In this case study, we will discuss:

 Chaayos’ Growth Story

 The Challenge
 The WebEngage Effect (Solution and Outcome)
 Organizing User Data
 Maintaining Customer Stickiness
 Retaining Lost Customers
 Growing with Customer Feedback
 The Result

Ready? Let’s dive in!

With an 80:20 split between offline transactions in the form of dine-ins and takeaways, and
online orders through their web-app and website, Chaayos currently sells over 500k cups of
tea every month. They are betting big on their offline business and target to triple their
sales within the next 18 months.

The Challenge
To keep up with the targets and reach out to all chai lovers, Chaayos charted out a
plan to open several cafes across the country. While the plan was in place, they
also wanted to invest in their existing customers. They were driven by the belief
that returning customers resulted in higher ROI as compared to new customers.
So, when Chaayos decided that customer retention was the way to go, they were confronted
with three major challenges.

1. Maintaining customer stickiness

To increase profitability from their existing customers, Chaayos aimed at increasing the
following metrics that defined their customer’s purchasing habits:

– Repeat purchase rate:

Of all the users who placed an order for the first time, ~44% of them returned to place an
order again. 
This kind of user behavior is commonly referred to as repeat purchases in marketing parlance
and is tracked as repeat purchase rate, repeat customer rate, reorder rate, or even customer
retention rate.

– Purchase frequency:

How often customers were purchasing from Chaayos in a given period of time.

Evaluating the two metrics will give Chaayos more context about their customer’s purchasing
habits which will be instrumental in improving stickiness.

2. Bringing back lost customers

Chaayos realized early on that shelling out on acquiring users who only transacted for an
introductory offer only boosted temporary footfalls. In the long run, it was leading to;
1. Loss of revenue and hard work that was put into acquiring the user.
2. And a loss of opportunity to nurture the relationship over time.

Streamlining their efforts on getting the lost customers back was going to help Chaayos save
quite a lot of time, money, and effort.

3. Growing with customer feedback

Chaayos understood that customer feedback is one of the most reliable sources of tangible
data that can be used in making future business decisions. Collecting feedback was easy,
but translating it into actionable takeaways was a challenge. For instance, mapping
customer feedback from their retail cafes wasn’t as seamless. This was a hurdle in getting
meaningful insights into their staff’s performance.

The WebEngage Effect

To overcome the challenges discussed above, the team at Chaayos decided to organize their
entire customer base data. This would help them understand their customers better and
execute their retention plans accordingly.

Organizing user data

For a retail business like Chaayos, a POS (Point of Sale) system records and collects all sales
transactions and associated customer data. Such large data sets are a treasure trove but are not
malleable into anything concrete until retailers bring in powerful analytics that can process
the data into meaningful insights.

This is enabled by marketing automation tools like WebEngage that are robust enough
to ingest large raw data sets and help retailers to optimize their business with:

 Increased store traffic

 Optimized and aligned marketing efforts
 An omnichannel approach to marketing
 Deeper insights into their ideal customers

Using the WebEngage Journey Designer, Chaayos executed omnichannel engagement

workflows to address their retention problems. Let’s walk you through all the journeys they
created to overcome each challenge.

1. Maintaining customer stickiness
The Solution:

A Loyalty (LoyalTea) program was introduced to reward customers for every interaction

with Chaayos cafes. A journey was created specifically to promote the loyalty program to the
users.

– Repeat order (Online/Offline)

Using the journey, Chaayos could now engage with their customers on a recursive basis as
opposed to a single nudge after the first order. Let’s analyze the journey to see how it drove
footfalls to their cafe and increased the repeat order rate:

 The journey is triggered every time a user places an order at the cafe (for dine-in or
takeaway).
 Whenever the user places his next order, the journey checks if the new order was placed in
the cafe or not. If the condition is true, the user is exited from the journey (no communication
is sent to him). However, if the condition is false, the user proceeds ahead.
 The journey waits for a day (remember that drinking tea is a daily habit) and an SMS is
triggered that incentivizes the user’s next visit.

