Flipkart adopts personalized digital push to grow customer base

One of the largest e commerce companies, Flipkart is looking at acquiring new users and expanding the market with personalized digital marketing to widen its lead against competitors. The Big Billion Sale was the only online event when started by Flipkart. It has now become a festive season sale and many players have adopted the same. In order to cut through the clutter, Flipkart is looking at innovative ways to reach out to potential users.

The personalized digital push started with the Big 10 Flipkart sale organized this year. The plan to push marketing on the digital medium for the company was floated over a year ago after the CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy mandated the marketing team to deliver higher impact with minimum spend. In the last BBD sale, Flipkart cut down its market spend by one third, riding on the reach of social media. Flipkart is now going after innovation instead of cutting costs.

Besides the television commercials doing the rounds, Flipkart has also tied up with US-based video personalization platform Adgreetz in order to push contextual advertisement. Popular for its association with companies like McDonalds, HBO, Warner Brothers and Etihad, Adgreetz has created more than 1,00,000 personalized videos which are targeted at 60 different customer categories which are identified on payment behavior, browsing pattern and geography. Flipkart has over 100 million registered customers and more than 70% of its business comes from mobile app. Further, Flipkart has entered into soft agreements with the Mumbai local and a couple of airlines like Indigo and Spicejet for in flight announcement of the BBD sale, targeting the most profitable markets which is the Mumbai Delhi corridor. The BBD sale is expected to offer upto 90% discount on smartphones, televisions and refrigerators. Flipkart also brought together personalities like Jose Covaco, Rahul Subramanium, Mallika Dua and Karan Talwar for a Facebook Live to reveal deal offers which involved a game of dumb charades. The idea behind this was to pitch to users where they are not jaded with advertisements. It is unique so people sit up and take notice.

Flipkart had done a similar program last year on Facebook 360 videos which had garnered 2 million views in a single day. In the Big 10 sale, Flipkart managed to get more than 80% of the reach it recorded with the last BBD sale riding on social media push. There was a 14% rise in the traffic on Flipkart’s website for the Big 10 sale as compared to the BBD sale. Flipkart’s push on personalized ads and the digital media push signals a new thought process which goes beyond discounting.

In 2015, the e-commerce companies went out to advertise their sale periods and offered frequent discount seasons in order to woo consumers to shop online. They would spend almost 80% of the marketing budget on TV and print ads. In 2016, the e-commerce players collectively contributed only about 4% of the total pie of ad spend in the country. The investment in e-commerce category decreased by more than Rs.500 crore across TV, Print and Radio in 2016 as compared to 2015.