 Ms. Ritu Mehotra, Regional Manager, South Asia at Booking.com. Ms. Mehotra is currently the Regional Manager at Booking.com, hailing from Gurgaon. She started off strong by gaining achievements from IIM foreign trade, Harvard Business School, and also graduated from Harvard University in 2013. She's also garnered experience by reaching senior level leadership positions and built her expertise by working with renowned organizations like the Civic Global, Crystal Corn, Zomato, to name a few. In 2015, she founded Green Plate, an e-com site dedicated to providing corporate America with organically healthy meals. Ms. Mehotra today at Screenage is going to be discussing and talking about unlocking your app marketing automation. Driving mobile app promotion in a COVID-19 world. Hi, Ms. Mehotra. It's nice to have you here, ma'am. And the floor's all yours. Over to you. Thank you very much, Pallavi. I'm going to share my screen as well, because I do have a PowerPoint. But before that, hey, everybody, it's a pleasure to be here with all of you this afternoon. And I would like to thank Exchange for Media for having me here. We have 25 minutes and lots to cover. So buckle up, and we get on to the exciting journey. All right, so maybe I'll just get started, assuming that my screen is visible, and so am I. Out of 7.7 billion people in the world, 60%, over 60% of them actually live inside the small circle that you see. And this circle, by the way, also is the fastest growing in the world. India is, as you can see, a part of this circle. And you can see that there are more people that live inside this circle than outside of this circle. And very interesting thing is that India is one of the fastest growing economies as well. Also, I think it's extremely diverse. It's a diverse nation. There are 23 languages. We have 415 dialects. We have 19,500 mother tongues and over a million dishes in the country. And when people say that they have one India strategy to acquire users at scale to build demand or have a product market fit, it actually confuses me a lot. There's one thing in common. We all love our beloved phones. The picture that you see on the top is I clicked while I was passing through a school in college a few days back. There's one thing in common. Everybody is glued to their phones. Last year, 70% of all internet visits were on mobile. And this number continues to grow. And why is this growing? Large and growing middle class, skipping desktop, and moving straight to mobile. Mind you, this is the nation. This is the country. Where a lot of people actually have never experienced a desktop or a laptop. This is the generation that moved straight to their mobile phones. So for a lot of ways, this is their first camera, their first TV, their first music store. And most importantly, this is how they connect with the world. Every day, 80 billion messages are shared on WhatsApp, Facebook, and all other social media combined. And if I talk about India specifically, there is a population which is, again, a young and middle class. Post-COVID, I think the digital transformation went on a turbo state. Because it was not just the want. It also became the need of the hour. And therefore, the need got even more pronounced. Average time spent on social media is over five and a half hours today. And mobile has changed user behavior completely. People do not want to wait for answers. People do not want to stand in queues. People do not want to wait in line to get to any kind of gratification either. People are expecting instant gratification. Picture this. When you get an Uber ride and the app shows you four minutes, but driver arrives in eight minutes, you're already completely disengaged. Or if I sent a message on WhatsApp stating that, hey, guys, I'm excited to all my friends. And hey, guys, there's a new bar that has opened up. Why don't we go and have a quick drink? And if I don't hear back from them in 15 minutes, I am thinking that they are thinking it's a bad idea already. And last, if I look at booking.com's business, same day reservations have gone up dramatically in the last couple of years. So it brings us to three things. Number one, on one hand, mobile as a platform is gaining so much traction. Number two, messenger or messages is the way to communicate. And third thing is that artificial intelligence machine learning that will personalize the content that we're sharing on the platform. So where does this take us? Let's turn to what happened in China. Let's look at this platform. It started as a messaging platform and very quickly morphed into a super app. And it's called WeChat. And this is empowering people to live their lives on phone only. Everyday hundreds and thousands of customers are interacting with millions of businesses and even government services. So if you want to apply for a permit, get a visa, everything is done through this channel. So if anything, China is a predictive to what's going to happen to the rest of the world and why I'm saying this is because they embark on the mobile revolution much faster than any other country in the world, including some of the Western countries like Europe or North America. So as a business, it's important for us to understand are we mobile ready? Are we innovating fast enough? Is our businesses ready to target these mobile users? Are we communicating with the users on the medium that they're most comfortable in? And the situation is actually even more grim, especially when we send text messages on WhatsApp, Facebook, over 100 times a day. And there is a key gap in how we communicate with the businesses and delivering value. Very interesting. Other key trend that we see also is, and I already mentioned that we spend five and a half hours on our phone today, but how are we going online? Google isn't the entry point anymore. We are going through our feeds, which are highly personalized, contextual, and keeps bringing us back. And just to make matters worse, none of these search engines will be the entry points. And just to let you know, if I look at the last year's sales for Alibaba, which is one of the largest retail chains in China, 60% of the sales came from contextualized content. So data shows that before we go to bed every night, on an average, people spend 50 minutes checking their feeds and social media. If anyone told you a few years back that you would be spending five hours on a six inch screen, you would laugh. But this goes on to show that if there's something easy, useful, frictionless, boom, it can change user behavior in no time. We spend hours on this without actually searching anything. So when you're looking at your feeds on Facebook, when you're looking at content, you're not searching anything. Basically, what happens is whatever notifications come in, because they're highly contextualized, you keep browsing more and more and more and more. And if you look at each of these examples that I've shown, that's exactly what happens. And because the content is so personalized, but it's low intent, so marketers have to be ready for that. Takes me to the next point. So how do we acquire users? What do we do to make sure that we have the right attention span? So at Booking.com, two years back, we started to spend