Biplab Poddar, a panwala’s son, built one of India’s successful eCommerce marketing agencies

Biplab Poddar, a panwala’s son, built one of India’s successful eCommerce marketing agencies

Indian entrepreneurs are demonstrating that the concept of entrepreneurship is not limited to business school graduates in the period of the Indian startup boom. We frequently hear about billionaire entrepreneurs and successful businesses who started with a large sum of money, yet other entrepreneurs rise from humble beginnings to the top. Biplab Poddar, the creator of Oxedent, is a fantastic entrepreneur who learned his business lessons from life rather than through a business school.

Biplab was born and raised in Nakkati Gachh, a small village near Cooch Behar in West Bengal, and did not have the financial security of a well-to-do family. Biplab spent most of his youth as a typical Indian village kid with no formal education or job advice. When he received a scholarship and moved to Tufanganj, a small town in Cooch Behar district, to study science in his higher secondary schools, things began to improve.

He passed the West Bengal Joint Entrance Exam without professional coaching or academic help and was accepted into Kalyani Government Engineering College, one of West Bengal’s most prestigious engineering institutes. However, it marked the start of a new period of strife. He confronted a fresh set of obstacles in a completely foreign environment, far from his home and without financial assistance. To pay for the entry fees and dormitory stay, he raised money from his village and distant relatives. “I had to get my hostel cooks to sign on the hostel sheet as my local guardians, and I couldn’t even afford to buy blankets and bedsheets to sleep in,” he remembered.

This is not the life that a 17-year-old dreams of, but Biplab was forced to live it. Biplab was interning at several businesses in various domains to manage and continue this education when many of his classmates were focused on their academic lives. He realised that returning to his hometown was not an option, so he improved his English to raise his self-esteem. At Gozocabs, he began honing his content writing talents and was introduced to SEO writing.

Biplab’s last hope for getting back on track in life was the campus placement, despite all of his difficulties. Biplab’s life, on the other hand, had different ideas. During his fourth-year placement, TCS rejected him, shattering him once more. “At the time, the TCS rejection destroyed my spirit, but I couldn’t quit up.” I started regularly working on my résumé and freelancing, which helped me advance. It was difficult to persuade my family that I could make a living as a freelancer, but I was doing well for myself,” he explained.

He eventually went to work for the Eden Group as a digital marketing executive. He concentrated on honing his digital marketing talents in light of the growing need for digital marketing in the internet marketplace. He even launched a company with his buddies, which finally failed but allowed Biplab to realise his power and passion in digital marketing. Biplab devised the concept of establishing a full-fledged digital marketing agency. He wanted to call it O2, but the agency was eventually dubbed Oxedent.

About Oxedent

Oxedent is an eCommerce marketing agency that uses Google and Facebook Ads to help eCommerce businesses thrive. To make your eCommerce business successful and scalable, they focus on result-driven performance marketing methods. Oxedent helps organisations get the most out of sponsored advertising, from Google Ads to Social Media Ads to White Label PPC. More than 250 eCommerce firms have grown due to their data-driven campaigns in today’s competitive digital marketplace. Oxedent also stands out among their sector colleagues because of their honest, ethical, and transplant business strategy.

It is a digital marketing firm based in Kolkata that has been assisting small and medium-sized businesses in growing their internet presence. All of Oxedent’s AdWords campaigns are overseen by Google AdWords certified professionals that stay on top of the latest trends and collaborate closely with Google. They have the best Google AdWords Campaign Management pricing in the industry.

The eCommerce marketing agency made $150K in annual recurring revenue in the previous financial year, becoming one of India’s greatest eCommerce marketing agencies. As part of its corporate expansion strategy, Oxedent is currently on a hiring binge, with the goal of quadrupling sales by the end of this fiscal year. They made over INR 40 lakhs in revenue in November and December alone. They are now expecting INR 3 crores in revenue this fiscal year.

Despite his success as an entrepreneur, Biplab hasn’t forgotten his beginnings and has an ambition of giving back to his hometown of Nakkati Gachh. He hopes to establish a school where young people from low-income families can acquire a good education regardless of their financial situation.

Oxedent has grown from a bootstrapped startup to a global eCommerce marketing agency with over 15 people and offices in India and the United Kingdom. The eCommerce marketing firm managed by Biplab is now poised to take the company to the next level.

