Mastering customer segmentation & boosting re-marketing conversions by 35%

Overview

• In the fast-paced world of quick commerce and ever-changing consumer preferences, Zepto needed to dynamically generate relevant audience segments in order to deliver personalized campaigns that would bring dormant and churned users back to the app.
• However, the manual effort involved made it impossible to create, maintain, and activate these dedicated audience segments at scale. 
• Zepto used AppsFlyer’s Audiences solution to dynamically create custom audiences and deliver personalized campaigns at scale — resulting in significantly increased remarketing reach and conversions. 
• At the same time, AppsFlyer’s deep linking solution enabled smoother user journeys and improved the customer experience, boosting retention. 

Background

Founded in 2021, Zepto quickly established itself as a leading player in India’s quick commerce market. With a robust presence in the five major metros,Zepto is known for its convenient,  personalized shopping experiences aimed at maintaining high customer loyalty.

The challenge

As part of its remarketing efforts, Zepto used multiple owned and paid channels to re-engage users who had stopped using the app or uninstalled it. These included WhatsApp, email, SMS notifications, and social media. 

Zepto knew that personalized messaging was key to successful remarketing. While it’s almost impossible to create personalized campaigns at individual level, doing so for a few segments or cohorts of customers was definitely a possibility. However, to create such custom audiences based on their ad engagement, as well as in-app behavior, Zepto needed to establish robust data pipelines connecting their customer relationship management (CRM) platform with campaign attribution data.

“AppsFlyer has not only supercharged our remarketing efforts, but has also become foundational to our continued remarketing success. We’ve seen over 35% increase in remarketing conversions and a 15% increase in D30 retention rates within just a few months.”

Zepto had made this connection, but the insights they gathered were limited. For example, Zepto found out that users who were active on the app in the last seven days responded to push notifications better than those who weren’t active in the last seven days. This enabled Zepto to separate out the recently active users and send them push notifications. However, they needed a deeper understanding of user preferences in order to effectively personalize campaign content.  

The possibilities of creating such custom audiences using both CRM and campaign attribution data seemed endless, and this seemed like a plausible solution. However, two distinct challenges emerged: 

1) The manual effort involved in creating and uploading audience segments to media networks such as Google or Meta proved futile in further scaling remarketing efforts.  

2) They were unable to provide friction-free, anywhere-to-app experiences for those successfully reached through remarketing efforts.

The challenge of directing users seamlessly to the app was the last-mile delivery problem: Zepto could have the right audience segment, the right messaging, and the right channel, but a broken path to the app could lead the user to drop off midway, meaning the remarketing failed. 

For example, the user might click on an email link that redirected them to the app store, even if they already had the app on their phone. Alternatively, a push notification link might not lead them to the right product or offer page within the Zepto app. 

The solution

Zepto used AppsFlyer’s Push/Pull APIs to ingest campaign attribution data into their internal business intelligence platform, enriching their CRM data. This allowed them to sync all of their attribution and CRM data, and create custom segments based on campaign engagement.

The foundation of Zepto’s campaign attribution data was AppsFlyer’s measurement suite, which provided a single source of truth about campaign performance across channels, cities, and customer segments. This allowed Zepto to distinguish campaigns that yielded high gross profit per order from underperforming ones — making it easier for them to allocate campaign budgets to the right campaigns. Determining which combination of audience segment, messaging, and remarketing channel yielded the best results proved crucial for Zepto’s remarketing success.

“AppsFlyer has given us deeper user insights relating to campaign engagement. The audience segmentation capabilities from AppsFlyer have provided us with the edge to dynamically create audience segments based on campaign engagement data coupled with our CRM data, making ‘delivering personalization at scale’ a reality for Zepto.”

AppsFlyer’s Audiences also eliminated the manual effort involved in creating and uploading audience segments. For example, creating an audience segment of users that were or were not active on the app in the last seven days didn’t need manual effort every time a fresh audience segment was created for the same criteria. Nor was manual effort required to upload audience segments to media networks to run campaigns. This made their remarketing efforts instantly scalable. 

Finally, Zepto addressed the challenge of a seamless, anywhere-to-app user experience using AppsFlyer’s Customer Experience and Deep Linking Suite. Using the OneLink technology, Zepto could now direct a user to the relevant app store if they’d uninstalled the app, or to the relevant in-app product or offer page if they still had the app installed.

“We do not want our low-engagement users to drop off the re-engagement journey just as we manage to reach them and get their attention successfully. AppsFlyer’s CX and deep linking suite simply takes care of that. With that critical closing part of the user journey taken care of, we can keep experimenting with our audience segments, channels, and messaging.”

Results

The combination of enriching CRM data with campaign attribution data, automatically creating and activating audience segments, and providing seamless anywhere-to-app experiences delivered impressive results: Zepto’s remarketing conversions increased by 35% and cost per reinstall reduced by 40% in six months. 

AppsFlyer’s suite of products not only enabled Zepto to double down on remarketing efforts with confidence, but also helped them create a lasting impact among their users: successfully re-engaged users showed a 15% increase in D30 retention rate.

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