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Tata CLiQ Luxury is India’s premier luxury lifestyle brand, offering a wide range of highly sought after products, from electronics, furnishings, and home goods, to designer apparel, jewelry, and more.
The pandemic obviously impacted various companies and sectors differently. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Tata CLiQ has seen their average order value jump 10-12%, with certain categories, such as high-end watches, growing 300-400%. In the home goods and furniture category, the company is recording a fourfold growth every year.
But how did this brand succeed where others failed?
One of the reasons for that massive success is how they tapped into hyper-personalization to provide real-time product recommendations that shoppers have literally bought up.
At our CleverTap Quarterly event held this May, we spoke with Mansi Verma, Head – Customer Retention Marketing at Tata CLiQ, who outlined how the company uses hyper-personalization to increase retention and growth.
For marketers seeking to create more personalized experiences, data is key. For example, Verma described how her team uses behavioral data to differentiate between browsers (those who are only window shopping) and buyers (those with an intent to buy).
This data includes things like the amount of time a user spends browsing products, the number of products they look at, whether they’re comparing multiple products with different price points, and more.
The company also looks at the user’s funnel stage. For example, if the user drops off, did they leave from the homepage, a category page, or a product page? If the latter, how many different product pages did they look at, and did they look at the product details as well? Are they simultaneously browsing different kinds of products or multiple products of the same type? All of this data provides rich insights into who the user is and what they’re looking for on the site.
If the data indicates the user has an intent to buy, the company identifies the category of products that the user is browsing. Then automated triggers promote the best-selling products in that category, which helps prompt the user to make a decision.
Or, if someone is browsing products from a particular brand, he or she may have a particular affinity for that brand. In that case, the company sends out recommendations that include the most popular products from that particular brand in the last seven to 10 days.
Another way they personalize each user’s experience is through an editorial section on the website. If there’s an editorial or an article which matches the category that the user researched, the company sends the post to the customer via a push notification and/or email. This too encourages them to make a purchase, because at the end of the day, luxury products are not essential goods and the decision to buy takes longer. By providing articles or educational snippets, the company can better promote the benefits of a specific product line, leading to an eventual purchase.
For ecommerce brands, cart abandonment is a major challenge. Tata CLiQ Luxury solves it through omnichannel communications.
If a user has abandoned their cart, the company reaches out via a push notification to encourage them to complete the purchase. But in case the users don’t have push notifications enabled, Verma’s team utilizes other channels such as email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
Tata CLiQ found that sending WhatsApp messages in particular has helped support their growth. According to Verma, “The click rates, conversion rates, etcetera, that we observed on WhatsApp are really amazing!” (To learn more about CleverTap’s WhatsApp integration, visit our website.)
In addition, within the Tata CLiQ app, they have exit intent popups that help determine why the user is dropping off and whether there’s any trigger that can get those users back on the app.
Another thing that has helped the company grow is innovation. Verma notes that she and her team continuously look at new avenues for growth. For example, they follow industry trends to see if there are any that they can leverage in their marketing. They also started sending time-based alerts, which have improved their click-through rate compared to a normal notification.
As a luxury brand, much of their messaging is about the details of each product, its craftsmanship, desirability, and more, rather than price or available discounts. This tends to be compelling to most customers.
But, for first-time shoppers or dormant users who don’t complete their purchases, they will try a discount two to three days after the person visited but didn’t buy anything. Verma notes: It’s about understanding each customer and what type of offer might sway them.
As is true for most companies, as the cost of acquisition continues to increase, retention becomes critical to a brand’s growth.
Tata CLiQ knows that a one-size-fits-all strategy will not suffice. Instead, they’ve split their entire customer base into various sub-cohorts and segments based on the recency of a purchase, their previous purchase behavior, and more. Then they design different and highly personalized communications for each segment and even each user.
If, for example, the user has become dormant and hasn’t purchased anything in the last six months, they look at the kinds of products that the user purchased in the past. Then they ask if there’s a way to cross-sell and increase LTV repeat rates from these customers, and then reactivate them. This is a future-focused hyper-personalization in which they try to determine what will help further boost retention going forward.
The company also looks at a customer’s behavior and interests outside of the Tata CLiQ Luxury universe. For example:
Tata CLiQ uses that information to create personalized communications, journeys, and offers based on the actual persona of the user, which is not just limited to Tata CLiQ Luxury. “This, I think, is the future of hyper-personalization for us,” says Verma.
CleverTap has a number of features that support hyper-personalization. According to Vema, to ensure they show the right product recommendations to the right shoppers in real time they use events and Liquid Tags in CleverTap.
Here’s how it works:
Any activity that the user is doing on the app gets passed on to the CleverTap platform as an event, which they then use to create triggers or to automate and record campaigns. For example, if a user is browsing a product but drops off without purchasing, this event gets passed to CleverTap. Then, 20 to 30 minutes later, an automated communication (such as a push notification) is sent to that user highlighting the product they were looking at. “CleverTap really helps us in utilizing that capability,” notes Verma.
And the entire message is personalized — from the coupon code to the creatives used — based on the category that the user was browsing. Even the push copy will be different, for example, for someone browsing women’s wear versus menswear.
As for CleverTap’s role, Verma states unequivocally that “CleverTaps helps us in hyper-personalisation in a very automated, seamless, and least time-consuming manner.”
We hope all our customers, partners, and friends at CleverTap have had an opportunity to watch the CleverTap Quarterly event. For those who have not, a recorded version is available here. We’re certain there’s lots to be learned from the many industry leaders and experts who joined us in putting on this event and we hope you’ll have a chance to watch it.