Let’s understand what an eCommerce marketing agency entails.

What is the definition of an eCommerce marketing agency?

The eCommerce industry is well-known for its fierce competition, which is why you might be considering hiring the services of this agency. If you want to offer goods or services online, you’ll want to target the proper customers and keep ahead of the competition to establish a strong brand and reputation.

It can be challenging to keep up with the current trends and marketing strategies in the eCommerce sector, continuously evolving. You can rest confident that the effort you put into promoting your eCommerce business is productive and rewarding for your business and overall brand if you engage with a prominent eCommerce digital marketing company.  

If you’re investing time, effort, and money into online marketing, the last thing you want to do is waste it on ineffective techniques. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to online success, but with the appropriate experience, you can earn long-term revenue.

Let’s take a closer look at the advantages of employing an expert eCommerce digital marketing firm for your online business, given that online sales account for about 15% of all retail sales worldwide.

7 Reasons Why You Should Hire An eCommerce Marketing Agency

If you own or run an internet business, you’re well aware of the fierce competition, which is why aggressive and successful marketing is critical to staying afloat. Unfortunately, even the most basic e-commerce marketing techniques take quite some time to learn and perfect. And, if you have other essential responsibilities to attend to, devoting the appropriate amount of time and attention to your eCommerce marketing may be impossible.

But hold off on burying your head in the sand. Hiring an eCommerce marketing agency is a great method to kickstart your marketing without devoting all of your time to it.

Top Reasons to Hire an eCommerce Marketing Agency

1. PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Management Experience

If you’ve never done it before, setting up and sustaining paid campaigns can be frightening. After all, it’s not as simple as writing some content and giving Google your credit card number. In reality, a good PPC campaign necessitates a great deal of thought and scrutiny even after the ads are set up.

Hiring an eCommerce agency to handle your PPC advertisements will save you a lot of time and headaches. This is because they’ve already run thousands of identical campaigns and understand how to set up, adjust, and budget your advertising to get the most bang for your buck.

However, there is a distinction between an eCommerce marketing firm and any other marketing agency. It could be a red signal if the agency you’re considering has no prior experience working with eCommerce businesses. Even if they’ve added dozens of IT companies in achieving their objectives, that’s a different animal altogether. An agency with no eCommerce experience, for example, might be able to set up and run Google Shopping ads appropriately.

The agency should be able to develop a high-quality landing page that matches your ad, in addition to writing appealing material that entices visitors to click on your ad when they see it in search results. Inquire about testimonials or case studies from their other eCommerce success stories.

2. An Understanding of Creative Design

Another advantage of working with an eCommerce marketing agency is that they frequently have a design team that can collaborate with you to create custom creatives consistent with your brand’s concept and standards. The key to having your firm stand out and seem attractive to consumers—primarily if they’ve never heard of your brand before—is to use high-quality design. To raise your site’s authority and rating in search results, you’ll need a solid SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy in place.

If you rank higher in search results, you’ll get more organic traffic. A smart eCommerce marketing agency will optimise both on-page and off-page SEO through extensive keyword research, backlinking, site structure, and other tactics. If you were running a Facebook ad, for example, you’d want to utilise bright colours to catch people’s attention. While a plain black and white ad may appear smart, most people will scroll right past it without even noticing it. A professional eCommerce marketing agency will be able to present your products in an appealing, well-designed creative that attracts new customers and brand followers. A good eCommerce marketing firm will know a wide range of design styles and formats.

Aside from the visual component of your creatives, having well-written material is also crucial. While the image draws people’s attention, it is the copy that persuades them to visit your website and make a purchase. Hire a company with a content team that can develop a concise, compelling document that explains the product you’re selling.

3. Understanding of Facebook Marketing

Advertising on Facebook has a lot of benefits, especially if you’re running an online store. To begin with, anything from their age to the car they drive can be used to target billions of active consumers. The targeting features on Facebook are so exact that they’re a little perplexing until you look at them. While Facebook can be an extremely effective marketing tool, without the help of an expert, you may not get much of a return.

