Gourmet Egypt, founded in 2006 by Jalal Abu-Gazaleh, is an online supermarket stocked with fresh groceries, frozen food, ready-to-eat and heat-n-serve products. It’s a household name in 8 prime locations of Egypt namely Cairo, Alexandria, and Red Sea to name a few. The brand’s sole aim is to deliver safe, nourishing and delicious food at users’ doorstep! It has 12+ physical outlets along with a strong online presence.
Amr Mostafa, Digital Media Manager at Gourmet Egypt, highlights the company’s goals and objectives that were outlined to meet through a transformation in its customer innovation journey.
1. Deliver worthwhile food ordering experiences to the users
Fresh and quality food products, quick food delivery, reasonable prices and an intuitive interface constitute a good food ordering experience. While Gourmet Egypt had all these elements to match the users’ expectations, it wanted to take its user engagement a few notches higher by providing outstanding food ordering experiences to users in a personalized manner.
2. Boost the number of orders placed on the Gourmet Egypt app
Number of orders placed is the North Star metric of every online food ordering business. And when it comes to Gourmet Egypt, they aim to put in extra efforts to maximize the number of orders placed on their app. This eventually helps to scale up its revenue and emerge as a market leader. The metric is also a prominent indicator to measure the users’ trust and loyalty towards the brand.
3. Improve user retention
With this rising competition in the online food delivery market, Gourmet Egypt wanted to understand user behavior closely and identify elements that hinder the food ordering process. This further helps win back lost users and adds up to the revenue growth.
The challenges the company encountered:
Engaging users at every stage of their lifecycle: The Company wanted to ensure that every user goes through a seamless and personalized experience on the Gourmet Egypt app right from the time they sign up till they place the order. But manually delivering personalized experiences based on the stage every user is at, took up massive bandwidth and eventually became difficult for the team at Gourmet Egypt to scale. Moreover, they were looking to engage with users at every stage of their lifecycle and monitor actions to be able to reach them contextually.
Monitoring user actions and reaching out to them contextually: Gourmet Egypt aids the users with a variety of delicacies ranging from ready-to cook foods, farm fresh groceries to festive specials. Now, with thousands of active users it’s tedious to manually figure which user is interested in what kind of food amidst the ones listed. Further, triggering personalized messages based on the users’ interest is even more cumbersome at such a scale.
The WebEngage outcome and impact:
The implementation of WebEngage’s full-stack Retention Operating System enabled Gourmet Egypt to solve their challenges and deliver several use cases, some of which are:
1. Accelerating first time purchases via personalized, multi—channel communication
Egypt transferred hundred thousand Monthly Active Users (MAUs) all the users’ data onto the WebEngage dashboard to understand such extensive data thoroughly.
The users are allotted a unique ID upon signing up where all their important details such as users’ name, preferences, platform activity, geography, etc. is constantly tracked and stored.
This unified view of the user base enables Gourmet Egypt to analyze the data and create specific user segments to send them meaningful communication.
One such user engagement journey has been designed for two specific user segments mentioned below:
1. Users who install the Gourmet Egypt mobile app
2. Inactive users – new users who install the app but do not place an order
As the users bucketed in the target segments are new users, the team at Gourmet Egypt allows the users to explore the app for a specific time duration of 2 hours. As per Gourmet Egypt’s user flow, the users need to first sign in on the platform to proceed towards checkout.
Now during the 2 hours of app exploration if the users sign up and place an order, then the journey ends for the users. Otherwise, they proceed further in the journey.
Next, the users’ – who proceed further in the journey, channel reachability on Mobile push and Email channels are checked. And highly contextual nudges are sent to the users’ on their reachable channels, encouraging the inactive users to activate their mobile app, browse through the app and enjoy the perks of personalized food ordering experience!
The process doesn’t end here. The team at Gourmet Egypt has created another user engagement campaign to encourage users to make their first purchase. This journey is based on the insights drawn by analyzing their sales funnel.
According to the funnel analysis, 20% users login after installing the app and 10% users place the order. It points out to the fact that a good number of users drop off in the initial stages of the funnel. Now, actively engaging with these dropped off users to maximize purchases on the Gourmet Egypt app is a priority.
And so in the ‘first purchase’ journey, Gourmet Egypt targets users by sending personalized ‘welcome onboard’ communication via Web & Mobile push notifications and Email channels. One of the most interesting parts of the journey is the discounts and other offers slipped into the welcome message.
Such a discount-based strategy excites users and encourages them even more to place their first order!
At any instance in the journey, when the users perform the conversion event, complete the checkout process, or place an order, the users exit the journey. Sending personalized, timely communication to the users at scale has helped Gourmet Egypt to strengthen its user engagement and has helped them achieve:
ï 7.25% increase in orders placed via the welcome journey
ï 6% uplift in orders placed on day 1
ï 3.35% boost in conversions via the post app install journey
ï EGP 500,000+ generated via the app install & signup journeys
2. Encouraging cart abandoners to complete their purchases through real-time, automated campaigns
Cart abandonment is a challenge that almost all online marketplaces face.
As per data, approximately 84% carts were abandoned on grocery apps in 2020 – reasons include: increase in product price, invalid or wrong discount coupons, too many details to share before placing the order, better offers on other apps/websites etc.
To solve this, the team at Gourmet Egypt built an event triggered journey on the WebEngage dashboard for all those users who don’t checkout within 2 hours of adding products to the cart.
This journey has a number of conditions, communication campaigns and different wait periods considering the nature of the target audience (cart abandoners) that this particular journey caters to.
Personalized communication is sent to the users via this journey across multiple channels including Web push, Mobile push and Email. And once the conversion event, checkout completed, occurs, the journey ends for the user.
Here are a few communication samples sent via the cart abandonment journey:
Encouraging the cart abandoners to complete their purchase in a personalized manner enables Gourmet Egypt to garner 47.71% recovery of abandoned carts.
3. Reactivating lost users by sending action-based communication
It is unrealistic to expect that 100% users will stick around with your business at all times. Some users might turn out to be loyalists while others might simply abandon your product. However, it’s very important to keep a check on the number of churned users. Generally, an ideal churn rate ranges anywhere between 4%-7% but might differ according to the industry.
To retain and bring back the lost users, Gourmet Egypt decided to first analyze its app uninstall trends on the WebEngage dashboard.
Upon analysis, Gourmet Egypt garnered the information on channels and devices that were resulting in maximum app uninstalls.
To tackle the challenge of app uninstalls, the team decided to contextually engage with the churned users encouraging them to reinstall the app and continue ordering food.
So, the team at Gourmet Egypt created an action-based journey wherein a specific user segment is targeted – users who have uninstalled the iOS app after making at least one purchase.
The communication in the campaign created FOMO in the minds of the lost users, indicating the exclusive deals and offers that would be lost out on.
After running the app reinstall campaigns over a period of time, Gourmet Egypt got onto analyzing the product purchase trends once again by leveraging the Cohort analysis feature on the WebEngage dashboard.
They realized that on an average over 55% of users completed the checkout on the app on Day 0 itself! Moreover, by retargeting the lost users via meaningful and personalized communication has helped Gourmet Egypt to achieve:
6.63% increase in conversions via the app uninstall journey
20% improvement in retention rate
1.6K reduction in the number of app uninstalls
Having accurate data and a unified view of the users has helped Gourmet Egypt to execute highly effective multi-channel user journeys. These journeys have enabled them to improve their users’ experiences on their web and app platforms. The solutions also helped Gourmet Egypt to draw deeper insights into their users’ behavior and improve user engagement!
