Welcome Gökmen Kavlak, VP Sales & Partnerships, Storyly sharing his insights and experiences on Customer Engagement, MarTech Trends and Gamification, as part of the MarTech Thoughts series.

What is your industry? And how would you explain your job to a 5-year-old?

Storyly is the user engagement platform to embed full-screen, interactive, and captivating content format of the day, Stories in mobile apps and websites. So basically, our industry is Software as a Service (SaaS).

What I do at Storyly as VP of Sales and Partnerships is like having a food stand. But we are not sellers, we are advisors to people who are hungry and don’t know what to eat. Together with my team, we are talking to people to explain why our food is exactly what they need so they will feel full and energized. But of course, not everyone has tasted our food before so we also want to go and meet the people in other neighborhoods and educate them about why they need to taste our food. And my job is also making friends with people who can help us sell our food not just in our neighborhood but also in other neighborhoods. Finally, we tell our cooks how to make the food taste better based on what people tell us.

And Storyly is like a magical way of helping companies show images and videos about their products and services. But instead of using a tiny part of the screen of the mobile phone, they can use the whole screen. And users can click on the Stories they want to see and then they can even swipe through them just like you would with a storybook. These Stories can be full of fun and interactive things like quizzes and games. Storyly makes the content of the apps and websites a lot more interesting.

What is the one marketing platform/app/solution you can’t live without? Why?

Salesforce.

Because it makes it easier to manage the sales pipeline and streamlines the business processes by automating them. Most importantly, it provides deep and actionable customer insights. And the fact that it can be tailored to a business’s needs makes it stand out.

What will be the next evolution in marketing technology that we can expect in the coming years?

AI is a frequent conversation topic across all industries. Marketing technology is no exception. We will see increased use of AI and machine learning in MarTech products and it will automate many tasks while also improving efficiency.

The innovations in MarTech will change how businesses measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, content, and targeting efforts. Thanks to the data capabilities they will provide, businesses will be able to make analyses on a granular level and identify patterns that can inform marketing and communications strategies.

And of course, the changes expected in MarTech will allow for delivering better customer experiences and better customer service. The same data analysis capabilities will make segmentation easier and personalization even more effective than it is today. Eventually, marketers will see a boost in their conversion rates as well as customer loyalty. Being able to deep-dive into user needs will help understand and forecast the demand better.

With more consumers being conscious of their data being shared, how do you overcome the growing concern?

Google’s plan to phase out cookies and Apple introducing ATT on top of the data regulations by governments all around the world will make tracking users and collecting data about their needs and preferences more and more challenging. But data is the nutritional source of marketing. The data tells marketers what consumers expect or do not want.

But we are living in an era of privacy concerns. Consumers do not want their data passed around and that’s why marketers will have to “earn” the data that will provide them the key insights about their consumers. At Storyly, we are helping marketers to overcome those concerns by enabling them to earn that data through our interactive components like quizzes, polls, and question stickers. This is called zero-party data, which is the data 100% voluntarily provided by the user. So, Storyly customers can simply create Stories in their apps or on their websites, place whichever interactive component they want onto the Stories, ask whatever they want to their users, and gather insights about them. Later on, they can use this data to segment their users and retarget them with personalized content. It is a win-win for both parties if you think about it as the users know what the data they are sharing is being used for and get a tailored experience out of it. Moreover, it is a fun way of collecting data and we’ve found that interactive Story quizzes and polls can have response rates up to 46%, showing that users love sharing their opinions and preferences.

What are the top priorities for a MarTech Stack Optimisation Strategy to achieve?

To improve personalised customer experience

What is the greatest roadblock in trialling the new innovations in Marketing Technologies?

Prioritization of the trying new innovation regarding the budget, time, and energy

Which MarTech solution/platform will you invest in if you’re an angel investor?

User retention is a huge problem for marketers these days. Though the users are spending more time online, they are also more distracted. There is fierce competition for attention today and it is not an easy battle. Also, the cost of acquiring new users is higher than retaining existing ones. That’s why I would invest in a solution focused on retention and engagement. And that solution would be Storyly. Not only because I am the VP of Sales & Partnerships at Storyly, but also because we are actually offering a whole new, full-screen, and interactive channel with diverse capabilities from shoppable content to personalization and gamification.

What’s the best approach/tools to understand customer pain points? Especially when the survey response rate is low.

Adopting non-intrusive and fun methods. Pop-ups might interrupt the user experience. Answering a survey is the last thing you would want to do when you are browsing an online store for a t-shirt. But if you can manage to integrate the feedback mechanism into the experience and make it a natural part of it, that will definitely result in more responses that can inform your business and marketing strategy. That’s what we are aiming for with Storyly’s interactive stickers. Users watch Storyly Stories as a part of their experience and voluntarily. So, when they see a poll asking for their favorite product, they just tap on it and that’s all.

How do you foresee the role of gamification across industries?

Gamification is not a new concept and it is not going anywhere either. Games are as old as civilization; they are fun, motivating, and engaging. And when a non-game task or context is gamified, it is the same. That task immediately becomes an engaging experience.

In exchange for a reward for completing tasks, people are willing to challenge themselves. No wonder why there are many mobile apps out there, like Duolingo, that build the whole experience on gamification. In a recent report, it was stated that gamification tactics have increased both engagement and loyalty by up to 30% for several retail giants like eBay, and Walgreens.

What’s more, they are easy to implement. Daily trivia quizzes, scavenger hunts that combine online and offline experiences, rewarding certain milestones such as completed profile information, first purchase, or one-year anniversary in the app, gamified onboarding flows with progress bars and achievements… They are all a great way of fuelling engagement and retention.

What’s the best advice someone has ever given you?

1^365=1 but 1.01^365=37.7. Constant efforts make a huge difference in time!

Join Storyly with The MarTech Summit Berlin on 22 March 2023!

Follow Gökmen on LinkedIn, and find out more about Storyly at their sponsor page: https://themartechsummit.com/sponsors/storyly/

See more MarTech Thoughts interview posts here: https://themartechsummit.com/category/martech-thoughts/

Last updated: March 2023