 Subsequent messages were sent to the user, each time with different content.
Journey Designer empowered Chaayos to drive engagement across their user’s lifecycle with
personalized content. The message on the left introduced users to new menu items, while the
one on the right was custom-made for gift card users.

 Every time a user placed an order at the cafe, the journey would add an extra wait time before
sending the next message. This way the message felt timely and personalized.
The Outcome:

The journey was created in May and after three months of run-time, it showed a conversion
rate of 38%-39% in July. This means that in the month of July, 38%-39% of their customers
(that were targeted by this journey) placed repeat orders in the cafes after receiving a message
from Chaayos.

Table 1: Journey performance. Conversion = Repeat purchase by users who were nudged by
the journey

Month MoM change in conversions

May ’18 28.50%

June ’18 35.86%

July ’18 38.07%

Now, one might argue that these customers may have converted organically i.e. without being
nudged by the journey. Well, the answer lies in data.

Of all the users who were eligible to receive the SMS, a fraction (10%) of them were not sent
any message (this group of users is called a Control Group. They entered the journey, but
bypassed all the steps of communication, which means that they did not receive any external
nudge from Chaayos). We then compare the conversion numbers of the two groups: those
who were engaged by this campaign (i.e., received a message from this journey) and those
who were not (the Control Group).

In the screenshot above, you can see that the overall conversion of the journey is 38 – 39%
whereas the conversion for the Control Group (CG) alone is in the range of 9-10%
i.e. without any external nudge, only 9-10% of users came for a repeat order.

Through this journey, Chaayos was able to increase their purchases by ~301% for the users
who were engaged by the journey. This shows that the journey had a tremendously positive
impact on their top-line.

Here’s a comparison between users who were sent a communication (non-CG) V/S users who
were not sent a message (CG).
Conversion numbers for users nudged by the journey grow faster than the control group users.

– Order frequency

They say that even if your loyalty program snags you just one or two regular customers, then
it would have practically paid for itself already.

Chaayos experienced an uplift of 30% in their order frequency; customers who were
engaged via this journey placed at least 2 more orders within the next 3 weeks.

So far, Chaayos has enrolled 95% of their customers in their ‘LoyalTea’ program, which
has been consistently winning them repeat purchasers.

Table 2: MoM progress in overall users giving repeat orders

Month MoM change in users giving repeat orders

May ’18 1.43%

June ’18 4.82%

July ’18 13.21%

The above graph shows the MoM trend in overall repeat orders since May.

There was an overall 20-22% uplift in repeat orders since they started using WebEngage.

Through the loyalty program, the company was also able to understand its customers’
preferences for different occasions and suggest the right product for campaigns to be
executed later.

2. Bringing back lost customers

The Solution:

Chaayos used their WebEngage account to create a segment of inactive users and created a

second journey to re-engage these customers. They used the following parameters to identify
inactive users;

1. Number of orders placed

2. Type of order
3. Number of days since last order was placed
We’ve analyzed this journey below.

 The journey gets triggered when a user is identified as an ‘Inactive User’.

 Once identified, the user is sent the first piece of communication: a ‘we missed you’ message
with an introduction to popular menu items.
 After a few days, they receive another message, prompting them to place an order.
 As soon as the user places their next order, they are removed from the journey.
Winback journey performance. A conversion is considered when an inactive user places an
order.

The outcome:

The industry standards for unassisted reactivation of dormant users is usually between 2.3-

4.3%. But with the help of this journey, Chaayos reactivated 9-10% of their dormant
users. Here is a snapshot of the journey’s performance:

Table 3: MoM progress in reactivating inactive users

Month % of inactive users converted by this journey

May ’18 7.32%

June ’18 8.57%

July ’18 9.99%

The CG for this journey recorded a conversion rate of merely 3.93%. This means that had this
journey not been running, Chaayos would have converted only one-third of their inactive
users. This was a 154% uplift in inactive user retention.