| | August 20228IN MY OPINIONBy Nidhi Gupta, Director, Head of Global GTM & Product Marketing, Payments at eBayWe need to embrace data to make more informed decisions." It's a common line heard by marketing professionals today, however, many teams don't know where to start, in leveraging data to inform strategies.At eBay, data is essential to our success and enables us to better understand our customers. As of Q3 2020, eBay had 1.6B listings, 183M active buyers, 452M app downloads and $25B gross merchandise volume. At this scale, the smallest changes can impact large numbers of users, and we use data to continuously drive our strategy.eBay is transforming payments on its platform and creating a simpler, more unified experience for consumers with more payment options, streamlining operations for sellers, and providing one place to sell and get paid. The payments initiative is a great example of how data is being used to drive go-to-market strategies and communications. 1. Understanding the customerOur marketing campaigns aim to drive awareness and adoption of payments with sellers on the platform, transitioning them to a new way of getting paid on eBay. As part of this transition, sellers are required to complete registration, providing their information and agreeing to the new terms. As eBay rapidly moves to manage majority of payments on its platform by the end of 2021, all sellers will eventually need to register. However, as the platform is being developed, only sellers who use compatible features are asked to register at given points in time. Complex segmentation is used to map a seller's past sales history, sales categories, HARNESSING THE POWER OF DATA TO TRANSFORM DIGITAL PAYMENTSgeographic profile, and features leveraged on the platform. Based on these attributes, sellers are placed in specific cohorts with messaging tailored to the seller's profile. 2. Align communication to the seller journeyBased on this customer profile, we craft cohort-based communications for each seller. A key learning has been the response associated to deadlines. We found that if we started communication too far ahead of deadlines, it yielded lower engagement with sellers and they were less likely to act upon the call to action. Regardless of country or profile, sellers universally wait until deadlines are very near to act. Using this data, we optimized the journey from a few months to a few weeks, and in parallel leveraged smaller cohorts to provide greater granularity on deadlines. Foundational to eBay's uniqueness is its consumer or individual sellers, that typically engage less frequently on the site. Guided by focus groups, user interviews, product data and A/B testing, we found these sellers preferred direct and transparent messaging with a clear call to action that highlighted what was changing to the way they did business on eBay. Leveraging this qualitative and quantitative data to shape our approach allowed us to quickly optimize registration conversion rates. Nidhi Gupta
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