Increasing Delivery App Revenue and Creating a Better Online Customer Experience with Amplitude

This post was written anonymously by an Amplitude customer.

Insight/Action/Outcome: In the company’s delivery app, conversion from the checkout promo banner was low—less than 2%. So, the team turned to the data in Amplitude Analytics. Rather than showing the promotional banner to everyone, the team decided to only display a banner if the customer’s basket is below a certain dollar value at checkout. They used specific messaging to incentivize customers to reach that threshold for points and cash-back benefits, and they also changed where the banner was driving traffic, taking the customer to a list of products sorted by price to match the remaining amount to be spent. The end result was an 18.7% increase in conversions for this segment, multiples higher than the previous overall average.

Companies can fall into the trap of thinking they know their customers based on past behaviors, but the only way to stay on top of changing behavior is to gather the right data and facilitate easy access.

We discovered the power of gathering the right data and used it to spark life into the customer experience of our well-known global retail chain.

Rolling out delivery to home-bound pandemic customers

Our focus used to be primarily on our brick-and-mortar stores, but in 2019, we explored rolling out a delivery service via our app. While we were aware that competitors’ digital services were a potential threat to our business, we were simultaneously concerned about cannibalizing the business of our physical stores. We wanted to protect our franchisees, who make up about 50% of our stores.

But during the pandemic, we had no choice. If we wanted to survive, we had to go online and focus on delivery. It was an immediate success: In the first year, four million customers used our delivery service. Today, we have about 10 million customers using our app for delivery, and we predict that number will continue to grow.

From the start, we wanted to understand how to serve these customers better. If we were going to keep them, especially once physical stores reopened, we needed to improve the online experience and encourage customers to use the app and delivery as a part of their daily lives. Our market is very competitive, and we needed to get better insights to determine what products our customers wanted, source these products, run effective promotional campaigns, and incentivize our customers to buy them.

We’ve always been data-driven, but our previous tools, which included Google Analytics and offline voice-of-the-customer research, were no longer cutting it. We could collect data on event frequency and understand what happened and when, but not why things happened. We had to guess a lot more, come up with ideas, and then do the research. This made it harder to answer our questions, and we sometimes had to make decisions based on opinion rather than undisputable information.

Uncovering answers with Amplitude Analytics

Compared to our previous process, Amplitude lets us develop a much stronger hypothesis about why things happen. We still validate the hypothesis through more research, but we start from a more definitive place, which allows us to reach these valuable insights much faster. With Google Analytics, you have to start with a strong hypothesis before you can ask further questions, but Amplitude surfaces those hypotheses quickly, highlighting items that weren’t on the radar. You can find answers to the questions you ask, but you can also get answers to the questions you never thought to ask.

We had so many areas to explore: we wanted data on our monthly active users, average sessions per user, 12-month retention, and revenue KPIs like conversion rate, average revenue per user, total orders, and total revenue. Amplitude helped us better understand each of these metrics and achieve growth across the board, informing the product roadmap at every step.

Saving time and money while boosting revenue

As a marketing executive, I have to decide how best to allocate our budget and resources to continue to grow performance. One of the biggest advantages of Amplitude is how it helps us validate ideas and campaign concepts before we build them. We can make informed decisions and refocus our resources elsewhere if the data doesn’t support those concepts.

One of these ideas was a campaign we designed to target customers who typically use a deal or coupon for purchasing. But through Analytics, we realized that this segment was much smaller than we had assumed, only representing 13% of total revenue. The potential impact of a campaign focused only on this segment wasn’t significant enough to make a notable revenue boost, and the cost of building it might have outweighed the potential revenue uplift. Instead, we focused our resources on a different campaign concept, which went on to boost revenue more than our initial concept.

Amplitude also helped us understand the value of customers who typically make payments via the embedded in-app wallet versus customers who always pay via cash. We learned that there is a significant difference in behavior between these two segments: Wallet users average twice the number of sessions, show increased visitation of all key services (as high as 4X for next-day delivery and 2X higher for deals), have a 15% higher basket order value, and show a 20% higher 12-month retention. This means that driving wallet adoption increases the frequency of use, breadth of use, loyalty, and revenue. These insights told us that we needed to optimize onboarding to make it easier for customers to register and connect the wallet immediately after registration, along with running new promotions that include onboarding incentives.

Analytics data also prompted us to revamp our checkout promo banner, optimizing it to become a powerful revenue driver. Conversion from the original banner was low—less than 2%. We looked at the data in Analytics to better understand the customers who were most likely to see this banner, and developed ideas to drive customer behavior. We decided that rather than showing the promotional banner for everyone, we would only display a banner if the customer’s basket value is below $6 at checkout, incentivizing them to surpass that amount for points and cash-back benefits.

We replaced the more generic upsell copy with more specific messaging about the exact remaining amount to reach the monetary target. We also changed where the banner drove traffic, taking the customer to a list of products sorted by price to match the remaining amount they needed to spend. The end result was an 18.7% increase in the conversion rate for this segment, multiples higher than the previous overall average.

Reaching new heights and proving Amplitude’s value

Amplitude has been a great investment. Compared to some of our other investments, it’s cost effective and highly impactful. By informing key upselling strategies within the app and improving our path-to-purchase journey, we have:

• Generated 15% additional revenue growth
• Increased our sales conversion rate by 7%
• Improved our average revenue per customer by 5%
• Boosted our total order numbers by 22% year over year

Amplitude isn’t just helping us optimize the experience for our online customers; it also helps us improve the experience for customers who visit our physical stores. For example, by gathering data on what online customers search for in the app, we can then source these new products and serve our offline customers even better. While we initially worried about online success diminishing our offline business, it turns out that online can complement offline and drive business both ways, improving the experience for everyone.

Amplitude helps us take our understanding of customer behavior and segmentation to new heights and drive overall performance growth. With this new understanding, we can successfully encourage customers to adopt behavior that correlates with higher value generation and achieve significant growth in our key revenue metrics and product KPIs.

It’s also improved the way we collaborate with partners like Appsynth. For instance, instead of sharing static screenshots like we used to do, we can now set up shared spaces and dashboards so we’re all looking at the same information in real time. This capability allows for quick access to insights so we’re all on the same page when we go granular, getting to the answers we need even faster.

It would have been easy for us to sit back and enjoy the growth we’d seen with our delivery service. But we strive to always improve on the customer experience, which starts internally. Using Amplitude has made our lives easier, which will help us continue to put smiles on our customers’ faces.