Makro: 100% increase in conversion rate with personalized omnichannel eCoupon campaign managed with Moments

Challenge

As a leading wholesale business in the Asia-Pacific region Makro supplies retailers, food service providers, SMEs, and large corporations with a wide range of products from fresh food to electronics, and many other essential items.

With the Thai government launching several schemes aimed at supporting consumers with discounts on goods from participating shops, Makro was keen to get behind the initiative and help 35,000 of their retail business customers who had registered for the Thong Fah (Blue Flag) Pracharat scheme.

This would entail generating and delivering government-approved personalized eCoupons on a monthly basis to their business customers, who could redeem the vouchers for discounts on bulk purchases that could then be passed on to end consumers.  Makro would need to track which businesses had redeemed their coupons, so that they could send reminders to prompt them while the coupons were still valid.

Makro had previously used SMS to broadcast marketing messages to their retail customers. This was an effective channel, but with the complexity of managing such a large number of personalized eCoupons every month, their existing manual process for deploying campaigns by SMS was too time-consuming and did not provide the conversion rates that they were looking to achieve.

To ensure the highest delivery rates for the eCoupons, Makro was also keen to introduce a secondary communication channel to serve as a failover and to give their customers more flexibility in how they were contacted.

Solution

With Infobip’s expertise in omnichannel communication and a customer engagement solution built for scale, we were an obvious choice to work with.

SMS was retained as the primary communication channel as it is the most effective way of keeping in touch both with traditional businesses and with retailers who have mobile premises that may not always have an electricity or data connection.

In the first phase of the project, coupons were sent by SMS, with redemptions tracked using the Moments customer engagement solution. As the coupons were only valid for two weeks, if a merchant hadn’t used theirs after a set period, then an SMS reminder was automatically triggered.

For this process to be as effective and efficient as possible there was a requirement for high quality data and accurate processing. To facilitate this, we collaborated with our Partner Connect Program member Wise Target to seamlessly integrate with our solution. With a lot of experience with ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes, the partner was tasked with the syncing and cleansing of data before it was loaded into the customer data platform, People CDP. They were also responsible for generating and hosting the barcode coupon.

For phase 2, LINE was introduced as a failover channel to support SMS and ensure the highest possible delivery rates for the Personalized eCoupons and reminders. LINE was selected as it is the most widely used chat app in Thailand and many of Makro’s retail customers were already using it as a B2C communication tool. These businesses were encouraged to opt-in to receive messages, which offered cost savings on SMS.

Our local Professional Services team helped with API integration that facilitated the movement of data between LINE and the People CDP so that Moments could be used to automatically check the redemption status of every coupon and trigger reminders when necessary.

Result

Once the first phase of the solution was live, Makro saw an increase in personalized eCoupon conversion rates from 30% to 60%. This impressive increase can be attributed to the reliable delivery of the coupon, the ability to automatically send a reminder to merchants who hadn’t used it, and the high quality of the data and reporting which enabled Makro to track results with 100% accuracy.

Phase 2 was all about enabling customers to communicate on their channel of choice. Customers that had opted in to receive messages by LINE showed their appreciation with a similar doubling of the conversion rate. This was a win-win situation as it meant that Makro could benefit from the cost savings of sending a greater proportion of messages using a digital channel.

On their digital transformation journey Makro has been able to benefit from automation to reduce the manual workload required to manage the eCoupon campaign. Despite the doubling of conversion rates, they were able to reduce workload by 20%.

This shows how leveraging multiple channels not only provides customers with a more flexible and convenient experience, but also enables business to benefit from cost optimizations.

Makro has been very satisfied with the service that Infobip has provided, responding to queries immediately and helping to find the best solution to ensure the successful launch of a project that has helped so many of Thailand’s citizens.