With so many active Facebook users, narrowing your audience to only those who will be most interested in your offering might be tricky. An eCommerce marketing agency can use your sales data to identify common demographics, hobbies, and behaviours that they can utilise to target new customers. They’ll also be able to install a Pixel on your site so that retargeting campaigns can be executed. Consumers who have already visited your site and demonstrated an interest in your products are targeted by retargeting campaigns. This is an effective strategy since it allows you to close sales that you might have missed otherwise.

Many rookie Facebook marketers make the fatal mistake of setting up their advertisements and ignoring them for a few weeks before checking in. If you hire an experienced eCommerce marketing agency, your campaigns will never go ignored. Instead, they’ll keep an eye on them regularly, making adjustments to your ads and budget as needed. They’ll also do A/B tests with Facebook’s various ad formats to discover which ones generate the most conversions for your company.

4. SEO Expertise

To raise your site’s authority and rating in search results, you’ll need a solid SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy in place. If you rank higher in search results, you’ll get more organic traffic. A smart eCommerce marketing agency will optimise both on-page and off-page SEO through extensive keyword research, backlinking, site structure, and other tactics.

The following are some common SEO features and tactics:

Keyword Research: Longtail keywords (three or more words) relevant to your content should be targeted. Aim for keywords with a reasonable monthly search volume and low to moderate competition. In general, ranking for keywords with a lot of competition is far more complex.

Keyword Optimisation: Keywords are only meant to be sprinkled liberally throughout blog posts. Alt tags, meta descriptions, page titles, headers and subheadings, product descriptions and names, picture names, and URLs should all contain keywords.

Site Speed: The speed of a website has an impact on SEO. This is because visitors will soon bounce off your page and click on a different search result if your site takes too long to load (greater than three seconds).

Errors on the Website: Broken links, duplicate content, and 404 error pages can all negatively impact the SEO value of your site. Ecommerce sites are notorious for being unmanageable due to the many products available. A poorly constructed site that is difficult to navigate for both users and search engines, on the other hand, might have a negative influence on your SEO.

Link Building: When done correctly, building external links back to your site can enhance your search value. Don’t just paste your URL and hit the “Post” button. Most websites require your web address as part of your user profile, so you don’t even need to offer a link. Contributing material to other websites can also help you build links (so long as it includes a link from your site).

If you engage an eCommerce marketing agency, most of these obligations will be taken care of for you. You also won’t have to worry about poor execution (potentially harming your SEO value). Choose a firm with previous eCommerce SEO experience, and make sure to ask for specific instances of how they were able to generate long-term results.

5. Professional-Level Content Marketing

One of the most critical aspects of an eCommerce marketing strategy is content. Still, many businesses don’t devote nearly as much time to it as they should—especially since it may be tough to keep up with new blogs and videos that appeal to your target audience. This is when the services of an eCommerce marketing agency with a skilled content marketing team come in helpful.

Blog material, videos, premium content (such as instructional booklets and buyer guides), and a distribution and promotion strategy should all be part of your content marketing strategy. Request a monthly content schedule from your firm, detailing when content draughts will be provided, when final draughts will be published, and which platforms they’ll utilise to promote them.

Before you start developing content on your own or through an agency, you should first figure out a few things:

• What are my goals?
• Who are my clients?
• What is the typical buyer path for one of my customers?
• How frequently will we be adding fresh content?
• What platforms will we use to promote this content?

 6. Email Marketing Expertise

Although email has been around since the dawn of the internet, it is still an extremely effective marketing tool. People prefer email to any other form of communication from businesses. Consumers check their email frequently for personal and work purposes, and mobile phones allow you to contact them anytime and from any location. However, because people receive so many emails each day, you’ll need an email marketing staff that understands how to design attention-grabbing emails.

The following are some significant aspects of email marketing:

The subject line is intriguing. Your email’s pickup line is the subject line. You don’t want to start with a cliche like “November Newsletter.” Write something that makes the viewer want to open the document and read what you offer. One effective strategy is to instil a sense of urgency in the customer, making them feel like they would miss out on something fantastic if they don’t take a look. “Hurry!” “Last Chance!” and “Today Only!” are just a few examples.

Engaging body content. Your goal is to keep the customer inside the email long enough for them to find your offer and click through to your website. Make sure the information is both exciting and relevant to your target demographic. Puns, for example, might be appropriate for a toy company, but a legal office might choose a more authoritative tone. 

