Varun Jha is the Marketing Head at PayU India. He has extensive experience in brand management and marketing. He has worked with multinational organizations like Cummins Inc (Fortune 500) and Micro-Star International Co-Op. He has been the brand custodian of various B2B and B2C products in his previous organizations. Having worked in diversified industries like consumer electronics, IT and e-commerce, he is now a part of core team at PayU India. His responsibilities include marketing strategy, brand management, product marketing, research and communication.

In an exclusive interaction with India Digital Review, he talks about videos as a form of consumer engagement and the uptake of PayU Money’s mobile wallet so far.

How does the digital medium - both internet and mobile figure in PayU India’s plans to reach out to consumers?

PayU India has offerings in both B2B and B2C space. Depending upon the customer category (whether B2B or B2C) we choose the relevant digital media. For instance we invest good sums into search engine marketing, affiliates, videos (customer testimonials), digital PR, email marketing to acquire new merchants for our payment gateway services (B2B). The marketing team generates a huge pool of inbound merchant leads. In fact, we have been able to increase our lead count from digital sources by almost 300 per cent y-o-y.

When it comes to promote our B2C products like PayUMoney wallet, we invest a decent chunk into social media channels and display advertising. We run marketing in a very scientific way, we analyze humongous data points to gauge consumer behavior and customize our communication effectively. Data slicing and dicing helps in remarketing audiences, personalized communication, increasing efficiency and optimizing our spends. In fact we do a lot of A/B and multi-variate testing of our communication, website pages and campaigns in order to make sure that we strike the right chord with the customers.

With new engagement forms such as videos coming up on Internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India?

A good video with strong content and script not only ensures that a brand is being heard but the brand name is being shared on the internet. Viral videos mean an opportunity on social media to engage the consumers on a one on one basis. In fact video sharing websites like Youtube and Vimeo are very high impact channels because the kind of reach they provide to a brand with very minimal spends helps in getting great ROI. In fact a lot of youth entertainment networks like TVF and AIB have topped the Youtube India’s chart with record views and shares. This is a new form of entertainment and engagement for Indian consumers who otherwise only had options like TV and cinema. Many FMCG brands are even offering advertising deals to such youth online networks. There is a clear shift from TV viewing to online viewing and mediums like social media can be an alternative to TV in times to come.

Tell us more about renaming PayUPaisa- the flagship product of PayU India- to PayU Paisa.

Renaming PayUPaisa to PayUMoney was a simple rebranding exercise in order to make our product globally ready. While the word paisa is restricted to the Indian context, we thought of including a term that has no geographical constraints. Also we have recently rolled our B2C offering which is the PayUMoney wallet and wish to invest a lot of marketing dollars to create the brand equity for PayUMoney over the next few years. Renaming the brand after such heavy weight marketing push would have involved huge marketing spends in rebranding. Thus, it was wise decision to rebrand PayUPaisa as PayUMoney from both perspectives i.e. brand building and global aspirations.

Which international markets can we expect PayUMoney to launch in by the end of 2014?

It’s bit early to comment. You would be hearing announcements officially when we will enter new markets.

Will PayU India be venturing into international markets by itself or with local partners for respective markets?

PayU India is an integral part of the global media conglomerate – Naspers Group. PayU is already present in 13 countries across four geographies.

Mobile is being seen as the 'next big brand and communication tool' but still very less amounts are being spent on this medium. What’s your take on this?

The mobile is undoubtedly the next big thing not only in India but across the globe and it will become the primary device in comparison to tablets and notebooks very soon. However India is still a feature phone penetrated market with smartphones constituting only 10 percent of the total mobile phone users.  Ad spends on a medium are in proportion to the kind of reach that medium has and in case of smart phones the reach is quite less as of today. Having said that, the smartphone penetration is expected to pick up by 52 percent y-o-y but it is quite early for marketers to invest heavily in mobile advertising.

As and when penetration of smartphones will follow a J curve, we shall witness heavy spends in location based marketing, display advertising, precision targeting and 1:1 engagement with the target audience.

How is PayU India using the social media to promote this campaign? And otherwise, how important is social media to promote your brand in India?

For a payments company like us, social media is a critical piece in the entire marketing value chain.  We are always in search of high reach and high engagement channels where we can run our buyer awareness programs and social media platforms do provide us excellent engagement opportunities. In fact the kind of 1:1 connect that we get through such channels is beyond comparison to others. While the overarching goal on social channels is to build a strong consumer brand, yet we use different social platforms for different purposes. For instance on PayUMoney’s Facebook page is more about running consumer activations, factoids, inforgraphics, quizzes and customer testimonials for consumer interactions and we post interesting pictures and videos for engagement. While our Twitter handle comes handy for service marketing, attending merchant and customer queries, new announcements and product updates.

In my opinion, social media keep brands on their toes. While brands are always interested in gathering high talking points and maximum coverage, negative sentiments and inability to respond to the intense queries in low TAT can be detrimental and harms the brand persona. Social channels become even more important when one is dealing with consumer payments because if anything goes wrong, these channels are the fist places where consumer will give a shout.

PayU India recently launched its wallet service. How has been the uptake of the service so far?

PayUMoney is accepted on more than 8500 ecommerce websites which makes it the most widely available wallet service in the Indian e-commerce industry. It is accepted on brands like Goibibo, Bookmyshow, Redbus, Tradus, Rechargeitnow, Ferns n Petals, Groupon, Travelyaari etc. PayUMoney wallet addresses the need of consumers for a better payment solution which is convenience, wide acceptance and rewards. PayUMoney accepts inputs from all major credit cards, debit cards and Net banking accounts. The intent is to allow users to pay through usual payment options, reward them with cashbacks and in the process we promise to deliver a quick and awesome payment experience to the user. It has only been three weeks since the wallet launch and so far we have observed encouraging number of user registrations for the service.

Any plans to make it a semi-closed wallet anytime in the near future?

Whenever a consumer pays on the web through PayUMoney, he gets an instant cashback into his PayUMoney account. The consumer can then use this accrued cashback as a discount in his very next purchase. Moreover the consumer gets an assured cashback into his PayUMoney account on every purchase. This is how money gets accrued into PayUMoney account as on date.

Right now, the focus is only on building a digital wallet which has a high degree of merchant acceptance and high degree consumer adoption. Semi-closed wallet system is definitely on the cards and will be rolled out soon.

Are anymore new offerings lined up for 2014?

PayU India is known in the market for its innovation leveraging technology and cutting edge products. In the process we keep on adding new features which helps in making online payments simpler and convenient. In 2013-14 financial year we rolled out PayUMoney tools like webstore, webfront, email invoicing and free payment gateway for the long tail merchants and SMEs who otherwise find it very difficult go online and collect payments. We have seen an amazing traction in this category with over several thousands of merchant registrations Q-o-Q. We then launched a payment settlement solution for marketplaces and Release on delivery (RoD) payment method for CoD customers in the second last quarter.

As of now, we have just come out with our wallet service with a focus on offering a great value to online buyers in terms of ease of purchase, rewards and trust. Payments is a hard business to do and especially in a geography like ours where consumer behavior is so dynamic and volatile, new products will find their space in the market as long as they deliver an awesome value preposition to the customer.