a lot of time and we invested a lot of energy and resources into growth of our app. We made big gains in booking and user engagement both on iOS and Android. And I want to dig into our growth trends to show you how this momentum is opening up new partner opportunities and user growth. So from high level perspective, our investment in future of our app follows. It's a two pronged strategy. How do we drive more app installs? And how does the app have more engagement as I spoke to you about? And in the last two years, we've been able to do both, actually, if I see the strategy. So let's focus more on the user acquisition side first. Number one, app store optimization. I think that is one of the most important things in activating advertising campaigns in app stores around the web. So our app is increasingly reaching new customers, new users as we continue to add flights, tours, and we are trying to do connected trips. Because the more choice you give on the platform, the more users keep coming back. And recently, we launched another PR campaign that was all about downloading the app. And I want to say that in the last two years, the very focused efforts that we made globally in Q2 this year, booking was number one downloaded OTA app according to third party research firm. And during the same quarter, we were one of the most downloaded app in US, and our downloads increased dramatically over the last couple of years. And we ensured that we create direct marketing. So apart from working on the conversion funnel, et cetera, we wanted to create content that brings low intent users to engage our entire funnel. And also, our entire funnel is touched by machine learning. So this is how the user acquisition is working for us. Now if we look at how are we driving engagement? So if I look at booking particularly, a typical user will not use a platform every day. They will do that when they're planning a trip and when they need it. But when they come and then they're planning the trip, that's when they open the app a lot more. And it's possible that the pandemic has increased this engagement as well with the uncertain travel environment, encouraging many travelers to pivot to mobile. And that's what we see as well. With such clear, so if I see today, the overall business from mobile represents 60%. And if I look at just India, it's actually upwards of 70%, 75%. So very large chunk of a business comes on mobile. With this clear success metrics pouring in, now is a good time to think about how do we offer deals to these mobile users? A differentiated rate strategy. So we started to work on a differentiated rate strategy. And if you see the picture on the top, you see that we have a very prominently listed mobile rates on a platform, which are extremely compelling. Because if you see, an app will have a very, very small screen and a small real estate. And therefore, it's very important for us to showcase these deals. And when partners, and when I say partners, it's our hotel partners, when they implement these, they receive on an average 28% on an average more bookings, which is a clear indicator that how people are so used to booking transactions online and on their cell phones. It just doesn't end there. The intelligence and framework we've built to help automatically identify and triage request through booking assistant now work seamlessly in the background on booking.com. Helping customers to navigate our health center, which is available in 44 different languages. So it's not just about getting users, showcasing the deal. It's also about making sure that once they come to the platform, as I spoke about machine learning, et cetera, it's very important for us to give them the right kind of engagement there. If I go and start to work on the overall user journey as well, so it's not about bringing the users. It's not about engaging with them. It's also about ease of use. It's also about how contextual can we make the entire funnel and how it's touched by machine learning. And if you see here, when you land on our site and you aren't sure where do you want to go yet, we make suggestions to you. So if you see the picture on the top, because we've been leveraging all your past data, the user data that we've had, and machine learning models, we know that what are the kind of options that will work on closing the funnel sooner. When we recommend which apartment and hotel would best suit your search criteria. So there is a lot of different machine learning systems working in the background. When you start to show you based on what your past data is, and they also work a lot in the moment for the moment. Because sometime back, you may have gone to the family. Today, you want to go a boys' trip on a road trip. So our machine learning funnel actually works as you're going through the journey as well. Also, it's very important to show, as I said, contextual. The reason you're going to your feeds is because it's contextual. Somebody has sent you a message, and you want to see that. So if you see the reviews, which images are most relevant to you, will come to you. Because we know from the past experiences what kind of images helped us to convert the funnel better. And which machine learning models have automated in terms of detecting important features. So we know that for you, pool may be important. Or for somebody else, a right kind of bed or mattress may be important. And data science has become rapidly more sophisticated over the past decade. And it continues to accelerate, which we love at Booking.com. And we've been passionate about data, to say the least. And because of the data, we focus a lot on our CTAs. So we already know that if you are a family of four people, even the reviews that we start to show you are the ones that are by families or people four, so that it becomes highly contextual. And you are able to engage on the platform a lot better. The last piece I want to cover is the customer service and demand prediction. If you need support before, during, or after your trip, our demand prediction algorithms make sure that there's enough of our excellent customer service staff on hand to help you out in the native language. So we use about 44 languages that I've already spoke to you about. So as we are looking at today's world of marketing, and I talked about three important things. It's not just about user acquisition. Google doesn't work anymore. It is highly contextual, content-driven, low-intent user base that we need to look at. Once users are on the platform, it's important to have engaging content. And that needs to happen in tired user journey, and that becomes available through the use of AI and machine learning. So I'll end with that world is moving to mobile experience. And in times to come, more or either businesses are going to be digital or on digital, period. And I'll end here. I hope I was on time. Thank you, Ms. Mehrotra. Very, very, very interesting session. I think the audience must have really had a field day with this one. Thank you again for being here, ma'am, taking up the time, sharing all your knowledge and interesting ideas. And we look forward to interacting soon. Perfect. Thank you very much, Pallavi. See you. Thank you. And take care, ma'am.