Rohan Jahagirdar
Verified Expert in Marketing
Marketing Expert
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Toptal member since April 2, 2021
Rohan is a marketing expert with an outstanding track record of delivering top and bottom-line growth. He specializes in developing strategic narratives for leadership teams at technology-led companies across the eCommerce, banking, and healthcare industries. Rohan is keen on aligning product development, technology, sales, and marketing teams around a high-level story to prompt higher growth and improve customer engagement.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Banking & Finance
- Branding
- Content Strategy
- Customer Journey
- Email Marketing
- Fintech
- Storytelling
- eCommerce
Work Experience
Email Marketing Specialist
GRWS CORP.
- Developed a revised e-mail marketing strategy and cadence that improved CTR by 20% and purchase via email by over 25%.
- Designed new email templates on Klaviyo and HTML, devised new flows, and revised messaging for Klaviyo flows and manual campaigns.
- Established a new measurement framework that aligned with business goals.
Email Marketing Specialist
Teachable Inc.
- Owned a weekly digital newsletter cadence. This involved internal stakeholder alignment over content, marketing materials, customer segmentation, and targets.
- Managed an email design, set up the process using SFMC and Litmus, and optimized efficiency and engagement through strategic marketing automation techniques.
- Managed business intelligence (BI), content research, AI content creation, QA, email template design for autoresponders using GetResponse, customer segment definitions per content, and surveys through SurveyMonkey.
Business Analyst
Large US-based Japanese Fund - Administration Co.
- Managed the product development of an in-house banking and payments platform that replaced Oracle's banking products. User clients included IMs such as BlackRock, Blackstone, and Grosvernor, among others. The platform managed over $300 million in daily payment volume.
- Provided product-based solutions, aligned with the overarching product strategy to regulatory, legal, and technological challenges, and managed stakeholder expectations across several distributed teams in multiple geographies.
- Authored detailed project requirements by aligning multiple distributed teams. Managed product documentation, backlog, and sprints through the project lifecycle.
- Contributed to some great results. For the first time, the new platform achieved twice the volume in STP SWIFT transactions and five nines availability. The increased confidence in the new product helped 1.25x overall monthly transaction volume.
Product Manager
Large Israel-based eCommerce and Retail Company
- Worked with a Middle East-based, large-scale eCommerce player on their transition from a monolith to a headless commerce platform.
- Directed the solutions, tooling, and integration mechanism for multiple components as part of the product stack.
- Handled product execution and delivery for key components, including recommendations, checkout, and payments, and helped reduce implementation timelines by over 30%.
Co-founder and Head of Products
Shadegrown Tech Private
- Led engagements with financial entities to navigate challenges in neobanking, identity management, and 3rd-party API integrations. Customers included some of the world's largest payment companies, listed banks, and VC-funded startups.
- Directed a digital transformation engagement for a publicly listed bank. Architected a novel API stack that adopted cutting-edge PSD2 standards and enabled the integration of third parties with their core banking system.
- Implemented a lead management system built using Salesforce Sales Cloud with custom approval flows for multiple roles and profiles and integrating with Google Maps API, Oracle Responsys, sales strategy, and content strategy.
- Partnered with one of India's largest AMCs to build an IFTTT channel, connecting external events with savings. Racked up 5,000+ users in four months on a zero-dollar marketing budget.
- Collaborated with a marquee fintech startup with marketing budgeting to design and build a new challenger banking app focused on urban millennial audience segments in entry-level jobs.
- Co-authored an essay for the EPW Journal on India's newly proposed policy on setting up data brokers for financial institutions. The essay was selected as part of the reading list for a parliamentary session discussing the policy.
- Teamed with a major IT consulting company to create a GTM strategy for a new division aiming to enter and serve the US market. Helped identify and prioritize target accounts. Set up and scaled ABM campaigns using Marketo to engage with stakeholders.
- Collaborated with the leadership of an early-stage VC-funded cancer care aggregator to optimize new user conversion. Helped optimize the onboarding funnel using Intercom product tours, capture questions, and users' latent interests.
