Business Platform
Tata CLiQ
Reaching more consumers with customized messages and offers
Business Platform
Reaching more consumers with customized messages and offers
increase in ROI over email, in-app push notifications, and SMS messages
USD in sales in one month attributed to WhatsApp
clickthrough rate with WhatsApp
more likely that customers will purchase when using WhatsApp
*Results are unique and are provided by the featured business. Success story results will vary, as they depend on a variety of factors.
Tata CLiQ is the flagship digital commerce initiative for Tata Group, an India-based conglomerate. Through its digital marketplace, Tata CLiQ offers international luxury brands and products across electronics, home furnishings, fashion, and beauty at affordable prices.
Tata CLiQ wanted to reach every customer opting to receive follow-up communications through its website but observed conventional methods like email and SMS often yield lower open rates and less flexibility in creative messaging. To target more customers with personal, relevant notifications, the company needed a dynamic and reliable dedicated communications channel.
Letting customers browse the biggest brands across electronics, home furnishings, fashion, and beauty products from anywhere, at any time, through its website and mobile apps has made Tata CLiQ a leading ecommerce company in India. However, as more retailers set up their own virtual storefronts, competition is on the rise and Tata CLiQ wants to keep shoppers coming back for the latest deals and freshest styles. For the innovative company, this meant understanding which kinds of customer engagement made the difference between an empty cart and a final sale.
Challenged to create a custom fit of the right messaging and offerings for each shopper, Tata CLiQ teams looked at how the company interacted with consumers. Though customers could opt-in to emails, SMS, and in-app push messages through the Tata CLiQ website, these conventional methods had not shown the desired reach. The team observed a 10 percent open rate for email, meaning that follow-up announcements and offers were not being seen by potentially interested customers.
Limited word counts for SMS messages also restricted the ability to craft personalized content that enticed customers to visit the site and make purchases. Since WhatsApp is widely popular in India, the team’s search for a communications channel that could help them reliably reach larger numbers of customers brought them to WhatsApp Business Platform.
Working with conversational messaging services company Gupshup, Tata CLiQ launched its WhatsApp channel over several stages. Stage one involved sending push notifications through WhatsApp, letting customers know when their order shipped and giving them transaction numbers. With the speed and ease of delivering messages via WhatsApp, Tata CLiQ teams were inspired to ramp up stage two—which involved more sophisticated customer targeting and customization—for the high-volume sales days of the Diwali holiday and Black Friday.
Customer Retention Manager
Gupshup was instrumental in developing the communications channel through WhatsApp to respond to specific triggers including abandoned carts or price drops. With a focus on enabling better customer engagement through conversational messaging, teams at Gupshup are highly skilled at building ecommerce channels through WhatsApp Business Platform. “As one of the earliest WhatsApp business solution providers, our solutions teams enabled Tata CliQ to engage in relevant, high-quality conversations on WhatsApp for optimal pre-purchase customer journey engagement with promising early results,” says Ravi Sundararajan, COO of Gupshup. “Once we had a clear sense of Tata CLiQ’s goals, we could help guide them toward a channel that would drive the diverse kinds of engagement they needed.”
Tata CLiQ worked to determine the most effective communications platform to support its goals for personalized notifications. As a stress test for its channels, including WhatsApp, Tata CLiQ teams developed marketing campaigns that used insights from data scientists to target a percentage of shoppers with custom messages driven by their behavior on the Tata CLiQ website. These messages, personalized for opted-in customers, featured product recommendations based on a one-month browsing history, abandoned cart follow-up, price drop alerts for wish-listed products, and welcome coupons for new users.
“We pride ourselves on giving shoppers many options, but when it came to marketing outreach, our customers had a clear preference for WhatsApp, which averaged a 57 percent clickthrough rate,” says Amit Kumar, Customer Retention Manager. “Customers who visited our website from a WhatsApp notification were 1.7 times more likely to make a purchase. In October 2021, we saw $500,000 USD in sales attributable to WhatsApp during our Diwali and Black Friday one-month campaigns, with an ROI 10 times higher than our conventional channels.”
Limited word counts for SMS messages also restricted the ability to craft personalized content that enticed customers to visit the site and make purchases. Since WhatsApp is widely popular in India, the team’s search for a communications channel that could help them reliably reach larger numbers of customers brought them to WhatsApp Business Platform.
Working with conversational messaging services company Gupshup, Tata CLiQ launched its WhatsApp channel over several stages. Stage one involved sending push notifications through WhatsApp, letting customers know when their order shipped and giving them transaction numbers. With the speed and ease of delivering messages via WhatsApp, Tata CLiQ teams were inspired to ramp up stage two—which involved more sophisticated customer targeting and customization—for the high-volume sales days of the Diwali holiday and Black Friday.
After launching customized notifications campaigns across its communications channels, Tata CLiQ saw significant increases in customer engagement and purchases, as well as tenfold ROI, in two one-month campaigns through WhatsApp in October 2021.
*Results are unique and are provided by the featured business. Success story results will vary, as they depend on a variety of factors.
WhatsApp Business Platform partners can help you plan, build and integrate WhatsApp as a channel to connect with your customers.