Data has become trackable at the micro-action level: Charu from Life & Half

When Charu graduated from college, she was clueless about how her career would shape up. She started an internship in advertising and found her passion for brands there. Today, she is the co-founder of Life & Half where data plays a pivotal role in driving growth and brand strategy.

1. Give us a little bit of the backstory about how you came to the field.

I started out in advertising as a summer intern. I was unable to decide in college as to what my area of interest was. During my summer break, I took up an internship at the advertising agency Lowe Lintas to see what work life is all about. That started my journey in advertising on the creative side, but I quickly realized that I was more interested in client briefs, what decisions were leading to certain consumer propositions, research intel, and business objectives, and eventually switched over to brand management.

2. What was your first interaction with data? 

I feel that data has always been around forever and a decade back too. I have been working with data across brand tracks, consumer research studies, and expected business goals. 

With digital transformation, data has just become trackable at the micro-action level. Online performance data picked up when I joined one of the most-viral D2C retail brands funded by Seed Fund as the Category & Brand Head. That was my first experience working with metrics and data across every brand communication touchpoint and also tracking product metrics (on-site performance traffic to conversion) and of course category performance and revenue (building marketing offers rooted in ASP, AOV, ATS, etc). Post this came to my bigger and deeper data experience when I joined Lenskart to head high-margin private label eyewear John Jacobs – this involved tracking performance across offline & online, marketplace, and native brand webstore performance while building the brand strategy. Over the last 3 years with my brand strategy & content, we’ve worked with a digitally-demanding client roster across D2C and platforms. And for different clients, KPIs can change the data funnel – DAU from social vs Amazon brand store conversion.

3. How did you start using data/metrics in delivering your campaigns? 

Starting out with quarterly KPIs, data helps us plan virality stack, media, and channel mix. 

4. Did you come across any challenges in communications where data help solve it?

In eCommerce for example – when we built the online store & business management for ethnic wear giant Lakshita – we were barely getting any signups despite a 10% discount incentive. A month after launch – our signups were just about 80. When looking through offline store performance, we saw leggings/tights always have a high sales volume and replenishment rate. So we changed the signup incentive to get “Get a pair of tights free” and overnight we woke up to 4800 subscribers!

3. What is the most important metric/data point for you as a comms person?

It entirely depends on the channel and audience segment. For instance, on Amazon, building brand search keywords and tracking its SFR may be important for social-led campaign traffic & CTR may be more imp.

4. What tools are your best / fav to help you in data insights?

For site performance and in-app, I rely mostly on google analytics. For social, we have worked across Meltwater but we now prefer to track daily data in excel to create custom views and gain in-depth insights.

5. How do you see data in comms and marketing evolve in the coming days?

I’m actually very excited about metaverse and analytics in NFT / metaverse-led interactions. The metaverse interactions will give a never-before volume to map to the typical 2D measurements so far. Imagine your avatar’s full panel of actions being measured in multiverse media interactions, or decentralized communities and collaborative actions & decision chains.

6.  Would you like to share three things that worked for your brand or your two cents for the budding comms professionals?

1. Always be data-informed – whether you are a designer, writer, strategist, or stylist (we have seen non-performing SKUs, stock out after replacing the image with a new style pairing!)

2. Learn to put that data aside and take instinct leaps in communication (again, despite the BUY NOW CTA convention for ads, we went ahead with ‘discover more’ cta instead across JJ top-funnel ads to create a more premium brand feel and intrigue – the ad ROI increased by 5% for the campaign)

3. Always plan for virality – nothing goes viral by itself. Always plan an integrated push even when working with low budgets.