Interview with Raviteja Dodda, Founder & CEO at MoEngage

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here? (what inspired you to start a martech company)
At MoEngage, I help customers get the best out of marketing automation to achieve early growth. Marketing technology is the key to achieving customer success in today’s Mobile era. The thought initially led me to co-found and successfully launch DelightCircle app – a leading offers network in India, that helped e-commerce companies drive mobile conversions early-on. Backed by Delight Circle’s success and learning from this experience working with e-commerce companies, I founded MoEngage – an omnichannel user analytics and engagement platform, that helps consumer businesses reduce churn and improve customer lifetime value.

MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?
Most marketing automation tools today are rule-based. Marketers need to manually analyze data, define the rules for segmentation, personalized content and time, create campaigns, learn from the results and iteratively optimize them (campaigns) for better results. I believe in a future where, all of this will be handled behind the scenes by platforms like ours, which automatically optimize the message and time for higher conversions.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
The advent of AI. In our case, MoEngage Sherpa, our Artificial Intelligence Engine has had the most impact for our clients, helping them auto-optimize their campaigns. We use AI to identify the right message and send it at the right time to the right customer. What usually is a lengthy iterative process has been made simple using AI. With MoEngage, marketers can spend more time on planning and creative rather than spend endless hours crunching numbers. Customers have seen an increase of up to 21% in CTRs with MoEngage Sherpa.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
Technology has made deep inroads into marketing, complicating things a bit.  Technology also brings with it, many benefits that marketers cannot ignore. Currently, we are focusing on simplifying this technology and helping marketers take advantage of it in their marketing efforts to drive business outcomes. How marketers make the best out of this trend remains to be seen.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017
Ravi: At MoEngage we use Google Analytics, Hubspot, Zapier, Drift, Hotjar, Unbounce, and MailChimp among others.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
Ravi: While I cannot talk about a single campaign, the use cases are both unique and plenty. Our customers use our products differently but with a common purpose – to positively impact business outcomes. Having said that, our recent launch of MoEngage Sherpa AI platform has helped clients improve campaign performance by up to 25%.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
Ravi: I envision a world where machine learning algorithms shall replace all the data analysis and decisions that marketers take on a day-to-day basis. In such a world, marketers would exploit these systems to drive personalized engagement with their customers and outperform competition consistently.

We recently rolled out a solution where our Machine Learning engine experiments and optimizes the best time to trigger a campaign. On a run time basis, it also explores content performance and sends the best message to maximize metrics like CTR. Our clients are already using these solutions and have seen large improvements.

We believe we have just scratched the surface here. There is so much potential yet to be unlocked.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Focus

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Mail, Notes, Slack, Calendar, Pocket 

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Have a list of things to complete everyday at the start of the day

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff. I add the relevant articles I see online to Pocket, and read through Pocket when I have time.                                                           

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Your time is limited, so do what you really love.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
Perseverance

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Elon Musk.

MTS: Thank you Raviteja! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.