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What you will find in this Case Study?
1) About MyDala
2) Journey of MyDala
3) Marketing Strategy
4) Future of MyDala
About MyDala
MyDala is India’s leading online couponing platform launched in 2009 by Anisha Singh. Till date the company has partnered with more than 100,000 merchants in India and boasts of more than 28 million customers across 209 cities in the country. Company was initially funded by promoters and then raised INR 1.1 crore from a group of angel investors. Later in 2011, it raised venture capital funding from Info Edge India Ltd.
Journey
MyDala started in December 2009 has completed more than 6 years in the digital space. The period when MyDala started was the peak period for Groupon and Anisha was primarily focusing on users who love to have big discount. Talking with merchants and vendors gave Anisha a brief idea of what marketers actually needed. They just needed a good online place to market their products. Restaurants, tattoo studios, salons … all of them wanted a platform to showcase their products and services. So Anisha moved quickly to fill that gap and became an online marketing platform for both big brands and small businesses.
When Snapdeal started in Feb 2010, then MyDala shifted gears to mobile and stayed the course. It built its first mobile app in 2011 to go bigger.
Around then, at a conference in Delhi, Anisha Singh met a senior official from Vodafone. Vodafone was already a huge telco and was keen to do some innovation. I talked about offering mobile coupons which could be availed by sending a text. Thus the company started the service in 2012, and the result was unimagined, unexpected…it was overwhelming.
Then MyDala soon built partnerships with all the major telcos in India. This alliance helped MyDala to solve another big problem – how to reach out to mobile users who do not own a smartphone. MyDala’s mobile coupons could be bought easily through a text which would be charged directly to a pre- or post-paid mobile credit account.
An interview of Anisha Singh with The Free Press Journal
While Groupon was trailblazing its way to a massive initial public offering in 2011 in the US, MyDala was making headway into smaller cities. MyDala managed to raise about $3 million in exchange of nearly half of the company’s shares. Six years hence, the company is leading the market. As per current stats, the website has a listing of more than 140,000 deals over the platform.
The mobile traction of the company is rapidly growing across all the platforms: WAP, USSD, Apps. Its mobile app is available in 9 languages. According to the company, its 90% of the 28 million monthly unique visitors are primarily mobile users, which is leading to a high transaction rate. More than 50% of the transactions are done through mobile.
It took five years for Anisha Singh and Arjun Basu to turn their venture, MyDala, profitable. According to a report from the brokerage firm Motilal Oswal Securities, MyDala will cross $40 million by the end of 2016-17.
Anisha, the founder has been lauded with a number of awards for her work with MyDala. She was conferred the ‘Women Leadership Award’ at the World Women Leadership Congress in 2014 and the ‘Leading Woman in Retail’ Award in 2012.
Marketing Strategy
The founder believes that the best things that all talk about is social media like the world linked with Facebook or Whatsapp as more things goes viral here. MyDala has also grown more so on viral marketing. They have promoted themselves in such a way that users come and talk to other users about MyDala.
The company many times hosts a contest over social media platforms to participate in and win cool gifts. MyDala believes in creating buzz over the social media to engage more people. Earlier the company did a marketing promo for Don giving the winner a chance to meet Shahrukh Khan. By doing so a buzz was created and coupons were given at a discounted rate. Same happened with the release of the movie Kahaani, and for many other movies. MyDala gives their users something different. They are always focused to do something different and it has really worked for them. That company has currently more than 2 lakhs fan following over Facebook and similarly Twitter also looks good for the brand. Twitter has got 10.4K followers over the platform which gives the company a competitive edge.
MyDala has increased its footprint to many cities by offering customized and cost effective solutions to advertisers to reach to their target customers. They offer various attractive offers and promotional campaigns.
Future of MyDala
MyDala’s headquarter is located in New Delhi. It has raised $5.9million in 3 rounds. MyDala’s estimated annual revenue is $10million. MyDala’s primary competitors are CouponDunia, Groupon and Cashkaro.
MyDala wants to grow by banking on people’s daily needs, and it would continue to focus on where “user adoption is happening”, while it prepares itself for the public listing.
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