Zoho Corporation, one of India’s oldest SaaS (software-as-a-service) platforms, on May 10 launched Zoho Marketing Plus, a platform that integrates marketing activities across campaign ideation, creation, execution, management and measurement.
The bootstrapped unicorn is betting big on marketing automation, a $340-billion market.
“By eliminating redundancies and confusion arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximises productivity and teamwork, allowing marketers to stay nimble and collaborative amid evolving customer needs,” Zoho Chief Operating Officer Mani Vembu said.
While the company did not disclose the amount it invested, its Global Head of Market Strategy and Thought Leadership Prashanth Krishnaswami told Moneycontrol that more than 700 employees were deployed in the platform.
Krishnaswami also said that he expected revenue from the marketing initiative to double on a year-on-year basis over the medium term.
Zoho said the platform would provide a single, shared view of critical information to stakeholders across the marketing ecosystem for better collaboration and results.
The marketing platform gives marketing leaders a deeper understanding of customer preferences and behaviours, which would help them in driving brand affinity and customer happiness, the company said.
"Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It's becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, customer profiles, data, and ROI (return on investment)," said Vembu.
The complexity of data and personalisation only raised pressure on marketers and CMOs to deliver effective campaigns and revenue and Zoho Marketing Plus would maximise productivity by simplifying these tasks, he said.
The marketing initiative integrates various Zoho applications, including campaigns, social, webinars, analytics, marketing automation, workdrive, PageSense, survey, and backstage.
Zoho would leverage its customers to onboard clients for Zoho Marketing Plus, Krishnaswami said.
“We expect that our customers, who already are using either many individual products or are already using CRM platforms will adopt the marketing platform itself. So at that level, it helps us quickly bring a certain kind of market momentum to the marketing platform by tapping into our own customer base,” Krishnaswami said in a virtual interaction with Moneycontrol.
“And then there's also the angle where it makes us far more competitive against other vendors in the market, where we offer a uniform level of maturity across all of our customer-facing software.”
As reported by Moneycontrol earlier in the day, Zoho clocked a net profit of over $250 million for 2020-21 (FY21), becoming the most profitable unicorn in India.
