Wakefit.co’s Three-Point Strategy To Digital Customer Growth [Customer Spotlight]

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Editor’s note: Customer Spotlight is an initiative by MoEngage. In these articles, we talk to our customers to understand their customer growth strategy, engagement tactics, and best practices across product and marketing.

We all know the importance of growth marketing in terms of customer base, product development, and business expansion. So here I’m today with an insightful discussion on how user acquisition and re-engagement can lead to an exponential growth curve.

I discussed growth strategies and tips that helped Wakefit.co succeed with Parasar Sarma. Parasar is the Vice President of Growth at Wakefit.co with strong expertise in product and growth marketing. He has been instrumental in driving customer acquisition and product development from a mobile perspective.

Let’s welcome Parasar to this Customer Spotlight interview on digital customer growth.

MoEngage: Parasar, we know you’re known as an app guru and have worked with some big brands like Goibibo, Policybazaar, and Magicbricks. But could you please tell us about your role in Wakefit.co and what makes this brand so trustworthy?

Parasar: My role at Wakefit.co is to drive growth by innovating or implementing the growth drivers with an effective and long term value proposition. Our Growth Team identifies and analyzes challenges with a scope of either optimization or acceleration.

M: When you joined Wakefit.co it was still growing as a brand providing sleeping solutions. But over the last year, we noticed that the brand has started providing home solutions as well by extending its offerings to furniture. How do you suppose that would change the dynamic of growth marketing for the brand?

P: Absolutely, we are a matured mattress brand. What you see now is most likely the 20th version of our mattress. Getting into the furniture segment, both for engineered wood and solid wood, was a conscious decision. We foresee a great growth potential by bringing complete home solutions to our current and new customers at Wakefit.co. Our brand stands for bringing the best products for customers at affordable prices and we intend to continue the same philosophy in all the new segments as well.  Additionally, we have already seen massive demand in the 15 cities that we have launched our home solutions range since last year.

M: Now, I understand that the basic marketing campaigns along with paid ads were already in place. This helped the brand gain momentum in terms of user acquisition as well as sales. But can you tell me what were your next steps for the brand’s user engagement and sales?

P: When Wakefit.co started back in 2016, there was no careful set-up of a growth team. The growth team was set-up very recently, and as you mentioned, we were able to pull sales and user acquisition using paid ads and other marketing campaigns. But after joining the company, I observed that our traffic is good but the new user acquisition was not adequate and re-engagement for existing users was not customized. Additionally, as a brand, we wanted to ensure every user landing on our page understands our product offerings. Our ad campaigns were bringing in gold-standard users but the engagement at the right moment was not following. We also wanted to make our engagement more relevant and personalized for our existing users to ensure they come back to us.

My main motive was to:

Together these would help us not only build a strong customer base but also improve our sales massively.

M: That’s thorough. How do you plan to run personalized engagement while growing sales?

P: Apart from building a three-point strategy to enhance engagement, we utilized an engagement platform to execute the same. We partnered with MoEngage as we wanted to employ a tool that was dynamic and intuitive. After the demo, we were positive that the platform could do more and allow us to add more engagement channels to the mix. This was especially necessary because we wanted to focus equally on our new and existing users.

M: Can you elaborate on this three-point strategy for your digital customer growth?

P: Our three-point strategy for digital customer growth was to acquire new users, engage existing users with cross-selling, and offer product awareness.

New user acquisition:

To acquire new users, we run survey campaigns on our website and app. When a new user lands on our page, an automatic survey pops up on the screen. The user is then asked to fill out the form with their information and purchase intentions. Based on this information, we segment the users into two brackets: buyers and non-buyers. We use MoEngage’s Custom Segmentation feature to do this.  So every week, we automatically segment new users based on these two brackets and segmentation condition being the purchase intention. The non-buyers are added to the product engagement campaign workflow where they receive product-related communications. They are nudged to check-out products and make a purchase using engagement channels such as on-site messaging, emails, and push notifications. For buyers, we use a content-first approach and send the communication on various sleeping benefits and activities. Here we heavily rely on emails as a channel.

Cross-sell existing users:

We already have a segment of users who have already made a purchase with us. For these users, we usually wait 100 days to re-engage as we understand the products we sell can’t be upgraded within 15-30 days. To re-engage users, we use MoEngage’s Analytics to learn their past purchases and wishlist products’ list. Based on this data, we can easily calculate which product should be bought next. We then create targeted workflow campaigns to drive these users for the next purchase. Apart from this, the users who made a product search/wishlist but didn’t complete a purchase, are driven to complete a purchase. These users are automatically added to our workflow where we send automated emails, on-site messages or push notifications based on their actions. Using MoEngage Flows, we’re able to add customized conditions to ensure these workflows are smartly targeted.

Product awareness:

This engagement campaign is a common practice we follow, where we target buyers and non-buyers equally. Utilizing the content-first approach, we send out personalized emails highlighting sleeping benefits, home decor ideas, and product-line awareness. The motive behind this engagement is to have relevant and continuing communication with interested users. Eventually, this helps us reach more customers and offer steady customer growth digitally.

M: What were the key business results you were targeting to achieve using these strategies? Also, how was MoEngage able to help you achieve these outcomes?

P: Our focus was to increase product adoption than last year, and I’m delighted to share that we saw around 80% adoption. This was obviously possible using MoEngage’s platform that helped us reach users at the right moment. We were able to engage more users by sending more than 4M personalized emails. Our emails saw better conversions with average CTRs of 11.79%. Similarly, push notification helped us reach 700K users with an average delivery rate of 58% i.e., above the industry benchmark of 44.74%.

Another powerful feature of MoEngage that helped us improve our conversions were On-site Messaging. We observed 21% conversions which is a remarkable number. Plus all the relevant on-site messaging helped us gain more users. Overall, the average orders placed in a day has seen a growth of more than 40%.  

M: Can you tell us what is your growth plan for Wakefit.co for 2021? Are there any specific areas or product solutions you’ll be targeting?

P:  We are looking at positioning ourselves as a complete home solutions platform. Where customers can buy our products with a great degree of confidence and trust. We are looking at expanding the entire portfolio from mattresses to furniture. We are working hard to offer multiple design options for all furniture products. You will see many design modifications and upgraded products of Wakefit.co in 2021.

M: Before ending this interview, would you like to give our readers one of your top growth strategies?

P:  Constant evolution of your curated communications to users and recalibrating your product-market fit is the sole driver for your business growth, especially during these changing times. We no longer stay in a world where brand loyalty is based on offline-online experience, it’s quicksilver.