How AI-led Personalization resulted in a 70% increase in click-through rates for the automobile platform
Banwari Lal Sharma, CEO of India’s largest online automobile portal CarWale, talks to Research NXT about his journey, from a software engineer to a marketer, to now leading CarWale as chief executive. He explains why CarWale is a company built on technology, and how marketing technology has helped them stay lean and improved performance, both on the supply side and the demand side. Banwari shares how AI-driven marketing has led to significant success stories for CarWale and also gives his views on digital transformation, the state of the auto sector, and the post-pandemic scenario.
I keep telling my team: What worked in my favour was sticking around with the right kind of folks and putting learning before growth.
Research NXT: I would like to start with your journey: you started as a software engineer at CarWale, and today as the CEO, that’s an amazing journey of 16 years. I’d like you to walk us through your journey into the organization – what you’ve done so far, and what your current role involves.
Banwari: I am an engineer from a private college in Bhopal. CarWale back then used to be a software development company. I got an opportunity for a project here during my seventh semester, the final year of my engineering. The entire exposure since that day, including the kind of people we worked with, the challenges we have faced, have all been a great learning experience.
It was a small organization, but the learning was tremendous. Somehow, I got lucky that the entire learning perspective, putting knowledge before everything else, actually worked for me. I keep telling my team: What worked in my favor was sticking around with the right kind of folks and putting learning before growth. Ultimately, if you’re learning, you’re enjoying, and growth will come eventually.
A couple of years into the job, we founded CarWale and we realized that someone needed to do content. At CarWale, we give a lot of gyaan (information) on which car to buy, how to buy, and so on – so a high amount of content focus was needed. I had some inclination towards automobiles, so I started working on content.
Then in 2008, when we had worked with an agency for an SEM account and they faltered big time. I was offered a small trial role saying – let’s try for a couple of months and see what works. So we tried it, and I got that opportunity, so marketing got added to my profile, and it became more like a product and marketing kind of role.
Back then, product management was not even a phenomenon in this country. The product manager was not a role per-se, but you’re doing what is supposed to be done, i.e., putting up a page online quickly and understanding what consumers want. Understanding how it can be grown, managing SEO / SEM, cost optimization, and all of that.
Then eventually, there were structural changes in the organization when we merged with CarTrade. The then CEO of CarWale moved on, the position was vacant, and I was given the opportunity. Today, as CEO, my role is to ensure that the organization grows, the people are happy, and we continue to build our culture, the way we always did.
This is predominantly our core strength. The majority of the management team is from a software background, so it comes naturally to us. Everything to us is tech first.
Research NXT: What’s the role of technology in driving the growth of CarWale, and how important is the deployment of marketing technology at your end?
Banwari: The first part of the question is straightforward: In my view, we are built on technology as a company. Out of the 500 employees in the company, there would be about 170-180 folks on product development or some part of the technology side, be it machine learning, or content building, data science, and so on. That says it all. This is predominantly our core strength. The majority of the management team has a fair amount of exposure to technology, so it comes naturally to us. To us everything is a technology first.
The world is struggling with COVID-19 right now, and everybody’s cutting costs, figuring out how to survive. But we’re not an organization that is going through any kind of churn. We haven’t issued a single pick slip. This all comes from a simple fact that we’ve been an organization that always put technology first, and that has helped us in a way.
We have always tried to be frugal. Whenever there is an opportunity to see where people or technology can solve a problem, we put technology first. Thus we have stayed very lean, and this lean organizational approach combined with a technology-first approach has helped us sail through this, or any other problems. We’ve been profitable for more than two years. We are one of the few companies in the country in the online-automobile sector making real profits, month on month.
The second thing which you asked about is, how does marketing technology help. I’ll talk about our traffic here. See, our business is publishing, as well as generating leads. So, it’s very important that when we create traffic and generate leads and the more organic traffic we get, the lower are our costs.
CarWale traffic is getting about 30-33 million sessions every month and out of that, 70-75% on any given day is organic – either direct or Google search/research, or referral, but we don’t pay for it. We pay for the remaining 30% through Google search marketing or Facebook Ads, and few other meaningful marketing channels, and I’ll talk about that later.
But as I said, the cost is extremely important. Through our in-house tools, approaches, measurability, the use of the right KPIs, we would be one of the cheapest search marketing accounts in the country of our size. This means we are generating traffic from search marketing at a very nominal cost, which again helps us keeps costs down. It doesn’t happen in a day, but for sure marketing technology has helped us over a period of time.
But I can tell you that we don’t do too much marketing. If you’re not a car buyer, we will probably not try to lure you into our ecosystem. Keeping that in mind, when you are looking at 30-33 million visitor sessions every month, and considering we sell about three lakh cars in our country, I think the majority of all India d even marketing, which predominantly for us is search marketing. To optimize costs and stay frugal – we use tons of in-house tools. n car buyers are on our portal at some point in their car-buying journey.
So, yes, technology plays a big role in general, and even marketing, which predominantly for us is search marketing. To optimize costs and stay frugal – we use tons of in-house tools.
Then we changed that to AI-based personalization. Our click-through rate on that particular section went up by 70 percent!.
Research NXT: You mentioned how you want to focus only on the intent base. So, how are you utilizing personalization? Is there any AI-driven marketing, considering you are operating on a very large scale?
Banwari: While the traffic is substantial, we are not a company like Amazon or Facebook, where you need to have some kind of stickiness, and people hang around with you for a long time. From the 30-33 million visits that we get every month, typically a user visits the site 2.2 times.
You can create a cohort, and you’ll know that there are a certain number of people who come to you every day – maybe three times a day – but they’re not the majority. When you have 2.2 visits to a user, it means that people come to you once, they come the second time, and they’re kind of done. They’ve taken a decision; they’ve understood what they want to buy.
However, we’ve had successes around AI-led personalization, which I can tell you about. We have a team in-house doing machine learning and using AI kind of approach for about four years now. There is lots of investment we have done there, and I’ll tell you a couple of use cases that were successful.
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