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Anand K, founder of Chennai-based e-commerce website Wedtree.com, knows exactly which gifts customers prefer on his site. Customers are also spending more time on the site, helping the retailer achieve one of its key goals, the conversion rate.
From Buscape in Brazil to Landesk in the US and thousands of other retailers have experienced better optimisation at their websites with Zarget. Now, more visitors on their websites are buying.
A Chennai-based start-up, Zarget has developed tools to help businesses increase sales by tweaking their websites.
Former Zoho employees Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santhosh Kumar founded the company last year. It has attracted venture capital firms Accel Partners, Matrix Partners, and Sequoia Capital. The first two contributed a seed fund of $1.5 million and the third gave $6 million last month.
Zarget, its founders claim, has no universal solutions but specific ones for each customer.
Parthiban, chief executive officer, Zarget, said, “Conversion rate optimisation is not new. Zarget is the first to provide everything one might need in one place. We have simplified the basic necessity to analyse and test websites that were being ignored because the process to do this was cumbersome.”
Right changes to optimise
Experts say optimisation is about making the right changes to a website to increase key targets such as conversions, sign-ups, purchases and so on. For instance, ‘A/B testing’ or ‘heatmaps’ are powerful tools that help turn a visitor into a buyer. These also help in analysing how users respond to changes. On-site plug-ins differentiate Zarget from peers such as Optimizely.
“Zarget helps websites understand their user at every point of interaction and derive actionable insights. Our clients can also implement those changes,” Parthiban added.
Many tools enable conversion-rate optimisation. It simply, such tools help an online retailer increase chances of business conversions by putting up the most preferred product on the website. But, they often find it difficult to use multiple tools from different vendors under one platform. Zarget provides different tools in one Cloud-based product.
Changing online landscape
The online marketing landscape has an average annual growth of 170 per cent. More marketers are looking to keep up with technology disruptions and allocate their budgets better. Businesses are slowly realising the need for a conversion optimisation tool.
“They have picked a large market opportunity and are building an integrated suite of products which isn’t available from others. We think this will drive a lot of efficiencies,” said Shailesh Lakhani, managing director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors.
Zarget is looking forward to grow more relevant to customers through product innovations. “Our immediate focus is on website personalisation, optimisation for mobile and session recording,” Parthiban said.
Another investor, Anand Daniel of Accel Partners, said, “The Zarget team comes from the same school of thought as FreshDesk. They have similar strengths in areas critical for this business.”
Challenges
The firm enables companies to invest in its product portfolio to analyse and optimise their websites. It currently acquires customers using pay-per-click channel and online marketing.
“We are exploring channel partnering to expand into other markets,” Parthiban added.
Recurring subscription of both monthly and annual packages help Zarget make money. For the start-up, it takes at least six months to make money from a customer after the product is purchased.
As pure-play product business could take longer to break-even, Zarget is also mulling over consultation.
Website optimisation — Zarget’s area of business — is extremely competitive. While Zarget believes constant product innovation will help it stay competitive, experts say offering customised products for big enterprises could pose a challenge.
“Building an effective and efficient go-to-market channel and finding ways to move their product offering to larger customers will be their main challenges,” says Lakhani.
Road ahead
Zarget aims to build varied products that will cover the entire spectrum of web optimisation. Website optimisation offers a plethora of opportunities in terms of bringing in more products. Zarget wants to tap that opportunity rightly, as it says “the second round mainly because of three things SaaS experience, product vision and market opportunity”. “While we have revenue milestones internally, we are more focussed on product milestones and we believe if we hit the latter targets, the former is easily achievable,” Parthiban says. The start-up expects to have 3,000 customers by the end of this financial year. Zarget is looking forward to 20,000 customers and a recurring annual revenue between $15 and 20 million by FY20.
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FACT BOX Founded: 2015 Area of business: Conversion rate optimization for online businesses Founders: Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat and Santhosh Kumar Funding: $7.5 million in two rounds Investors: Accel Partners, Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital Opportunity: New products in website optimisation |
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EXPERT TAKE
There are quite a few companies successfully running a software-as-a-service business from India for the global market. Operating from India has advantages like building multiple products simultaneously, selling it as a complete package with better hand-holding, support and, to top it off, a price nobody can match. I think Zarget has cracked this code and is definitely making its presence felt. The thing I like most about them is, even though the space is crowded, they have managed to make a mark by introducing an innovation like the industry-first Chrome plug-in that adds a new dimension to what they offer. Going forward, the biggest challenge I foresee for Zarget is how they address both mid-size and Enterprise size businesses. These are two different games. While their current business model is perfect for small and mid-size businesses, it will be a challenge when they move up the ladder. Their competition will be big names like Adobe, Optimizely and Monetate. If Zarget can crack this bunch, they will go a long way. |
Aneesh Reddy, co-founder and CEO, Capillary Technologies
