Any ecommerce service provider spend large sums of money driving traffic to their website. Yet, a vast majority of site visitors drop off without buying their product or service. It is important for the ecommerce companies to understand the customer online cues and try to get them back. This is where Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) comes in. Vizury is one of the leaders in this market. We talk to Mr.Vikram who patiently takes us through a lot of things about VRM and Vizury. Have pleasure reading!
What is visitor relationship management and why is it so important for today’s ecommerce websites?
Just as businesses use CRM data in the offline world to engage their prospects and customers through their lifecycle (prospect – customer – repeat customer), Vizury Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) empowers online businesses engage with their audience in 1-1 manner throughout the purchase lifecycle spanning awareness through loyalty.
It is important for eCommerce websites for the following reason. Online businesses spend large amounts of money driving traffic to their sites. However, a majority of these site visitors drop off without engaging the brand or performing a desired action (buy, register, subscribe, fill a form etc.) resulting in budget leak. Vizury VRM helps re-engage visitors that drop off the site with highly personalized display ads generated in real-time, thereby improving brand recall, encouraging conversions and helping companies realize better ROI on their Adspend. Vizury allows businesses to tailor ads with specific messages based on the stage of the purchase lifecycle facilitating strategic engagement for long term gains.
Built on a proprietary digital advertising platform, VRM is being widely used by Industry leaders such as Expedia, Webjet, Jet Airways, Jabong, Souq, Virgin Australia, Netshoes, Viajanet, Rakuten, Yintai, Tidebuy globally to name a few. With VRM, customers have seen upto ‘6x’ increase in CTRs and ‘3x-5x’ increase in conversions compared to traditional marketing methods.
Please tell our readers how Vizury’s VRM product helps website owners to drive the traffic back to their website? How does it achieve retargeting?
Vizury’s proprietary digital advertising platform solves this problem. The platform captures data pertaining to an individual visitor (based on his/her behavior on the site), analyzes it and draws meaningful insights. These data insights are inturn used to generate ads customized to the individual in real-time that combine dynamic elements such as appropriate offers, live prices and specific messages to re-engage visitors after they have left the site as shown below.
Therefore, the value lies in Vizury’s structured, data driven approach to delivering ads in real-time, for better ROI compared to other traditional display marketing campaigns. This is made possible using Vizury’s digital advertising platform which constitutes a Digital Data management system, Real-time bidding engine and flexible targeting engine.
From the website, we gather that Vizury has several media partners. What is global ad inventory and tell us how Vizury performs RTB Integration with these Media Partners?
To deliver engaging Ads on the fly, ability to reach our target audience efficiently is critical. Vizury partners with the world’s largest Ad exchanges, Ad networks and in-region ad inventory partners including Google Adx, Microsoft advertising, Yahoo RightMediaExchange, AppNexus, Facebook Exchange(via Appnexus), Rubicon, Matomy Media etc. giving businesses unprecedented reach and access to their target audience.
When we do an RTB integration, our engineers work with tech folks from the corresponding exchange to get all the wires connected. Post this, for every ad impressions on the exchange, Vizury’s bidding engines (located across the globe) receive bid requests. Our bidding engines respond to these bid requests with what we want to pay for the ad impressions. All this happens in a matter of about 100ms. We make our decisions based on sophisticated machine learning algorithms which look at hundreds of variables before deciding the worth of the impressions to us. This helps us become extremely efficient when buying media for campaigns for our customers.
What is the pure performance model (CPA, CPC) Vizury provides it’s customers? How does it benefit them?
Vizury’s strong RoI focus or ‘Pay per Result’ business model offers customers a risk free way to scale their online business. We support both Cost per Click and Cost per Acquisition models. The benefit of this to customers is that it’s a risk free and customers pay us for the incremental revenue they make.
Can a customer surfing the website opt out of the behavioral retargeting that Vizury provides?
Yes, every ad we serve comes with an opt-out button (usually seen on the top right of the ad). Users can click on this link – which will take them to an opt-out page where they can sign out of Vizury ads. Sometimes, it may take a few days or ad units more before the user is signed out completely. But beyond that, users will not be retargeted anymore.
What are the underlying technologies used to develop Vizury’s VRM Platform?
Vizury’s VRM platform runs partly on the cloud (Amazon AWS) and partly on dedicated infrastructure. The cloud based architecture is fundamental to our business as it allows us to scale on demand.
Since we deal with Big Data, we also rely on technologies such as Hadoop, NoSQL, Hive as they deal with aspects such as storage of big data, retrieval, offline analytics to adhoc querying
Vizury has gone really global with operations in APAC & Americas. Please share the future plans.
Vizury is focused on high growth Internet markets in Asia, Oceania and Latin America. Our goal is to further strengthen our presence in our chosen markets and establish ourselves as leaders in the space.
Please tell us about the founders of Vizury. Background, and how this idea was shaped into forming a company.
Vizury was established in December 2008 by Chetan Kulkarni, Vikram Nayak and Gourav Chindlur. Prior to this they were all part of US based Trilogy. Chetan, CEO at Vizury is from IIM Lucknow. Vikram is the CTO at Vizury and is from IIT Mumbai while Gourav, COO & Head Products is from IIM Kozhikode.
Back then, the digital media industry in India was fairly nascent. Display media as a performance channel was just gaining prominence. Media buying was mostly manual. Adexchanges were making their presence felt with the introduction of bidding for media inventory (buying/selling).
At the same time, the online commerce industry was a sunrise industry and about a 1/3 of its current market size. Technologies that can help crunch large volumes of data such as Hadoop were just introduced.
We looked at e-commerce adoption, improvements in technology, emerging trends and the opportunity to improve performance of display advertising and decided to invest.
Online businesses already had access digital data related to their customers but drawing meaningful insights from large volumes of data and using it to deliver highly pertintent ads would be valuable for businesses. So, we went about building a proprietary digital advertising platform to address this need.
Any advise you’d like to give to people who are young & aspiring entrepreneurs?
Follow your dreams. Persevere and the results will come.
What do we think of Vizury?
As an eCommerce company, it is important to get as many customers as you can, and get them to buy from your website. From business perspective, Vizury will definitely help customers to find where their sales are getting lost in cracks. The company is also quite decent in allowing customers to opt out of retargeting. We think it’s a must have if you want to re target and get your customer back!
