CaratLane – A Digital Marketing Strategy by Disha Shah and Divya Sakariya

CaratLane is the biggest online jewellery company in India. Its inventory includes diamond jewellery and gold coins. It is headquartered in Chennai, and it was founded by Mithun Sacheti and Srinivasa Gopalan in 2008. Today, 10 years after its inception, it has just opened its 39th store in the country, penetrating the market through their physical establishments as well as their online presence.

This case study is created from the research, analysis, and solutions of the student team from our Post-Graduation Programme in Digital Marketing, consisting of Disha Shah and Divya Sakariya. They have prepared a digital marketing strategy for the brand that will help them fully explore their potential. Let’s dive right into it.

About CaratLane

In 2008, gold prices kept rising and jewellery stores kept expanding—and yet the choices for jewellery continued to be limited and disappointing. Customers tended to buy jewellery and keep them in safes for years, which led them to be unusable on a daily basis.

Observing this market trend, Sacheti, based on his experience at Jaipur Gems, an online jewellery store, decided that the future of jewellery was going to be digital. Fascinated by how people were willing to buy jewellery like diamonds online based solely on read information, he teamed up with Gopalan to launch CaratLane.

After tasting success in the digital arena, CaratLane decided to expand to physical stores as well in order to establish itself as an omnichannel player. In 2016, they created the Perfect Look app, which allowed customers to ‘sample’ the jewellery they wanted to buy online. This was India’s first online jewellery try-on app! This was a blessing to several customers who wished to see how they would look in a particular piece without actually buying it. This made the experience of shopping for jewellery online extremely similar to that of jewellery shopping in physical stores. The growth of the Perfect Look app has been absolutely organic and 20-25% of CaratLane’s sales originate from there. In the future, they aim to drive more traffic towards the app.

By 2020, CaratLane aims to be a Rs. 1,500 crore business and own 50 stores across India. Their primary goal is to instil trust regarding shopping for jewellery online in the minds of Indian buyers. Our students have devised a digital marketing strategy to help them achieve this goal. Let’s have a look!

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation refers to the usage of particular keywords in order to ensure the maximum amount of traffic on a brand’s website. These keywords are those that have the highest search rates on Google from their target customers. If a website is able to optimise itself based on the search engine’s keywords, then it is certain that it will be able to reach the maximum amount of relevant people.

Some of the most popular keywords for CaratLane are cocktail rings online, 24-carat gold ring price, engagement rings online, bracelets for men, buy couple bands online and solitaire pendant designs. This means that whenever someone searches for these terms online, CaratLane’s results are the first that pop up.

Often, brands bid on certain search terms to ensure that when users search these particular terms on the internet, the particular brand’s page pops up as one of the first results. This may be useful for CaratLane in reference to other words that it could really capitalise on if they were able to be one of the top results.

Some of the suggested bid words for CaratLane are wedding bands for women, sterling silver earrings online, fashion jewellery stores, halo diamond ring, buy anniversary gifts online, women’s fashion jewellery online and custom pendants online. This ensures that when someone searches for the said terms online, they are bound to encounter CaratLane’s website as one of the first results. This makes the website more accessible to the people looking to shop for jewellery online, which is ultimately the group of people CaratLane wants most to reach out to. Developing an SEO Strategy has surely benefited CaratLane Digital Marketing Strategy!

Social Media Marketing

One of the key factors towards the success of any business these days, especially e-commerce businesses, is social media. And CaratLane, in the space of 10 years, has already learned this. They have 1.6 million likes on Facebook, 50k followers on Instagram and 4k followers on Twitter.

Some social media campaigns they carry out in order to further increase their following are #WomenOfMettle wherein the brand posted creatives and pictures of women they paid an ode to. This was carried out to celebrate their 7th anniversary in 2015. This campaign trended on Twitter in the #1 spot for quite a while! CaratLane even created a separate microsite for further elaboration of this campaign. This website featured statistics and nuggets of information about women in India and a Twitter plugin that succeeded in displaying all posts under the #WomenOfMettle tag on Twitter on the website as well. CaratLane Digital Marketing Strategy was found to be very successful.

