Since the introduction of memberships in December 2015, a value proposition for customers, ikman.lk has reported exponential growth in the number of customers opting for memberships, a true testament to the success of this service. Memberships offer advertisers their own dedicated page on ikman.lk, which will display all their recently posted classified ads, which brings about significant benefits including convenience and greater sales.
According to ikman.lk memberships are targeted at all 16 categories on the website, and its category management team has been aggressively marketing memberships to advertisers who fall into these categories with impressive results. For instance, ikman.lk has identified that there are approximately 800-1,000 car dealers in the country and over 600 have already signed up for memberships within the first year of its launch. ikman’s property, electronics, general and jobs categories have also experienced similar growth averaging around 500 members a month. Since December last year the number of SMEs subscribing for memberships have grown to over 3,000 as at today, with ikman expressing confidence that 5,000 members can be reached by the end of the financial year in April 2017.
Speaking about this impressive growth, Mr. Ravi de Mel,Director Category Management of ikman.lk said, “The success of our membership service can be attributed to two main factors. Firstly, the significant value and benefits it offers advertisers and secondly, the efforts of our category management team who have gone into educating SMEs on the benefits of this service. We are fully confident that the success we have experienced in these categories can be replicated across all categories on ikman.lk.”
Some of the unique benefits of having a memberships are; a unique link which will show up on search engines, a company profile, branding, contact information, opening hours and postal and web addresses. In addition to this, a number of free premium listings are included at no extra cost every month further brining grater visibility of ads resulting in increased inquiries.Customers can also take advantage of ikman’s dedicated CM support team who are on call to assist them to post their ads.
This service has also led to an increase in entrepreneurs starting up their own businesses from home as the marketing aspects can be handled entirely online as a result of this service from ikman.lk. The monitoring of the success of their advertising can also be done as ikman provides a monthly summary with all statistics including the number of clicks on the membership page and the number of clicks on each ad displayed on the membership page, an indicator of how many people have viewed the ad and so on.
Speaking about his experience with memberships Mr. Prageeth De Alwis, a furniture dealer who operates his business from home under the name Unique Marketing House was full of praise for this service. “My business was always doing well thanks to ikman.lk but with the introduction of their membership service, business has really started to boom. Since going in for memberships I have noticed a 100% increase in monthly sales and on average 10 times more clicks on a post,” he stated.“This service has greatly helped me take my business to the next level and the ability to monitor all traffic to my page is a great asset in taking important decisions with regards to the running of my business,” he concluded.