Alfamart rst started as a distribution goods company but changed its course over the years to rebrand itself as a convenient minimarket and community store. It is one of the popular convenience stores across Indonesia and the Philippines. After opening over 15,000 retail stores, Alfamart realized the need to have a digital presence as it observed changing buying patterns within its customers’ base. So the brand decided to provide a more convenient option to its members to shop anytime, anywhere. That’s when the digital app Alfagift came into the picture.
Alfagift app is the digital arm of Alfamart that provides retail shopping experience and membership benefits both online and offline. This arm allows customers to experience personal shopping with exceptional benefitsnd a wider range of otherwise nonexistent products in the physical stores. Alfagift app has various offers and discounts along with loyalty points and ease in shipping. Currently, the app is one of the top 10 apps in Indonesia, with more than 10M downloads across Android and iOS.
Alfamart saw the usefulness of making their minimart more convenient. Hence the digital arm Alfagift was launched. The app gained popularity instantly. Alfagift observes a steady increase in downloads, i.e., 14.5K daily downloads. The members of Alfamart were downloading the Alfagift app as the customer experience and benefits were similar, and shopping became more convenient. The app was intuitive as it offered products and discounts based on customers’ purchase patterns and loyalty reward points. Alfagift’s marketing team decided to build a more intuitive and relevant engagement strategy. They wanted to make Alfagift the go-to E-commerce app for loyal customers and ensure they shop for their daily needs on this app. The team established some high-level business goals they would want to achieve using the new engagement strategy: Create customer journeys to improve engagement and retain customers on the app: - Boost DAUs and MAUs by encouraging customers to utilize the Alfagift app for all their daily shopping needs. - Improve app stickiness by offering relevant discounts using shopping insights and preferences. - Increase monthly transactions by providing similar experiences on the app. - Offer a more relevant, journey-based communication across multiple channels by sending appropriate product recommendations based on past purchases. The marketing team partnered with an engagement platform to execute the new engagement strategy. The initial engagement platform partnership didn’t work out due to platform-level gaps. So the team decided to move to a more robust customer engagement platform. After exploring some competitive platforms, Alfagift’s marketing team partnered with MoEngage customer engagement platform.
We were able to observe a healthy 29% improvement in our install to sign-up journey with the usage of MoEngage's smart-triggered push notifications. We engaged our customers as soon as they onboarded using relevant push notifications and re-engaged in case there was no activity after sign-up.
We built Alfagift because we realized that we have a huge opportunity to bring a new shopping experience to our loyal members. For this, we can utilize MoEngage's omnichannel solution and utilize our store network spread throughout Indonesia.
The Alfagift app team had various elements to drive customers to use the app more. They had to follow the engagement strategy and create campaigns highlighting these elements. The team utilized MoEngage’s Flows to create journey-based workflows allowing customers to engage with the brand at every step of their purchase journey. The team focused on three critical stages—install, register, and first purchase. Using the workflows, the team sent out emails and push notifications to drive customers to install the app, register, and complete the first purchase. The utilization of channels was seamless as they focused on the ‘actions to be taken’ and then based the best channel on driving that action. One of the many reasons they started with sending out emails for app install, and once the installation was complete, they moved to push notifcations to drive registrations and purchases.
Apart from running journey-based campaigns, the team strategized to modify channel usage and messaging based on the customer purchase journey stage. The team utilized multiple communication channels such as Push Notification, Emails, In-app Messages, and SMS. Under these channels, there were many messaging and template variations that the team adapted to make the communication more effective. The team strategized to create a mix of generic and smart-triggered workflows that utilized push notifications and emails as primary channels. The smart-triggered campaigns focused on action-based conditions. Whenever customers completed or abandoned an action, a message was triggered to nudge customers to either complete or opt for a different action. This strategy improved overall CVR for push notifications is 16%. Based on the data, the team found that most campaigns were sent at the beginning of the week, i.e. Monday. The highest engagement (clicks) and conversion came on Monday as well. They plan to follow this trend to make their channel engagement more fool-proof. Overall, the team sends at least one push notification per day (i.e., seven messages per week) and five custom segment-focused emails per week. Because of targetted emails, the team increased the email open rate to 4%.
Alfagift’s team decided to build a more intuitive and relevant engagement strategy using the MoEngage Platform. They wanted to make Alfagift the go-to e-commerce app for loyal customers and ensure that they shop for their daily needs on the Alfagift app.
• 45% increase in monthly customer transacting base
• 4% increase in email open rates
• 16% increase in push notification CVRs
• 88% growth in MAUs in less than a year
The team utilized MoEngage’s Flows to create journey-based workflows allowing customers to engage with the brand at every step of their purchase journey. Using these the team sent out emails and push notifications to drive customers to install the app, register, and complete their purchase.
To reduce app uninstalls, the team focused on loyalty-based themes in their communication. So, the campaign workflow for this focused on highlighting loyalty-related benefits like using loyalty points, stamps, and vouchers to buy any product. This helped retain 75% of their customers from D0 to D90.
