Summary
Brands across are facing a challenge - Customers who shopped at their stores regularly are suddenly missing. Pandemic induced shift in shopping behaviour only amplified these challenges. For Westside too, this has been the case and despite repeated campaigns, brand was struggling to reactivate these past loyal customers. However, by going an extra mile to build personal touch, consistently with most relevant content, Westside managed to achieve highest ever dormant reactivation.
Challenge
Brand had a loyal set of customers who were shopping before the pandemic however since Pandemic, they had not shopped. All regular marketing activation campaigns like personalized campaign, introduction to program benefits, reminder of eligible benefits, etc. weren't resulting in desired impact. Hence, Brand asked to arrive at engagement plan to win-back these loyal dormant customers.
Objective
1. Count of customers win-back against the established pre-pandemic trend 2. Contribution of win-back to overall brand revenue 3. ROI measured as delta using Test vs. Control approach and benchmarked against other campaigns
Strategy
To achieve the stated business objective of reactivating lapsed customers, Hansa Cequity adopted below holistic approach: 1. Leveraged the quantitative and qualitative insights: Quantitative data is great and gives insight into prevalent trend however in order to identify reason for non-purchase and find opportunity to drive reactivation, it was important to add qualitative research and extrapolate it with look-alike base. 2. Created a very relevant content plan: While personalization was based on individuals past purchase behaviour, which had changed dramatically due to pandemic induced changes, hence based on shifting trend, we had to recreate recommendations based on geographical, demographical and product purchase trends. 3. Deployed 360° engagement strategy: With every other brand going all out with high marketing budgets and top of voice discounting, it was important to stand-out with personalized engagement by using WhatsApp, Social and traditional marketing channel judiciously based on preferred channel of engagement. 4. And supported the campaign with direct human to human touch: in these touch times when everyone realized the importance of human connect, as a brand we also decided to leverage power of our store team of 180+ stores. However the approach wasn't to ask or invite customers to shop but instead just focus on wellbeing, safety and indulge in conversation achieved by training 200+ people on Video and Voice based customer engagement. Thus, enabling brand to activate lapsed customers without any discount.
Data
A. Quantitative Analysis: 1. Transactional data suggested that customers are not necessarily buying the same styles and brands they used to buy before going dormant. Hence, using recommendation model purely on past behaviour won't have helped. 2. Younger customers and specially Males are more likely to be reactivated as compared to other segments 3. Shift in purchase preference was very different across India. Delhi, Jaipur behaved very differently from Mumbai and Pune. Likewise, within City, Mall store shoppers behaved differently from Stand-alone store shoppers. B. Qualitative Analysis: 1. Amongst the lapsed customers, Females are largely promoters, so though data suggested that Males are more likely to come – that is just a current trend and doesn't represent the opportunity. 2. Middle age customers have highest penetration of promoters, again an opportunity to be tapped. 3. Higher the amount spent in past, higher the willingness to shop again at Westside. 4. COVID was the biggest reason for customers to stop purchase while Product would be the biggest driver to shop at Westside. 5. It wasn't that brand has lost these customers to other retailers, most of the customers spoken hadn't shopped at all since Pandemic or had shopped online (Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Urbanic, etc.)
Solution
Festive is very important theme to connect but isn't universal. So apart from having a strong Festival theme, created parallel content on non-festive around 3 themes – (1) #NewEssentials (2) #GetTheLook (3) #NewInStore Within Festive, again had 3 content strategies to appeal to different segments of customer – (1) The Positive Life with Sameer Reddy (2) Beautiful Homes with Breakfast, Décor theme (3) Celebrate with us – Festive Shopping series Entire campaign philosophy was designed to appeal to aspirations of customers in terms how they want celebrate their festival, create look for occasion, host a guest etc. using short videos. These short videos were promoted using WhatsApp, Social Media, SMS and Email channel. Conscious effort was made to ensure that content isn't talking about "we miss you" but rather remains positive and highlights "new", "festive look", "body positive", "winter styles", etc.
Results
1. Reactivated customers contributed to 30% of total brand business with higher than average spend across segment. 2. Reactivation from Multi-timer dormant customers hit all time high with growth of 180%+ over same period in 2019. 3. Top 3 Decile customers (focus audience for campaign) had 2times better conversion rate, contributed to more than half of overall win-back and had 4times better ROI than other segments.