Product Owner – Supply Side
Nestaway
- Directed end-to-end audience development and implementation of an in-house developed ERP system that integrated with 300+ users across functions.
- Replaced a Salesforce implementation with the purpose-built, scalable ERP system (based on ERPNext) that seamlessly integrated the sales strategy and sales, business finance, supply chain, and operations teams across multiple cities.
- Led the effort to build a modular supply selection tool that used over 35 data points to score incoming homeowner leads and provide estimates on rental revenues. The internal tool drove up the utilization factor by 2x.
Director, Growth
Teabox
- Led all aspects of growth, product marketing, video marketing, cross-channel marketing and content strategy, competitive pricing strategy, and sales strategy as a member of the founding team.
- Grew the company from under 200 customers to over 100,000 retail customers and over 10,000 SMB clients in 75 countries.
- Managed customer acquisition efforts that drove growth experiments, induced trials, and optimized onboarding experience and purchase funnel.
- Directed a digital branding and guest posting effort with the renowned design agency Pentagram. The exercise helped immensely improve user experience and received significant international press coverage.
- Achieved scale in international press coverage, including from major publications such as Wired, Forbes, Bloomberg, and CNN. Handled copy editing and copywriting responsibilities.
- Directed the launch of the Teabox US store on Amazon, integrating Amazon FBA as a component of a comprehensive omnichannel marketing strategy. Expanded the store's operations to contribute 30% to the monthly gross merchandise value (GMV).
Assistant Manager – Customer Retention
Flipkart
- Partnered with technology and category teams to enhance eCommerce SEO strategies, leveraging marketing communication (MarCom), including personalized email marketing and mobile notifications, as an effective customer retention channel.
- Co-led efforts to build an internal product that enabled segmentation and automation based on behavior that drove up revenues from repeat purchases by 5x to $1.5 million per month in less than one year.
- Outlined customer segments based on recency, frequency, and monetary spending and streamlined the communication and sales strategy for each segment.
Project History
Identity and Brand Revision for Teabox
Led the effort to redefine the brand identity and design architecture, which led to a significant uplift in conversions and tangible improvements with the CX metrics. Wired magazine called it "super hip and made for the future."
Teabox is an Accel-funded vertically integrated brand that ships high-quality teas from India to customers across the world. The key target markets include the US, the UK, and Western Europe.
I worked with one of the partners from Pentagram and spearheaded all the aspects of the brand revision project from Teabox’s end.
Specifically, I worked on the following:
• Undertook a detailed consumer research study that enabled us to develop a nuanced understanding of user persona’s behavioral and tangible motivations.
• Developed a strategic narrative that clarified the value proposition and the brand attributes that lent credence to the narrative.
• Worked with the Pentagram team to design a new visual identity, including a new color scheme, typeface, logos, and marketing collateral. The new design system was deployed across all digital, web and mobile, and physical properties, such as product packaging.
The engagement helped deliver a 75 basis points uplift in sales conversions, clarify the narrative, and improve brand recognition over the long term. It also received praise and recognition from several international publications, including Wired, FastCompany, and BP&O.
Transforming Customer Journey for an Online Cancer Care Aggregator
Worked with the CEO and leadership team of a growing cancer care aggregator to transform the user onboarding experience and identify new opportunities. The exercise resulted in an overall conversion uplift of 300% and notable revenue gains.
The organization, a fast-growing online cancer care platform, was ready to look at the user journey and product offerings completely anew. I led the company’s transformation by working out a new digital strategy and aligning the leadership team with it.
Specifically, I worked on the following:
• Conducted user research that revealed that customers wanted the onboarding process to be more conversational, self-serving, and in local languages.
• Built a thorough understanding of the jobs to be done and aligned the teams on the strategic narrative framed around the jobs.
• Transformed the entire customer onboarding flow with an automated, one-on-one chat-based interface that gave the users the personal attention they deserved while serving at scale.
