Yury Tsoy, Head of Marketing: "Yury Tsoy on his successful career in global companies"

Yury, what is your current experience and what do you do today?

For more than 11 years I have been involved in both large E-commerce projects that are known worldwide, and unknown startups that later became significant players in their markets. I have worked in large companies such as ABBYY USA, Google, Mail.ru Group, and Yandex, and I have worked in different fields in different countries, including insurance, banking, logistics, and digital, in short - I work in the most competitive niches and markets.

Currently I work at Yandex.Eats and Mobility in the CIS countries, Latin American countries and Europe. I am responsible for attracting clients and getting big businesses to use our logistics and food delivery systems.

You made your way from BBDO agency group to Google,a large corporation, tell us how you did it?

At BBDO agency, I worked in e-commerce, a field that was familiar to me. I already had experience of working with children's goods and e-commerce, which was actively developing at the time, and I saw potential in this area. At BBDO I worked with M.Video, which at the time was the largest retailer in Russia and remains one of the largest Russian companies in e-commerce. I developed an AI system that helped manage over 300 stores in 150 cities across Russia and increased M.Video's sales and profitability. I managed to increase sales through the Yandex.Market and Google channels by 40% while reducing costs by more than 32% using AI-based systems. I managed placements, bids and display strategies (influencing the ad auction directly).

I joined Google after the BBDO agency on recommendation and was responsible for the development of advertisers in different segments across Russia, helping to manage bids, ad placements and increase the effectiveness of ad placements, which eventually resulted in many seminars and training courses that helped more than double the sales of my clients.

Tell us more about your key role in the global technology corporation Mail.ru Group?

I worked for Mail.ru Group and developed taxi services in Russia and built a system of customer engagement through internet channels (Youtube, Google Ads, Facebook, etc.) that generated 300,000 new users every month. I started working in a startup called Citimobile, which had no performance marketing and had to build everything from scratch.

At the beginning there was a problem of low ROI per customer and a high cost of customer acquisition, the solution to which I found in CRM marketing and automated business intelligence reporting. Having increased the frequency of push notifications by 42% and the number of Youtube contacts by two times, we reached the planned ROI, which allowed us to grow to a top 2 player within 2 years in the taxi market in Russia.

You were developing ABBYY's mobile applications worldwide and were responsible for getting to the top of sales in most markets. How did you achieve this?

In the US market, ABBYY, with my involvement, became a top seller in the North American markets in the OCR apps category. This was accomplished by raising prices to our competitors' prices, which had a positive impact on customer confidence and consequently increased sales. I also changed the pricing for new customers only and raised the subscription price by 100%, resulting in only a 20% decrease in conversion and a 100% increase in revenue.

As everyone is aware, the Covid19 pandemic hit in 2020, and this drove sales of mobile scanners and apps because many people started to give up paper and office visits. We launched an advertising campaign with a message (mobile office in app) which increased sales by 85% in our key markets.

You multiplied the volume of orders at Yango Delivery in Mexico, tell us how you managed to do that?

In Latin America there are a huge number of international startups from Europe, the US, and China.

To drive the delivery market in Latin America, we took a product management approach and we added delivery options such as store returns, reverse shipping and next day delivery, which is very popular there. In terms of results, in our first year, we grew from zero to a top-5 company in the delivery market. I also connected Walmart Mexico to the Yango Delivery platform.

You worked in top management as Head of Digital Marketing at the startup Mafin. How did you manage the advertising department and develop the company?

Managing people is always a challenge, as everyone is different, with different needs and requirements. It is important to learn to trust people and delegate tasks and authority to them - I believe this is one of the key success factors in managing people. The second principle is to give them freedom in decision-making and implementation, because this is the only way to help them realize their creative potential.

As for the development of Mafin as a whole, I managed paid advertising, SEO-optimization and CRM-marketing and we grew more than 50% year on year because I introduced the omnichannel principle and concept. Omnichannel is the use of multiple touch points in advertising for new customers and advertising campaigns on social media.

Also, not only did we grow faster than the market, but we were among the top 5 innovative insurance startups in Russia, partly because we used Big Data-based solutions, so we were able to renew policies in an automated way without involving people. Also, the percentage of insurance policy renewals and repeat purchases of our users was on average twice as high as other companies in the market due to our effective management of CRM systems.

Tell us more about your membership in the jury of the Tagline Awards - one of the most prestigious among digital disciplines in Europe.

The Tagline Awards is one of the most prestigious awards not only among Russian-speaking countries, but also in Europe, so it is a great honor to be a jury member in this competition. Among the participants there were many interesting, and talented people who create trends and new vectors of development of the digital market. I chose the best works in the categories Best Website, Best Performance Advertising and Best Digital Strategy, in which there were many talented teams. There were submissions from Europe as well as Russia and CIS countries. I am very proud to have been part of the event and to be a member of the jury.

You have promoted companies in IT, e-commerce, banking and insurance, what do you plan to do in the future?

I plan to develop the digital sphere, to be responsible for the development of advertising and data-driven marketing solutions that help people to make the most informed and effective business decisions.

I believe it is important to contribute to society and social development, as all the companies I have worked for benefit people in terms of products and results.

Software technologies and E-commerce are products and solutions that are important and help people every day. I believe that choosing the right companies that contribute to society is key to success for any executive, manager or specialist.