How to effectively communicate with India’s small businesses

Even when something’s free, it will cost money.

At least, that’s what our suppliers thought.Even when we offered our suppliers free credits they thought it would be a liability.

Why? The usage of the word “cost” and “₹”.

From “Add to Cart” to “Estimated Delivery Date”, a lot of thought goes into writing every small text on our app. Here is a peek into how our UX team solved a huge gap in our cataloguing problem through effective communication:

Problem Identified 🕵️

Catalogue uploading is the most critical action our suppliers must take. In fact, for effective selling on Meesho, a suppliers must upload a minimum of 7 catalogues within the first 30 days of creating their account.

However, we discovered that many of our suppliers did not have the motivation to complete catalogue uploads. These required our suppliers to supply product info such as size, colour, category, etc., which proved to be too time consuming. This step was eating into their business hours. Moreover, some suppliers also face technical issues that weren’t promptly addressed.

The Solution : Incentive Bundling Project 💰

We needed our suppliers to complete catalogue uploading. The obvious solution was to incentivise this step. So, we did.

We offered monetary credit to suppliers who upload a minimum of 7 catalogues. Suppliers could use this credit to create advertising campaigns on Meesho and boost their business. Additionally, we released other secondary rewards aimed at improving the satisfaction metrics amongst our suppliers.

We identified two entry points to place the communication banner:

1. First, the most obvious real estate… the home screen
2. Second, the advertisement section that a supplier could access through their account. This is a high visibility spot which receives ~230,000 visits per day and ~37,000 unique users every month

Now with the banner placement set, we moved onto creating a content hierarchy that helped weave the ‘Incentive Bundling’ story with intuitive design.

While design grabs the attention of a supplier, content informs them of the value proposition. Design and content (UX copy), thus, go hand-in-hand.

But things went wrong before they got right.

The Goof Up 🙈

The above banner was added to the the advertisement section.What we found:

• Users did not understand the term “ad credit” and “worth”
• With the word “free” and the amount “1200” so far apart, our suppliers didn’t realise that we were giving them 1200 ad credits for free
• The usage of “₹” confused our users into thinking that we were asking them to spend INR 1200

Course correction 💡

• We orchestrated intensive User Testing (UT), where we interacted at length with our suppliers to understand the way they speak and comprehend English. This led us to some revelations. We replaced “Ads Credit” with “Advertisement Balance.” While the word “balance” explicitly told our users that “1200” is what remains with them, “advertisement” was way more comprehensible to our suppliers than “ads” or even “advertising”
• Lastly, we placed 1200 next to “Free.” This removed any remaining confusion and we clearly communicated that it was free balance for ads

More Goof Ups 😬

The banner above was placed on the home screen to convey to our users that they were now part of the “Supplier Plus” programme. But…

• Suppliers had no clue about what ‘Supplier Plus’ actually meant.
• They interpreted the phrase “you are now part of” as a membership programme that could be extended after the first 30 days.
• The banner didn’t convey where or how suppliers could “use rewards”.

Essentially, this banner didn’t reassure our suppliers regarding their business growth. Meanwhile, the rewards screen (aka the page where suppliers see the rewards available to them) was causing more confusion to the suppliers too.Here’s a sample rewards screen:

• “Upload 4 more catalogues” was not the right way to communicate with our users
• Our UT showed that the terms such as “advertising,” “returns placed,” “applicable,” “penalty,” and “worth” were incomprehensible to our users
• Our suppliers interpreted “callback within 1 day” in Catalogue Manager Support card as “they would get just one call” from Meesho’s support team.
• Penalty for cancellations was not a point of concern for our suppliers if at least cancellation within the first 30 orders were waived off.
• The ‘days left’ part were repetitive.
• There was no follow up on ‘Boost Your Business’ mentioned in screen 2

When we got it right 🙌

We changed our language to match the expectation of our users. For example, we explained what “Supplier Plus” is but simply putting it after the key term “Boost your business” in the home page banner. We also added “See Rewards” as the Call To Action, which became an exploratory trigger for the suppliers to see what the reward section is about.

We also made the following changes to the rewards screen:

• We replaced “4 more” with “4/7” which made the communication about number of catalogues to be uploaded explicit and simple
• We replaced “callback within 1 day” with “receive call back within 24 hours”
• We shortened the subtexts and removed terms that were foreign to our user base and replaced “days left” with “rewards expire on” at the top of the banner, which created a sense of urgency and eliminated repetition
• And finally, we gave a coveted spot to the “Boost your business” buzz phrase.

UT has been key to our deep understanding of how Bharat’s e-commerce users communicate online. We were sufficiently surprised to learn how the placement of words can completely change the perception of our messaging. We also learnt that not all short, crisp sentences float well with our suppliers. Some occasions call for over communication. Longer sentences = Better comprehension.

After making these small but incremental changes we found our suppliers starting to feel more comfortable using the various features on the Meesho platform, and finally taking action quicker on our app and website.

The Takeaways ⭐

• Involve: Work on content at early stages. Content has a big say in the design stages
• Ask: Talking to users is the best way to gauge what will work and what won’t. This includes terminologies, nomenclatures, etc.
• Evolve: The order of words, their proximity to other elements in design, their spacing may change the whole meaning for the user. Know what these nitty-kitties are and evolve with your user’s behaviour

While the impacts metrics of this project pour-in, the user testing and feedback is positive. But there is always leeway to evolve and adapt. After all, we are building for the next billion.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Heli Fajalia (Product Designer) and Avinash Paadhi and Vennela (Product Managers)

If you want to work on such unique challenges and build for the next billion, check out our careers page for our openings.