Learn how you can Unlock Limitless Customer Lifetime Value with CleverTap’s All-in-One Customer Engagement Platform.
Time is money. This is even truer in the ecommerce world, where speed is the true differentiator in a multitude of ways. As a rapidly growing ecommerce brand in 2017, Tata CLiQ knew this. But when the speed of executing campaigns appeared to be a major hiccup, the team began to search for an engagement solution built for fast-growing mobile brands. Their search ended in CleverTap, and here’s the complete story.
Tata CLiQ is an omnichannel marketplace that’s owned by Tata Unistore Limited, a part of the Indian conglomerate Tata Group. The platform offers users a wide array of products, ranging from apparel and electronics, to appliances, gadgets, and jewelry.
To understand how CleverTap powers Tata CLiQ engage with users effectively across the entire user lifecycle, we spoke to Amit Kumar. His role as the Customer Retention Manager involves managing various channels such as emails, push notifications, SMS, and web notifications, and improving the contribution of these channels to the overall business.
The key growth metric for Kumar’s team is app stickiness (DAU/MAU). Some KPIs include tracking the traffic and Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) from their various channels.
“In ecommerce, things change at a breakneck pace. We needed our retention partner to be agile enough for our shifting requirements. We couldn’t afford to spend the time to configure and execute campaigns the way we did with our previous CRM solution,” says Kumar.
The team earlier underwent numerous hassles to execute real-time, intelligent campaigns based on user actions and inactions. As their audience grew, they found scalability an additional challenge with their existing partner.
“Tata CLiQ has multiple categories of products on the website. It’s a challenge for us to find out what category a user has an affinity towards. Past purchases offer limited insights on what product recommendations would work,” says Kumar.
“If a user had browsed through the Indian wear section on the website and did not make a purchase in the last 15-20 minutes, we wanted to reach the user with a personalized notification in real-time,” recounts Kumar. Timely, contextual, and individualized notifications were a necessity for Tata CLiQ to boost revenue and GMV.
“CleverTap helped us with executing campaigns on the fly and helped us scale our business since teaming up with them in 2018,” says Kumar. CleverTap’s combination of real-time analytics, automated segmentation, and omnichannel engagement— in an all-encompassing and contextual ecosystem—offered them a simple and fast solution to their existing woes.
According to Kumar, “Before implementing CleverTap, the turnaround time for any new campaign was around two to three days, which was quite high.” With their previous provider, the process to understand user intent and execute real-time, intelligent campaigns was inefficient, time-consuming, and annoying.
Their exponential increase in user acquisition resulted in a large volume of data and complexity in use cases. CleverTap‘s TesseractDB is a patent-pending technology that was invented to solve for scale, speed and security. CleverTap helps Tata CLiQ capture every single user action and augment user-generated data with external data sources in order to provide deeply personalized experiences.
Archaic service providers still tend to segment users based on the action performed on the app, rather than creating micro-segments to identify predominant interests. Which user should receive a notification about a TV set? Which user should receive a notification about Indian wear? Which users should be notified about a smartphone?
Answering these questions meant moving beyond generic segmentation or else risk spamming users with irrelevant notifications. Tata CLiQ found the solution in CleverTap’s psychographic segmentation, which can map the right product category to the right user.
“With the ‘predominantly’ option under the psychographic segmentation, we can easily choose users who have predominantly viewed a product category over others. This helps us immensely in our day-to-day configuration and also, we need not use data intelligence,” says Kumar.
If a user browses a particular category of product but does not make a purchase within 15-20 minutes, Kumar’s team can use smart automation to send a hyper personalized inaction notification containing the most relevant image, content, and landing page.
“CleverTap helps us personalize in real-time. We automate sending notifications to users as soon as they browse our site, or view a product or category. We can instantly connect with them using the right message and landing page,” he explains.
Inaction campaigns have helped his team address cart abandonment effectively. By analyzing the past behavior, he has identified two distinct types of users:
Users with higher purchase intent: These users have a high browsing history, browse the same category predominantly for the past 7-15 days before adding a product to the cart. Within an hour of abandoning the cart, they receive an inaction campaign with a discount code.
Users with lower purchase intent: These users have a relatively lower browsing history and have added their first product to the cart. They receive a campaign that reminds them about how “they won’t get this price again” or how “the offer is about to expire.”
“Over the past month and the year, Tata CLiQ’s conversion funnel for these abandonment campaigns has improved tremendously. By giving discounts to users with higher purchase intent, we avoid wasting coupons,” observes Kumar.
Recently, Tata CLiQ experimented with their in-app messages using custom HTML. “We used CleverTap’s personalization engine to customize in-app messages using custom HTML. The message would contain a personalized product image and accompanying copy based on the user’s browsing history,” adds Kumar. This personalized campaign delivered a CTR boost of 1.5X.
Cohorts help Tata CLiQ compare how different user groups behave over time. “As app stickiness is an important metric we track, using cohort analysis we understand how many repeat visitors we have in any given month,” says Kumar.
Users who are a part of the active user cohort in the first month and don’t launch or browse the app next month receive re-engagement campaigns. “CleverTap helps us analyze the cohort of repeat visitors on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Based on the report, we scale our campaigns. If we see a major drop in repeat visitors, we deploy coupons with extra incentives to increase visits,” he adds.
Tata CLiQ saw a 4x boost in the CTRs with their personalized, real-time, inaction campaigns. “In comparison to our previous marketing automation partner, we’ve seen a 4x growth in our click-through rates using inaction campaigns on CleverTap,” notes Kumar. Personalizing their messages using custom HTML gave them a 1.5x boost in their CTRs..
Amit Kumar Customer Retention Manager Amit Kumar Customer Retention Manager “As a user engagement and retention powerhouse, CleverTap has been key to helping Tata CLiQ grow exponentially over the past few years,” states Kumar. His team is keen to explore communication channels like WhatsApp and is eagerly looking forward to CleverTap’s product roadmap for 2022. We are delighted to partner with Tata CLiQ and help them scale their operations and help them achieve their retention goals.
