WebEngage success story: Saudi-headquartered retail brand eXtra clocks 33% increase in purchases, driven by localized user engagement campaigns

The current pace of digitalization can be deemed either disruption or transformation, depending on how you perceive it. This notion holds true even for market leaders and industry incumbents, as evident from one of WebEngage’s notable success stories involving eXtra. A leading retail brand with a long-standing pedigree in consumer electronics and home appliances, Saudi-based eXtra saw the need to create a true omnichannel experience for its customers. This pursuit, however, often runs into challenges, including the inability to segment the customers, contextualize the communication at scale, and orchestrate event-based engagement campaigns across channels. Taking these into stock, eXtra sought a full-stack retention operating system that can achieve multiple objectives while addressing the challenges. 

Leading SaaS provider WebEngage and eXtra came together to delve deep into the challenges and develop customized solutions. WebEngage, powered by its Retention Operating System, devised an omnichannel strategy to engage eXtra’s shoppers through email, mobile push, web push, and web notifications. eXtra has since achieved a quantifiable improvement across multiple parameters, including customer retention, gross sales, and revenue, in the KSA, Bahrain, and Oman. This success story stands as a testament to how digitalization and fit-for-purpose solutions can have an instant, measurable impact. WebEngage’s methodical approach with eXtra can be enumerated as follows. 

Improving product discovery and engaging new visitors

The risk of disengagement is omnipresent in online retail, especially at the start. Due to high competition and myriads of value propositions, customers too are spoilt for choices. So, brands need to keep the bounce rate in check. What does this mean for a brand like eXtra, which clocks a whopping 4.5 million monthly active? For starters, it demands granular segmentation, automated engagement, and timely yet contextual communications. The idea is to engage each shopper on the right channel at the right time. 

Leveraging the Journey Orchestration feature on WebEngage’s Omnichannel Campaign Manager, eXtra automated the welcoming of new visitors, who were instantly subject to location-specific hyper-segmentation and guided to relevant offers. Subsequently, as part of the post-event trigger, the automated system assessed customers’ reachability through different channels such as email, mobile push, etc. Contextual and timely communications with relevant offers were sent, leading to customers viewing the intended product. 

This methodical approach enabled eXtra to instantly and meaningfully engage new shoppers. The results were par for the course: 8.92% of Bahrain shoppers viewed the product, up 31.78% from previously recorded engagement. A similar new-customer journey was orchestrated for the Oman market as well, and exemplary results were achieved. 

Nudging visitors proactively to add products to the cart

It’s no secret that customers often visit the online store, view a product, attain as much information as possible, and leave without adding it to the cart. Typically, however, brands emphasize customer acquisition and target shoppers who have products in their carts. In addition, eXtra intended to target those who display interest but are hesitant to add products to the cart. The objective was to target them early and drive them deeper into the sales funnel. This process often entails orchestrating event-based engagement campaigns across channels, based on intent data such as searches, clicks, etc on apps and websites. The “abandoners” need to be re-engaged with hyper-personalized, one-on-one messaging; cookie-cutter communication will not suffice. 

WebEngage leveraged its Journey Orchestration to help eXtra track such shopper behaviour and drive targeted data-backed engagement campaigns. Starting with checking whether or not the shopper adds to the cart organically, the streamlined process involved analysing behavioural data such as product interest, profile attributes, etc. The “targeted” customer was then re-engaged with customized messaging. If no response was generated, only a couple of follow-ups were made, to avoid inundating. In what can be considered a commendable outcome, 10.69% of the targeted English-speaking shoppers and 4.18% of the targeted Arabic-speaking shoppers added products to their carts.

Convincing abandoners to place orders

Card abandonment is perhaps the proverbial problem in online retail — it’s both rampant and costly. However, it’s also important to understand that, when a shopper adds a product to the cart and doesn’t buy it, there could be several causal factors. Therefore, it demands tracking and analysis of customer data. Considering there is already strong interest, even a timely reminder or a nudge can lead to sales. Subscribing to this notion, eXtra worked with WebEngage to craft a data-driven solution, and hyper-personalize the message intended to incentivize the shopper to make the purchase. By delivering timely reminders at the right time to shoppers’ preferred channels, eXtra achieved significant positive outcomes. Cart abandonment campaigns led to a 33% increase in purchases, contributing to 21% of total revenues. Multi-lingual campaigns saw 18%, 13.21%, and 13.31% of targeted shoppers place orders in Saudi, Bahrain, and Oman, respectively. 

Commenting on the improvements, Shahin Riaz, Head of Product, eXtra, said: “The WebEngage Retention Operating System enabled us to create a personalized shopper engagement strategy to make every communication more meaningful to shoppers. With region-specific targeting, we were able to deliver localized content on the shopper’s preferred channels of communication and cut down our communication cost significantly.” In a dynamic ecosystem like retail, such quantifiable results are of great consequence, especially at a time when customer loyalty is up for grabs, with shoppers increasingly seeking personalized services. Concurrently, SaaS companies like WebEngage have emerged at the forefront of this data-driven retail transformation. 

About WebEngage

WebEngage is a new age Retention Operating System, a single suite for marketers to store user data, provide 

actionable insights, orchestrate omnichannel campaigns by leveraging user insights to provide a hyper-

personalized end-user experience. The platform helps brands drive more revenue from existing customers and 

anonymous users across 10 communication channels. WebEngage goes above and beyond a marketing 

automation platform and powers the user engagement for thousands of enterprise brands worldwide, working 

across several industries like E-Commerce, Edtech, Fintech, Foodtech, Media & Publications, Gaming, BFSI, 

Healthcare, Online Retail. The key clientele includes marquee brands like Unilever, L'Oréal, Bajaj Auto, 

Unacademy, Myntra, Pluralsight, Pepperfry, Junglee Games, HT Media, FirstCry, eXtra Stores and GoIbibo and 

many more. 

To learn more about the WebEngage, please click: https://webengage.com/