Vincent Saint-Martin | CX spotlight
Vincent is a true Renaissance Man. A civil engineering graduate with a Master’s degree in finance, he’s worked as a banker, a broker, and an entrepreneur in London, the Congo, and Paris. Vincent’s most recent challenge is reinventing Europe’s car sharing market at OuiCar as Chief Marketing Officer and Country Manager for their Spanish market.
What is Ouicar?
French-based Ouicar is a peer-to-peer car sharing platform. Anyone can list their own car on the platform and rent it out to other users — it’s as simple as that. OuiCar provides the platform, sorts out the costs, and handles insurance.
As of now, we currently have 30,000 cars all over France. We will soon be launching in a number of other countries — we’ve identified Spain in particular as the next big market.
How important has Mobile been for Ouicar?
Mobile is not just to replicate what you are doing on on the web. It is much more powerful.
Vincent Saint-Martin, Chief Marketing Officer and Country Manager at OuiCar
Mobile has been massive for us. When we started, smartphones were nowhere near as common as they are today, and there was no 4G. However, we knew that if we could do everything on the app — listing a car, having a marketplace, signing contracts — then we’d go far.
I think that too many companies in Europe are still web-first. The modern consumer quickly becomes frustrated if things don’t go their way; if a webpage struggles to load on their mobile, they’ll just click off and find another site. We should closely follow places like Africa in the coming year, they are already ahead of us in terms of mobile adoption and I am sure they will inspire the rest of the world.
Tell us a bit about your Growth Stack
Our growth has been accelerated by three main components: Data, Insights and Marketing Automation. We have been doing lots of optimisations on our business models through data and insights. Thanks to our processes, we have been able to serve more customers, more profitably with less cars.
1) Data: we’ve always tried to stay on top of collecting, organising, and using all available data sources. No matter your business or your industry, you should always put your data at the heart of whatever you do. We were lucky enough to have a team of in-house data scientists to help us with this on an ongoing basis.
2) Insights: here at Ouicar, we have invested in tools to make analytics simple and available to every single employee. After all, what’s the point in having such useful information if nobody can even access it?
3) Marketing Automation: to execute on these insights, we use Batch to streamline our mobile messaging communications and Salesforce for the other channels. However, we faced a lot of challenges setting it up — so you need to make sure you have the right team to help set up these tools and get to value quickly.
What advice would you give to fellow marketers trying to grow their business?
Our biggest challenge when we started was getting strong data about our prospects and our users (both on web and on mobile). Marketing attribution has been crucial; you really want to get as detailed a view as possible about your cross-channel customer journeys.
If you do this successfully, you’ll be able to easily calculate the average revenue per user per channel — this is really helpful in guiding your marketing strategy going forward.
Another key lesson is to engage data analytics personnel as early as possible. For a long time, whenever we wanted to speak about data, someone would come to the meeting armed with a whole load of arbitrary figures… And the entire meeting consisted of debating these figures rather than making any concrete conclusions.
I have one final piece of advice to leave you with: Just get started.
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