The first edition of EngageMint was held on March 13, 2018, in Mumbai. It featured a specially curated session by Rahul Ganjoo, VP Product at Zomato which covered how the food app approaches the challenges of user engagement and retention to create a sustainable growth model. Zomato's remarkable journey from being a small Indian startup to becoming a leading global food aggregator is an inspiration. And this presentation will give you a glimpse into all the hard work, experiments and data science that went into making it big. You can watch the entire talk here: https://youtu.be/cMNLydI7pAs Or enjoy a detailed here: http://bit.ly/2LaJI4H

1. Presents
Skyrocketing Growth via Retention:
The Zomato Story

2. Rahul GanjooRahul Ganjoo
Why is Retention Important?
Retention is the answer to sustainable, powerful business growth.
It is the one metric to rule them all.
Acquisition
ViralityMonetization

3. Rahul GanjooRahul Ganjoo
There are 4 main reasons why:
• Increase in Competition
• Requires Long Term Outlook
• Rise of Monopolies [GAFA]
• Channel Fatigue
However, Retention is hard and only getting harder

4. Rahul GanjooRahul Ganjoo
• New Players Springing Up
• Users are spoilt for choice, FTU needs to have
a WoW factor
• Differentiation is becoming challenging
• Attention is scarcest commodity
Increase in Competition

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• Pressure to deliver short term growth
• Quick hacks to decrease revenue losses
• Exceptional planning and execution abilities
Long Term Outlook

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Long Term Outlook

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• SPAM SPAM SPAM
(>60% users opt out of push)
• Too Much Marketing Noise
• Difficult to Engage Users
• Messages lack context awareness
Channel Fatigue

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• Deep Pockets Go a Long Way
• Big 4 (GAFA) will continue to
move to adjacent growth
opportunities and gobble up
startups
Rise of Monopolies

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First Principles Product Thinking
Growth Team = Product Team
Customer first Approach
Retention/Growth Philosophy - Zomato

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• Best of insights sound the most obvious in hindsight
• Most successful growth engines out there are boringly
efficient
• Therefore: Discipline of doing simple things right over and
over again > silver bullets & hail marys
Key Things to Keep In Mind

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• Everything starts with the USER
• If it doesn’t make sense to you, don’t do it
• Be data-informed, not data-driven
First Principles Product Thinking

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• Growth/Retention can’t be outsourced
• You retain users by building a differentiated product experience
over time - it’s core product work
• Growth hacks are only effective in the short run
Growth Team = Product Team

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• Crafty advertising will quickly lose its charm
• Real Customer Value = Healthy Cohorts
• Differentiate your service offering for the user’s benefit
Customer Value is Paramount

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Products Focus Frequency
Classifieds
Search, Discovery,
Reviews/UGC, Likes, Follows
etc.
Weekly
Online Ordering
Repeat Orders, New User
Acquisition
Weekly
Zomato Gold
Renewals, Redemption Rate &
Depth, Merchants
3M, 12M
Different Products, Different Goals

15. Rahul Ganjoo
Transactio
ns
Retention
Monetisation
Through Transactions
Rahul Ganjoo
Growth Flywheel
Engagemen
t
Content
Traffic
Monetisation
Through Ads
High quality, exhaustive restaurant listing (using a
combination of tech and human output) yield large
organic traffic
Users engage with the platform to write reviews
and upload photos - further enriching our content
Traffic from search/ recommendations product
naturally drives transactions off-take
Users who transact on Zomato visit us more often
than users who don’t - further increasing traffic and
hence adding back to the first flywheel

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• Increasing Retention by increasing UGC cohort
Problem Statement
Lack of reward, validation or feedback for highly engaged users for
contributing content.
First Principle Product thinking - what are the user problems?
Classifieds: Increasing UGC
Tried various spray and pray methods, notification etc with no results

17. Rahul Ganjoo
Classifieds: Increasing UGC
Rahul Ganjoo
• Added rich profiles and a social layer
• Added city wide leaderboards to highlight highest reviewers
• Introduced foodie levels and expert badges to showcase
expertise
Solution

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• More content = More feedback/validation
• More content = More expertise/badges
• It also fuelled network effects
Impact
Classifieds: Increasing UGC
Engagemen
t
Content
Traffic
Monetisation
Through Ads

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Increasing retention by increasing app adoption [app users
• Idea! Use our healthy mSite traffic to
drive App Downloads. Duh!
• Want to read the Menu? Want to see
more photos? Want to see more
reviews?
• Download the App!

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Remember -Retention needs a longer term horizon!
• Daily Install = wrong metric to
track effectiveness
• Track Specific Cohort Retention
over 6-9-12M
• Track Net increase in App base
[Install - Uninstalls]

22. Rahul GanjooRahul Ganjoo
• Use Smart Nudges instead of hard rules
• Build differentiated app experiences and nudge users to them
• Raise the bar for what requires an app download(e.g. no one
will install an app to get a restaurant ph # but they will do so to
import their Instagram photos)
• Be Context & Location Aware
• Context = FTUs should have a friction free experience. Let them
experience the value of the platform first.
• Markets where app adoption lags, invest in good mWeb UX
Retention needed a long-term focus to be sustainable
How We Sustained Retention

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What drives Retention?
TransactionsRetention
Traffic
Monetisation
Through Transactions
Online Ordering
• No silver bullets or low hanging fruit left
• Series of micro-optimisations as against
broad strokes

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• Supply Density/Choice
• First Time User Experience
• Time To Order Acceptance
• Zomato Fulfilled Orders
• Post Order Experience
Key Retention Drivers

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• Food Shots
• Loyalty Program - Zomato Treats
• Personalisation*
• Menu Experiments
In-Product Retention Drivers

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• We are constantly testing experiences based on more than a few dozens
parameters for each user
• Personalisation parameters include user signals (location, platform, aov,
history, cuisine affinity, frequency, payment method, time since last order,
etc), restaurant signals (popularity, rating, distance, delivery time, cft, car
etc) and others (time of day, day of week, etc )
Personalisation challenges

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29. THANK YOU