2. About me
• Seasoned product management and product marketing executive
– Chief Product Officer of IndiaHomes.com
– Director of Product Management at Coupons.com
– Executive at MSN/Microsoft
• Experience
– across domains (email, content, coupons, retail, e-commerce, real estate and
maps & traffic)
– across product types (consumer, enterprise, mobile, social & platform)
– across functions (engineering, product management and online marketing)
– across levels (individual contributor, manager, director & VP/CXO).
• Angel Investor and Mentor at 500 Startups
• MBA from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
3. Online Marketing
• Customer Acquisition
– Via product features
– SEO
– SEM
• Customer Retention
– Via product features
– Email Marketing
4. Disclaimer
• If a company is good at using one particular
strategy/tactic, it doesn’t mean that they are
doing well in all aspects.
• The user experience of the company might
have changed since the time this presentation
was created.
• I have advised or worked at most of these
companies at some point of time, so there will
be a personal bias.
5. Customer Acquisition (via product features)
• Phenomenal first time experience
– Do you give your users enough reasons to sign up
with you at least as a free user?
– e.g. Roomations, TheStyleUp, etc
• If you have a platform, what are your killer
apps?
– Wildfire interactive
6. Customer Acquisition (via product features)
• Phenomenal return user experience
– Online-offline combination
– e.g. Coupons.com, IndiaHomes, etc
• Sign in experience
– e.g. Linkedin
7. Customer Acquisition (via product features)
• How do you enable your existing users to
touch non-users?
– Hotmail signature
– Facebook photo sharing
– Linkedin vanity URL
• Note that it is not the same as “virality”.
9. Customer Acquisition (SEM)
• Intent-based vs. Demand-Gen
• Law of diminishing returns
• Online-offline combination
– Indiahomes, MightyNest, etc
10. Customer Acquisition (SEM)
• Optimize for the right metric
– Leads vs. Qualified Leads
• e.g. IndiaHomes
– What may seem intuitive may not be right.
• e.g. an e-commerce site could be selling few products
with little/no margins. (Tushky, IndiaHomes)
• Lifetime value of a customer
11. Customer Acquisition (Paid)
• Affiliate Marketing
– Cost Per Acquisition
– Infinitely scalable
– e.g. Adsense, Brandcaster, etc
12. Customer Retention (via product features)
• Where all are you touching your existing
users?
– Mobile (e.g. LinkedIn signout experience)
– Facebook, etc
– Affiliate program
– Toolbar
13. Customer Retention (Email Marketing)
• How often are you touching your existing
users? Can you provide them with something
of value "n" times a week? Bigger the "n",
better it is.
– Thestyleup
– Groupon daily deal newsletter
– LinkedIn emails
• Latest in Email Marketing
– SimpleRelevance
14. Final Words
• Focus on value before you focus on growth.
– Learn from the retail distribution world
• Real metrics vs. Vanity metrics
– Sverve, Resume, etc
• Experiment as frequently as possible.
• Product and marketing go hand-in-hand. Your
experiments may not be very meaningful if
you don't iterate on the product constantly.
