How people define luxury goods has steadily changed over the years. More recently, the pandemic and increasingly urgent questions about sustainability have accelerated this change, with the focus shifting from price tags and logomania* to a true appreciation of craftsmanship, authenticity, and heritage. Being at the forefront of luxury commerce in India, our customer Tata CLiQ Luxury strives to deliver a holistic luxury experience across all channels. Their answer to changing customer expectations and what luxury means today is to focus more on the finer elements of shopping such as the customer experience.
Tata CLiQ Luxury is India’s premier luxury lifestyle platform. They offer 100% authentic international luxury brands in apparel, shoes, bags, accessories, watches, and beauty. Indiluxe, the boutique segment of Tata CLiQ Luxury, focuses on bringing traditional craftsmanship and heritage to the forefront across fashion, home, and beauty categories.
To understand the impact of customer experience on retention, we spoke to Mansi Verma, Head of Retention Marketing at Tata CLiQ. “We’re now working towards an evolved retention-forward approach to bring maximum value to our existing customers and drive high year-on-year repeat purchases, thereby improving the Customer LTV. We plan to look at customers from a cohort lens instead of a one-size-fits-all approach,” she says.
According to Meghraj Patil, Tata CLiQ Luxury’s Retention Manager, their philosophy extends beyond an extensive product portfolio to offering a holistic shopping experience so that customers keep returning. In this role, he oversees various revenue and customer retention channels. The primary KPIs for his team include revenue from free channels, the number of users coming back to the platform every month, the number of reactivations, and the number of repurchases.
“Before implementing CleverTap, the turnaround time for any new campaign was around two to three days, which was quite high,” observes Patil. Before CleverTap, the process to understand user intent and execute real-time, intelligent campaigns was inefficient and time consuming. As their audience grew, they found scalability an additional challenge with their existing partner.
One of the prerequisites for creating a great user experience is understanding both user actions and what those actions say about the user’s intent. Understanding what the customer is doing on the app or website — and why — can help the team design the type of campaign and channel that best meets their goals.
Patil wanted to venture beyond basic messaging and captivate customers across various platforms with the right message at the right time. If a user dropped out from one channel, Patil wanted to try connecting with the user on another channel, and do so seamlessly.
Tata CLiQ Luxury was on the lookout for a marketing automation partner to help them tailor a holistic shopping experience that would help them stay true to their brand promise. “We found CleverTap’s capabilities in handling complex queries and executing campaigns on-the-fly truly impressive,” says Patil.
CleverTap‘s TesseractDB is a patent-pending technology that was invented to solve for scale, speed, and security. CleverTap’s TesseractDB not only captures every single user action, it augments user-generated data with external data sources. This makes analyzing large volumes of data easier than ever, a key advantage for fast-growing mobile brands like Tata CLiQ Luxury.
When it comes to high-end, premium, or luxury purchases, emotions and emotional conditioning are key differentiators in the decision-making process. Unlike the purchase of essential goods, the decision-making process here is quite complex, with the customer frequently going back and forth in deciding among a few choices. Information about the craftsmanship or heritage of the product often helps in making the final choice.
“Selling a very high-end product like a Rado watch worth thousands of dollars can’t be achieved through a single push notification. In fact, many iOS users are opting out of receiving notifications. It’s important for us to figure out what other channels we can use to connect with our customers and encourage conversions,” says Patil.
To connect with the users, understanding their digital footprint on the site is pivotal. “CleverTap helps us to capture these events within seconds. We engage with users based on these custom events like ‘products viewed’ using our native channels,” he adds. Apart from emails, SMS, and push notifications, they also leverage channels like web pop-ups, exit intent popups, and native display.
According to Patil, the campaigns based on custom events are the ones that drive the highest conversions for Tata CLiQ Luxury.
“If a customer revisits us after abandoning the cart, we show the customer a customized pop-up message that helps us to convert. In luxury, it’s the context and timing of the message that counts most, more than any price discount,” he explains.
Cart abandonment campaign created based on custom event ‘product viewed’ Patil’s team optimizes the campaigns through A/B testing. The team experiments with various iterations of copy, images, and landing pages to find the winning variant. They share this feedback with their copywriting team, which helps that team gain better insights into user behavior and also tweak the messaging to convert better.
“We also use the Emotion Detector to help us understand what type of emotions our messages generate and how they correlate to user engagement,” he adds.
RFM Analysis segments their entire user base into 10 distinct categories based on how recently and frequently a user launches the app. “Since one of our core metrics is user retention, RFM provides us valuable information about the segments of customers we absolutely should not lose. We can then act upon this information by building retention campaigns quickly and effortlessly,” says Patil.
With RFM, they can easily identify and reward loyal customers, discover the ‘cannot lose them’ segment, and spot users who are hibernating. The insights from RFM enable the team to devise the right messaging strategy for each of these 10 different segments.
User retention is not about preventing uninstalls but rather about fostering a genuine relationship beginning at the point that the app is installed. Lifecycle Optimizer identifies which campaigns and channels contribute the most towards converting users to the next stage in the customer lifecycle.
This helps Patil’s team view user engagement data in a holistic manner, instead of manually connecting the dots from every standalone campaign and journey. Additionally, this aids the team in curating an unparalleled shopping experience that brings customers back to the platform again and again.
“On a single day, we execute around 300 campaigns across a wide range of channels. We’ve seen an average boost of 150% in click-through rate using CleverTap,” observes Patil. In terms of the revenue generated from various messaging channels, he’s witnessed a monumental 159% increase.
Gitanjali Saxena Business Head- Global Luxury 
Mansi Verma Head of Retention Marketing 
Meghraj Patil Customer Retention Manager “As a user engagement and retention platform, CleverTap has been key to helping Tata CLiQ Luxury grow exponentially over the past few years,” states Patil.
The retention team aims to look at customers from a cohort lens instead of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. “To this effect, we intend to split the base into different cohorts based on their last transaction date and then personalize communications and offerings for each cohort. To achieve this, we will be using various Clevertap features like liquid tags, journeys, etc. that will assist Tata CLiQ Luxury in reaching the next phase of retention,” adds Verma.
We are delighted to partner with Tata CLiQ Luxury and help them redefine luxury shopping and customer experience for millions of Indian lifestyle connoisseurs.
