MarTech Interview with Balaji Krishnan, CEO and Founder at RedKangaroo

Balaji Krishnan, CEO and Founder at RedKangaroo talks about the impact of generative AI and what inspired RedKangaroo in this quick chat with MarTechSeries:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Balaji, take us through your entrepreneurial journey in the tech market and tell us about RedKangaroo: how did the platform inspiration come about and how has the journey been since starting up with it in 2022?

RedKangaroo was started purely from the need for an organic growth platform for one of my other companies, the beverage startup Frazy.

At Frazy, we tested by placing a message on our product to encourage our customers to take a picture of their Frazy bottle, post it on Instagram and add a hashtag. In return, our customer received an exclusive discount for 30% off on their next purchase. This worked really well, but our team had to manually track all the hashtags and then send customers the discount codes, which was a lot of work. We wished there was a fully automated platform that can track such organic actions, where the users are automatically rewarded once the actions are done. We couldn’t find any such platform, so I decided to create one.

RedKangaroo was born to let brands offer exclusive rewards to their users/customers, and the brands can define the actions to be performed in order to unlock those rewards. The RedKangaroo platform fully automates the process.

How in your view can today’s marketers and advertisers drive better experiences and outcomes with organic growth initiatives?

I believe Trade Spend is greater than Ad spend by all means. I strongly believe that brands should focus heavily on investing in their own customers and incentivize them to spread the word and bring new customers and added revenue. The Customer Acquisition Cost will be much lower in the long term once your own customers start convincing their friends and families to buy your products – this is what we call ‘Trust Channel’. Marketers and advertisers should focus on investing in ‘Trust Channels’ in addition to the traditional ad networks. The ‘Trust Channels’ will not only offer a cheaper Customer Acquisition Cost but also enable higher repeat purchases from your own customers (when you incentivize them for their actions).

Can you share a few proven pointers on what it takes to balance a paid and organic strategy to drive digital growth in a crowded marketplace?

The best example is Frazy (the main reason why I started RedKangaroo). We are a small bootstrapped startup so we didn’t have a lot of budget for paid ads. While we were acquiring customers through paid ads on Instagram, we wanted our customers to share their experiences on Instagram and in return offered them deep discounts on their next purchase.

All of these happened through RedKangaroo and we increased our repeat purchases from 6% to 17%. Plus, our overall CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) reduced from $89 to $42 (because we acquired new customers through our ‘Trust Channel’ in addition to acquiring new customers through paid ads).

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How is RedKangaroo’s core platform different from others in the space and how have marketing users benefited from it thus far?

RedKangaroo’s platform is the world’s first fully-automated organic growth platform where brands can simply set the rewards/incentives they are willing to offer, and they can choose the actions they want their customers to take in order to unlock the rewards. The rest is all automatically tracked by RedKangaroo and the rewards are instantly offered to the users who complete the actions.

There are some Shopify apps like Yotpo that offer referral based incentives and there are some coupon sites like Honey, but there’s no unified platform for different organic growth actions that’s fully automated for both brands and customers.

We are still young with a handful of brands but we are starting to see early success with some of our brands where their CAC is reducing and their repeat customers are increasing.

Can you talk about a few leading brands and how they’ve used organic growth initiatives to drive impact: what can fellow marketers learn from those examples?

Outside RedKangaroo, big brands like Uber, Instacart use referral based organic growth strategies to grow their customer base and encourage repeat customers. The referral based incentives is just one part of the organic growth strategy. RedKangaroo offers the full suite of organic growth actions that can help small to midsize brands grow significantly faster and at a cheaper price.

Can you comment on the growing use of AI in digital marketing and how you see it impacting the future of marketing and martech / social media?

Generative AI is going to have a significant impact on digital marketing – mainly because of the time it saves in creating ad assets in the form of images, copywriting and email marketing.

The AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will have a deep impact on the ad targeting techniques in the future – especially if the AGI systems have deeper knowledge of the target demographics and by learning from other systems.

Before we wrap up, take us through five must-dos you feel every B2B marketer and B2B advertiser needs to follow on a daily basis

While everyone talks about how the CAC, ROAS, and LTVs need to be focused by the marketers, I’d make a simple list that every marketing person working with small startups should follow:

Always assume customers are right. At the early stages, if your customers complain, go one level up to satisfy them. This will have a long term effect in your CAC.

• Increase your Trade Spend over your Ad Spend.
• Try adding something unique and exciting in the box when you ship your product that will make your customers pleasantly surprised. This will increase your repeat customer rate.
• Pay attention to your ad creatives. Keep it simple but exciting.
• Always focus on LTV (LifeTime Value) of a customer, and focus on Organic growth strategies and incentives.