About Jabong.com
Jabong.com is an Indian fashion and lifestyle e-commerce portal.The company is headquartered in Gurgaon, NCR which started it;s operations in January 2012.
The e-estore carries over 1000 brands and over 90,000 products which includes clothes,apparels,accessories, jewelleries,furnishings,designer apparels etc., for both men and women as well as kids.
The company’s co-founder Praveen Sinha with his colleagues Manu Kumar Jain, Arun Chandra Mohan, Mukul Bafana work together as team with a common and well defined goal backed by self motivated strategic planning.
Jabong Business Objectives
The e-commerce portal Jabong which is the brainchild of Arun Chandra Mohan, Lakshmi Potluri and Pravin Sinha was started with the focus to offer lifestyle and fashionable products to the customers at the lowest possible price in the form of deals and discounts. Their bigger objective was to win customer’s mindshare by giving them a new experience of window shopping with zero leg work, even delivering a wide range of products at the shortest span of time at a price unmatchable by local retailers.
Strategy Adopted by Jabong
The business model of Jabong follows both the inventory model and a controlled market model. While products are sourced from the various brands and stored in the Jabong warehouse in the inventory model, Jabong doesn’t store the inventory but takes care of fulfillment.customer service, returns etc., in the controlled market model. Jabong’s logistics operations launched a separate service independent of Jabong in the name of Javas, which covered around 50-55 cities catering majorly to e-commerce firms.
Jabong.com launched in early 2012 dedicated 90% of the company’s budgets towards digital marketing and rest 10% in Tv and other ATL/BTL promotions. Currently it is using digital media to enhance the transactions and revenues and social media to increase engagement. Offline media are engaged to generate awareness in small towns and cities.
In it’s journey towards acquiring the brand recall which Jabong has today it encountered various challenges and weaknesses in the system and at the same time was encouraged by market opportunities and strengths.
While other online players like Myntra,Flipkart,Fashion and You were strong competitors leveraging the same platform to expand into apparel market and many brands and retailers had a strong distribution network, Jabong was fighting with inadequate infrastructure,lack of common taxation rules and customer’s mindset still inclined towards the touch and feel system. These shortcomings were overpowered by Jabong’s widest range of products from the best of brands mostly that are not available offline in many parts of the country,their innovative features like express delivery, 30 days return policy and open box delivery giving a better customer experience. The also indulged in fashion curation and differentiated themselves from their competitors. They strongly leveraged the youth potential in India with discretionary spending through an effective digital marketing strategy and successfully exploited India’s fast growing internet traffic which is now expected to have 348 million users by 2017.
- Digital Platforms Exploited by Jabong as Marketing Strategy
Jabong initiated the distribution of shopping worth Rs 2500 to users for first sign up on their site on digital platform.
Jabong used affiliate marketing to enhance it’s marketing reach and ran cost per sale(CPS) campaigns with many affiliate networks in India like Amazon.com, msn.com,Pinterest.com, etc.The payout to the affiliates was up to 10% of any sale, the payment being made on the basis of Final Validation Report and within 60 days of activity month.
In order to retain its members and make them visit their site time and again, Jabong ensured regular personalised touch with them through email marketing by sending promotional offers and vouchers etc for sale hyperlinking their site to engage their audience to a direct click.
Jabong also engaged in display advertising on sites like Flipkart.com,google.co.in etc., getting 35.37% of their traffic from this activity.
Jabong got 2.43% of it’s traffic from social media sites like Facebook,Youtube,Twitter,LinkedIn, Pinterest with a whopping 89.53% from facebook alone and a commendable figure of 37.36 lakh likes on Fb and 166K followers on twitter. They publish 10-12 updates a day and almost all of them are self promotional yet perfectly engaging their target audience.
They had quite strategically captured the emotional pulse of Indian customers and launched their campaign “BeYou” to ensure loyalty with their target audience by identifying their brand with the emotions of Indian customers. ” Be You” stands for originality,self motivation and confidence and this is how they pampered their customer’s choice and ensured whatever they liked was never out of fashion, bringing in confidence in buying and supreme brand loyalty.
If we tap the recent pre-Holi facebook promotion of Jabong in 2016, it is again clear that they engaged their customers by leveraging on emotional and personal stuffs with the campaigns like #JabongColorBomb contest where target audiences were invited to upload their Holi selfies on facebook tagging #JabongColorBomb to win big !!
Even the facebook promotion of “I like this.Do you Think I should buy it?” is a marvellous way to ensure customer engagement and cross promotion through mutual friends. This should definitely show spikes on Jabong’s facebook traffic during this promotional period. Both these promotions must have been done through Facebook Ad to enhance visibility and traffic.
Going back to their initial days, Jabong launched their first Tv campaign in March 2012 and another similar one was launched in Sep 2012 with a new tagline ” Fashion Nikla Mann Fisla”. But they made a soft launch of this video first on digital platform with a teaser and got immense response and spikes on likes, shares and other engagements.
In Nov 2013, Jabong together with Puma launched the digital fitness campaign “Gear Up Buddy” with Bollywood actress Chitrangada Singh. The association with Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone in Bollywood movie ” Yeh Jawani Hain Deewani” also gave a strong uplift to the brand Jabong.
