Making data driven automation a reality with AppsFlyer
Background
Wolt is a Finnish tech company that provides food delivery services to 23 markets.
When they launched in Helsinki in 2015, they proved that it was possible to run a successful food delivery business at a hyper-local level. Factor in the high Finnish labour costs, its wide geographic spread and bad weather, and it’s clear the odds were stacked against them.
Starting in this complex food delivery market provided the blueprint for their hyperlocal approach.
Wolt’s competitive edge is their ability to operate profitably in smaller regions and cities. That edge comes from their focus on technology, efficiency and the customer experience.
Challenge
When Anh Nguyen, Wolt’s Director of Performance Marketing, joined the team in January 2019, one of his first goals was to get a clearer understanding of Wolt’s attribution. It’s the foundation for everything his Performance Marketing team is tasked with achieving and one of the most important elements of their business.
Having a reliable partner that provides accurate data, quickly, would be essential to success.
Following, Wolt’s core challenge was to make data-driven automation a reality.
Another challenge would be finding the right partner that could work with Smartly, an important part of Wolt’s performance MarTech stack.
Founded in Finland in 2013, Smartly are leaders in the highly competitive social advertising automation market. Their automation software helps brands launch and optimize creative campaigns quickly and efficiently.
Smartly have a lot of experience of working with Wolt’s competitors, including the likes of Uber Eats. They understand the business. And because Smartly is built for hyper-local targeting they have the tools that Wolt needs to succeed and have proved this success helping the company scale campaigns in over 100 cities.
Finally, when Covid-19 hit, the plans for every restaurant and take-away business across the globe were put on hold. Nguyen knew that supporting their under-pressure clients meant being agile and adapting to the “new normal.”
Solution
Wolt integrated Smartly with AppsFlyer which opened up time-saving automation opportunities.
Events from AppsFlyer automatically trigger campaign changes in Smartly. If, for example, the performance of a campaign in a city dips below a certain threshold, the creative for that campaign is instantly changed.
When the reality of Covid-19 became clear, one-by-one, countries began to lock down. Overnight, many of Wolt’s thriving customers were facing a grim reality. While many businesses immediately cut all advertising spend, Wolt decided to double down and increase its investment due to this invaluable integration and resulting insights.
“Having a reliable partner that provides accurate data, quickly, is really important. AppsFlyer have played a big part in supporting our growth and have been tremendously helpful.”
Results
Wolt wanted to drive as much business to their 10,000 restaurant partners as possible. By supporting those restaurants, Wolt would also provide much needed business for over 20,000 courier partners. And they needed to do it safely.
Remarkably they were able to adapt to no-contact delivery in just 2 weeks.
Wolt showed their agility by launching a much-needed grocery delivery service in 15 of their markets and what was once a longer-term ambition was launched in a matter of days. In addition, the same data-driven automation that worked for their restaurant clients worked for their new grocery clients.
Customers who previously faced waits of over 4 weeks for delivery from supermarkets had a dynamic new range of grocery options open to them. And, what the data clearly showed was, that in many cases, they were reaching an entirely new untapped market.
Empowered with better attribution data and insights, Wolt was able to provide an essential service in a time of crisis for a new audience that was struggling to make their weekly grocery trips.
“It’s been a great experience working with Jonatan and the team at AppsFlyer & Jaakko and everyone at Smartly. We have the right support from the right people. I normally just come up with lots of different ideas, and just say, “Okay, I have this idea, do you think we can make it work?”
Looking forward, as their clients rebuild their businesses, Wolt knows that they need to review their own plans.
Will the services they reactively launched continue? Or will a degree of normality return, sooner than expected?
The answers to those questions and many more will come from their customers. And, many of those answers will be found in the data that’s already guided Wolt’s decision-making.
Whatever the future holds Wolt is committed to creating more opportunities to drive growth through data-driven automation and AppsFlyer and Smartly will continue to work closely together to help them do just that.
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