An attractive design. If your email design is dull or unprofessional, many individuals will disregard your offer or unsubscribe from future communications. Make an appealing template that reflects your brand. However, don’t get too fancy with it—some servers may reject emails, including large image files or videos.

Segmented contacts. While it may be simpler to produce a single mass email and send it all at once, this isn’t the greatest strategy for email marketing. Instead, you should create separate contact lists for each type of communication. You may ensure that your subscribers only receive relevant and appealing emails to them in this way.

Emails that are both personalised and automated. You may personalise your emails by adding a contact’s initial name to the subject line or body content. Even something as simple as this can help boost open rates.

A clear CTA. It’s critical that the email recipient doesn’t get confused about what to do next after reading your message. It would help if you had a CTA button and explicitly declared your call-to-action in the body content. It’s also a good idea to hyperlink your header.

Non-promotional emails. You don’t have to send a promotional email with every email you send. You may, for example, provide free information to your members in the form of buying guides or ebooks. While this form of material does not directly promote your products, it does position you as an industry expert in the eyes of the consumer.

By designing interesting marketing emails that engage your subscribers and lead them to conversion, an eCommerce firm can help you get the most out of email marketing. They’ll also be able to create automated processes that send certain behaviour-triggered emails at various points of the buying process.

7. It Can Save You Money

Because an eCommerce marketing agency has extensive knowledge and experience in the areas discussed in this piece, there is less opportunity for error and lost ad spend, whereas tackling marketing tasks on your own entails a steep learning curve that can quickly deplete your budget. The goal of employing an agency is to ensure that the investment is repaid.

Top Benefits of E-commerce Marketing Agencies

Any of them can be expertly handled by e-commerce marketing services. Regardless of your current marketing techniques, there are several other advantages to collaborating with an e-commerce marketing agency.

• Experience

E-commerce marketing agencies have worked with a wide range of businesses in various industries. Your e-commerce company is only one of its many customers. Their teams know which audiences are interested in particular trends and what works and what doesn’t in various businesses.

These firms have enough experience to give you a broad perspective from which to strategise. They are well-versed in the intricacies of the e-commerce market. E-commerce marketing agencies can come up with fresh ideas based on their experience, or they may spot your e-commerce marketing mistakes and work to correct them.

• Adopting Flexible Marketing Strategies

Like marketing trends in general, the digital world moves at a breakneck pace. It’s challenging to keep up with these trends with your in-house team because they’re responsible for so many other aspects of your e-commerce firm. E-commerce marketing agencies, on the other hand, make it a point to stay up to date on the latest marketing technologies as part of their business.

E-commerce marketing organisations can assist you with altering market trends and unique marketing strategies. Using the abilities of a marketing firm will be incredibly beneficial to your e-commerce business, allowing you to dominate the market.

• Getting to Know the Latest Technologies

As a credible e-commerce firm, there is no doubt that you must rely on technology – while this pays off handsomely, keeping up with the latest advances costs money, time, and effort.

Hiring an e-commerce marketing agency has a lot of advantages in this case. Qualified agencies have easy access to the most up-to-date tools and products, as well as the ability to maintain premium subscriptions. These firms also have personnel with experience in numerous types of software, allowing them to respond quickly to your needs.

E-commerce marketing agencies can relieve you of the stress of establishing and testing new items thanks to their technological capabilities. Using a new tool is easier for your business with the help of a marketing agency. Instead of training your in-house team to use a new product or service, you can save time.

• Budget-Friendly Service Compared to Your In-House Team

It is not inexpensive to hire a marketing agency. When you include the hidden costs of attempting to achieve the same effect on your own, marketing companies offer a financial benefit. Keep in mind that you are hiring a fully equipped service.

Making your in-house team consistently follow the newest and best practices in this ever-changing digital environment can be rather costly. It will help if you put a lot of money into your employees by giving them new items and training to use them. When you consider their salary, benefits, and other expenses, it is not cost-effective.

The job description for the workforce of an e-commerce marketing firm is exactly what comes as an extra cost to you. When you evaluate every detail, it is a cost-effective alternative. Furthermore, by locating the most appropriate agency for your company, you can strike an economic deal.

Edited and published by Ashlyn Joy