Throughout its journey Jabong has a fantastic engagement rate with more than 60% on Facebook page with topical posts leveraging on festivals and occasions, posts with related current affairs and talk of the town etc.,co-partnering with big brands like Lakme Fashion Week for the consecutive four seasons and with designer Rohit Bal for an exclusive collection. Currently they are also running a special category for India’s topmost designers which has made the brand not only popular with the mass but also win the hearts of the brand conscious chic and sophisticated high profile TG.
Another very interesting thing about Jabong is that its page takes hardly 1.608 secs to load whereas 51% of other sites are slower than this.
Even on Twitter, Jabong has used the platform very appropriately to address customer queries and most of their communications end with a pleasant note . While they also cross promote their Facebook posts on Twitter, the content mix has earned them satisfaction among customers , thus once again winning loyalty for the brand.
However, Jabong has not been too successful in optimizing the youtube platform to the fullest as its posts seem to be quite random and insufficient compared to other e-portals. The reason could be the huge production cost involved in making quality YouTube videos as per their standards on other platforms but once they can optimize YouTube their customer engagement should increase in many folds as similar sites have a subscription base of 18K(Myntra) to 83K (Amazon) while Jabong has only 8K subscribers.
Jabong, along with Paytm and Hotstar have signed deals with manufacturers like Micromax, Intex, Spice , Microsoft and Karbonn for getting them embedded on smartphones. According to Praveen Sinha, when an app is embedded on a phone, the probability of using the app increase and hence such tie-ups make a lot of sense. Jabong’s transactions through smartphones have increased to about 50% from 5% about 2 years ago. Smartphones sales grow about 51% in every 3 months, therefore the mobile commerce market is likely to grow 55% to $19billion by 2019 from $2billion now according to a study by Zinnov. Hence, this move by Jabong is sure to bring good returns soon.
Results Achieved by Jabong
(Source:Similar web, Freewebsite Report)
- Jabong site ranks 34 in India compared to other sites and commands a Google page rank of 5/10.
- It has a daily page view of 3 million hits.
- The total estimated website traffic net worth is $6.7 million USD.
- Jabong gets 13.5% of it’s traffic from organic searches, 14.67% from paid searches and around 35.3% from display ads.
- Jabong reported the highest MOM growth of nearly 35% in its net revenue for Jan’16 (Source: DNA)
- Jade eServices Ltd which runs Jabong in India registered the highest ever growth statistics with an additional growth of 20% in the Jabong app.
- Jabong’s new CEO and MD Sanjeev Mohanty commented that they touched $66 million GMV in January 2016 positioning them as the largest fashion e-commerce company in India with a robust growth of 56% in their gross orders and 59% in gross items.
- Filings submitted with the Registrar of Companies show that Jabong’s growth in 2014-15 was 98% which is nearly 20% more than their closest rival, while Jabong’s losses had shrunk to 40% lesser than theirs comparatively.
Learning
There are quite a few meaningful and strong learnings that can be derived from Jabong’s digital marketing strategy.
- Since each network has specific advantages and disadvantages, a company should select the most suitable network based on the nature, requirements of business and target audience.
- It is always best to start promotion as early as possible though anytime is the best time. Starting early helps customers know the brand from the scratch and win confidence in a slow and steady manner while being a part of the brand’s journey.
- Facebook News Feed is the best place to showcase content. One can increase brand awareness, drive traffic and bring in new customers by posting informative and inspiring content which is relevant to the brand and suited to the emotions of the target audience. Each content should be tailored to the general interests of the customers.
- Twitter is the best medium for customer service and business development. Since, the TAT for customer resolution is less, you end up converting irate customers to happy and loyal customers. Most customers are satisfied once their query is addressed and can wait for even a day for resolution and here’s where Twitter comes into play by building the trust of immediate contact.
- Creation of engaging content with videos, infographics etc is important and posting them on multiple networks simultaneously to enhance engagement is sure to bring in positive results in your digital marketing efforts.
- Optimization of all the social media sites are equally important to capture subscribers , followers etc.,with different interests and mindsets.
- Use of paid Ads is also an important tool to leverage on occasions and festivals and get the maximum mileage in terms of visibility, shares, comments and other engagements.
- Upto 80% of the customers are influenced by online reviews and comments of the consumers and go directly on various social media sites to search for advice and opinion of the product or service before making a decision to purchase. Therefore, utilising social media as search channel pays out heavily in gaining new leads and customers.
- Email marketing is an important tool to stay in touch with new leads and existing customers thus making a channel for regular promotion of offers, discounts and newsletters to keep loyal customers always informed about your products and services.
- It is always wise to map your customers gender, age, choice of interest etc., to tailor your content for better engagement.
- Affiliate marketing also helps in boosting the sale of products and services by tapping the untapped potential customers who crawl on similar sites.
- Co-partnering with big brands and celebrities and promoting the association heavily helps in generating better customer delight.
- Engaging the maximum budget in digital marketing than the traditional marketing mediums like TV, OOH etc., can bring better reach which is well mapped and identified to even target future promotions. Moreover, it is also cost effective in many ways and even smaller firms with minimum marketing budget can utilize and encash the beauty of digital promotion.
- Finally, it’s important to keep the research on and look out for fresher mediums of promotion on digital platform as new techniques and possibilities are opening each day and one needs to optimize all of them for a 360 degree promotional success.
Image Credits: Jabong
