party to really understand what is the impact of those, you know, full-funnel-modeling and full-funnel activation? One good example is, we also try to understand what is audience propensity scoring, and what is the incrementality multiplier for each and every cohort, which really helps us to understand how impactful it is and what is the point of diminishing return for us, if frequencies is a big priority for us in some of those campaigns. This also helps us to be more efficient, like when we spend this marketing dollar, in the different parts of the funnel.
Matt (00:13:34)
Perfect. And in this half of the episode, what we’re going to be doing is talking about how to connect the dots in a full-funnel strategy and look at some best practices for creating a really solid customer journey online. Additionally, what we’re going to talk about is the future of the automotive vertical, the future of e-commerce and what trends some advertisers should be looking out for. So Praveen, what we’ll do here is start with a question, you know, to a marketer who’s listening to this? How would you recommend that they connect the dots from the upper funnel to the lower funnel using various digital marketing strategies?
Praveen (00:14:11)
Yeah, I think like there are, I would rank four areas of focus if you really, really like to connect the dots, from top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel. One is like I think like all marketers, we all agree that marketing funnels are not linear, right? Like it’s not linear anymore. Could be linear back in the 1980s 1990s. But marketing funnels are not linear anymore. It’s a messy mix. So it constantly urges all the marketers to be omnipresent, and in each stages of the funnel, so I would rank a top four area of focus if you’re really really looking forward and measure success in a full funnel model. One is like you know, create an addressable top-of-funnel media investment, right like, there are like a lot of digital solutions like CTV, audio, which now we are able to measure impact on it even on like a transactional metrics, right? So try to create that addressable top-of-funnel media investment, and also create a shareable KPIs. You know, a lot of these companies like brand team and performance team always work in a different functionality, but creating a common shareable KPI between those two teams like, you know, really helped you to navigate through all those hurdles in between, especially on the measurement side. And really understand and try to plan your media mix model like why it’s important to create that media mix model and, and what are those user cohorts you’re targeting in each channel through each stages of the funnel, which will again help you to understand audience propensity scoring, and also like any incrementality, multivariable will be able to measure as well. And the last one is like operating model, I think like, cross-functionality. And cross-functional collaboration is like always a key and this especially like, you know, if we are tracking some of those measurements, studies, lift studies, or even, you know, like improvements studies, it’s very important that you constantly collaborate with your product engineering team, because the cross-functional team collaboration is like, really, really important. Even like, you know, to some extent, if you can create a focus group, it would be also helpful for the team to start addressing all this measurement and analysis back into the company or back into the owners.
Matt (00:16:33)
Awesome. And to tailor this question, I’m also interested to know, you know, what are some best practices for creating a really solid customer journey? You know, how can we build more trust? How can we make consumers more comfortable during that purchase process, especially when it comes to a vehicle?
Praveen (00:16:55)
Identifying those customer personas is like the number one part like, you know, we need to have absolute understanding around who’s our customer who’s our target audience and where they live, what kind of platform they engage, what’s their go-to place if they are in a research mode. So understanding that is like the first thing, and identifying, you know, the budget allocation for each stage, and how important is for you to achieve your, let’s say, in-period goal versus like long-term goal, having a solid balance between achieving your period in-month target, but also trying to build and nurture long-term, like long-term cohorts for your business is also important key metrics. Because the end of the day, like if you’re too focused on low-funnel and your in-period target, then you’re missing out targeting users who you might be easily convert in the next two months, or next three months. So always try to have a balance between those two. But again, I think, the end of the day, like having a solid understanding of our core audience will really guide us to pick the right channel. And that will open up you know how efficient we can scale and gain efficiency and maturity across all those platforms and channels as well.
Matt (00:18:12)
So getting to the last question here, Praveen, I’m interested to know what the future of the automotive verticals going to look like and the future of the e-commerce vertical. And what trends advertisers should be looking out for and paying attention to as we head into the latter portion of 2022 and into 2023?
Praveen (00:18:35)
In a world where you can order food at a click of a button or watch pretty much anything you want from your phone. There are a lot of people who are still haggling over price and pouring through the mountains of paperwork to buy a car what Clutch is doing right now is like we are just simply modernizing the car buying process and giving Canadians a better way to buy cars. So I think like this trend will continue and evolve and grow into a real disruptor in the auto industry market. Once you try one of our service, you will be surprised and will be a partner. To be honest, a lot of our customers who bought through Clutch, there’s a huge word-of-mouth, and they shared their experience with their friends and families. And that’s how like, you know, the popularity of our brand kept on growing and growing. So it adds a lot of trust and credibility to who we are and what we do right now. It’s high time marketers should think about adapting to a full-funnel strategy because focusing on a low-funnel or mid-funnel silos are not going to help anyone to accelerate their growth. Like if you are looking to grow your business. You know, year over year, I think marketers has to adapt to a full funnel strategy. And all those more full-funnel strategy has to have the four pillars I mentioned in your previous question like you know, again, I’m repeating it but it’s very, very important like, as a market as we have to think through this one as, again, keep all your top-of-funnel investment more addressable, create a shareable KPI between teams, work on your media mix model, and create focus groups within your team. If one team focused on media buying the other team always constantly run rigorous experiments around those channels. So those are the four things I would again, reiterate people should think about. When they think about like, what’s the future of e-commerce in the space.
Matt (00:20:35)
Just want to give you a quick thank you for joining us on the episode. We appreciate your insight on all the questions and to all of our listeners who are in the automotive space and in the e-commerce space. We hope that you took as much away from this episode as I did. And until then, this has been How Agencies Thrive podcast and we wish you the best of luck.
Episode Outro (00:20:57)
Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you liked what you heard, then there are three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can find us at stackadapt.com Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