• Integrated event-based triggers through the flow with CRMs, support flows, and marketing communications.
• Built integrated conversational flows on popular chat platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram with web properties.
• Identified ancillary opportunities and built a framework to test and launch new business lines.
• Set up and monitored actionable metrics and CXO dashboards.
A Digital Transformation for an Up-and-coming Bank
Led the product and strategy engagement to launch a fully digital bank in an emerging economy with improving internet connectivity and rising mobile phone availability.
One of our clients, an up-and-coming bank with 200,000+ retail customers, wanted to navigate the changing financial landscape and make deep inroads into digital financial products for emerging urban audiences.
My co-founder, a team of engineers and designers, and I worked closely with the client to build the product line from the ground up.
Over 24 weeks, I led the efforts on:
• Identifying new audience targets, principal use cases, and operating models.
• Defining a working strategy, pricing strategy, and value proposition for a new bank.
• Building the first versions of the products to attract a new segment of customers. And further designing a long-term roadmap for the team to implement post-engagement.
• Identifying opportunities and weaknesses in the existing back-end system—specifically with the user identity, authorization, authentication schema, and solution of new components where needed, using the latest DevOps and API infra practices.
• Implementing Salesforce Sales Cloud, building a custom approval flow based on various roles and profiles of the bank’s users, and integrating Oracle’s Responsys.
• Conducting workshops for customer-facing product and technology teams to build a digital-focused culture and capabilities.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering
National Institute of Technology Rourkela - Rourkela, India
Skills
Core
Content Strategy, Branding, Customer Segmentation, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing Automation, Email Marketing, Social Media Design, Audience Targeting, Paid Advertising, Public Relations (PR), Brand Strategy, Marketing Communications (MarCom), Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy, Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, Marketing Strategy, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Content, Digital Marketing, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Marketing Analytics, Google SEO, Social Media, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Digital Marketing Strategy, Social Media Strategy, Omnichannel Marketing, Marketing Leadership, Content Marketing, Writing & Editing, Copywriting, Lead Generation, Account Planning, Agile, Marketing, Funnel Optimization, Marketing Budgeting, Responsive Email Templates, Financial Marketing, Elevator Pitches, Agile Transformation, Brand Consulting
Platforms & Tools
Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Mailchimp, Content Management Systems (CMS), Klaviyo, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), HubSpot Marketing Hub, Google Analytics, Marketo, CRM Systems, GetResponse, Amazon FBA, SendinBlue
Business Models
B2C, Business to Business (B2B), B2B
Other
Fintech, Onboarding, Direct to Consumer (D2C), Marketplaces, Personalization, Customer Journey, Customer Research, Storytelling, eCommerce, Implementation, Lead Marketing, Product Branding, Sales Pitches, Pitch Decks, Brand Positioning, Market Segmentation, Research, Creative Strategy, Growth Marketing, Paid Media, Drip Email, Go-to-market Plans, Startup Marketing, Email Template Design, Marketing Attribution, Data Collection, Dashboards, Shopify, Banking & Finance, Data Analysis, Product Strategy, Sales Strategy, Content Management, Intercom, Data Analytics, Kissmetrics, Direct Mail, WordPress, WooCommerce, Engineering, Programming, Python, APIs, PSD2, Event Marketing, Oracle FLEXCUBE, Jira, Product Roadmaps, Salesforce, Product Launch, Pricing Strategy, Jobs to be Done (JTBD), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Mobile UI, Stakeholder Management, Data Strategy, Analytics, Web Analytics, New Product Development, International Payments, eCommerce SEO, Autoresponders, Email Autoresponders, Shopify SEO, Copy Editing, Guest Posting, Business Intelligence (BI), Video Marketing, SurveyMonkey, AI Content Creation, Cross-channel Marketing, Digital Newsletters, Competitive Pricing, Content Research, Audience Development, Marketing Materials, User Stories, SaaS Sales, ConvertKit, D2C Branding Strategy, Client Services, Web Trends, Yahoo Ads, Content Personalization, Tech Sales
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