Competitors

CaratLane’s main competitor on a national level is BlueStone.com, whereas the Blue Nile is their international competitor. Comparing the digital marketing strategies of these brands would give us a better idea of how CaratLane stands amongst its main competitors.

When speaking of Facebook, CaratLane has 1.6 million likes, whereas BlueStone.com has only 728k. However, Blue Nile beats out CaratLane by boasting a whopping 1.8 million Facebook likes. At the same time, Blue Nile has 119k followers on Instagram whereas CaratLane has 49.9k and BlueStone.com 11.1k. On Twitter as well, Blue Nile has the maximum amount of followers, 18.6k, whereas CaratLane has 3.9k and Bluestone.com has 2.7k followers. However, between the three, CaratLane has the lowest bounce rate (37%) whereas the rest of the websites have a bounce rate of 40%. This proves that CaratLane has the most engaging content and is able to convert the maximum amount of website visitors into buyers of their products.

One of BlueStone.com’s most successful social media campaigns has been #BeLikeAlia. This involved the promotion of online shopping with Alia Bhatt as the brand ambassador. It included slogans like, When Alia shops, shutters never go down. BlueStone.com often also hosts online contests in which they post pictures of jewellery and ask their followers to describe how they would style those particular pieces. They also post festive posts and use a lot of hashtags. These activities ensure that their engagement rate stays high and that they remain relevant to their followers’ feeds.

Blue Nile has initiated campaigns like #BlueNileMoms, which encouraged children to buy jewellery from the Blue Nile as a gift for their mothers and post something positive about them along with the hashtag #BlueNileMoms. Blue Nile also hosts online contests and giveaways, along with product promotions and extracts from blog posts. The Blue Nile has incredibly interactive social media.

Target Audience

CaratLane mainly caters to women between the ages of 25-50 years of age. The women are placed in metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. They belong to the upper-middle-income class. Their target woman loves jewellery or has a specific inclination towards diamonds and gold. They may also target married men who want to buy presents for their wives who belong to the above category.

Content Bucket

One way to engage your customers and ensure that they stay on your brand’s website for a longer duration of time is to provide them with interesting blogs, product posts, and festive content to browse through.

Informational and testimonial blogs are two examples of content that could go down well with CaratLane’s audience. They might include blogs about which jewel you should wear according to your zodiac sign.

Product posts featuring new arrivals or pictures of celebrities sporting the brand’s jewellery are a few examples of content that the brand could create to ensure that website visitors spend more time with CaratLane online!

Online Reputation Management

A few online platforms that could be of use to CaratLane’s online reputation management (ORM) are Pinterest, Twitter, review-based websites (like Mouth Shut), e-magazines (like Grazia and Elle), jewellery blogs (like Jewellery Craze and Gemologue), jewellery certification websites and app review websites. These platforms help the customers share their reviews of CaratLane’s products and therefore spread the word!

Complaints on Mouth Shut could also be tended to more often in order to avoid giving off a negligent and nonchalant attitude.

Email Marketing

An Email Marketing system that strategically targets CaratLane’s prime customers is the need of the hour. Our students have come up with a strategy they feel would be of benefit. They have devised an email marketing system that includes:

• Greeting mail

• Discount voucher (and a follow-up mail if they do not use it)

• Regular updates

• Sales Updates

• Engagement mails

 

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing refers to collaborating with social media influencers to promote your brand. As influencers have a large following on social media, they are an excellent method of reaching your target audience and maximising your brand’s reach.

CaratLane could conduct influencer campaigns in which it approaches influencers to post about their brand. For example, Aashna Shroff, who has a following of 471k on Instagram and 88k on YouTube, is a beauty and lifestyle influencer who could do an Instagram post wearing CaratLane’s collection. This would encourage the influencer’s followers to check out CaratLane as well, and perhaps be convinced to buy their jewellery.

 

Conclusion

 

Carat Lane is a unique company in a country like India. It has so far understood its target audience well and positioned itself accordingly in the ideal digital and physical locations. Their marketing strategy is clearly the reason for its rapid rise in repute and size. 

If you wish to learn the skills to analyse and decode digital marketing strategies like our students have demonstrated here today, get in touch with us and start your digital marketing journey right away.

Thank you for reading this case study. If you liked our solutions and content, be sure to let us know in the comments below!