The Asia Pacific is home to a bustling business landscape. They say that a rising tide lifts all ships; however, because of its vibrant ecosystem and strong pool of diverse and competitive businesses, startups from the region may have a hard time staying relevant amidst cutthroat competition.
This challenge is even more pertinent for the burgeoning e-commerce industry. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a dramatic increase in e-commerce engagement across the globe. There is a catch, though. Because of the industry’s success, the number of competitors has also ballooned drastically. As of 2022, there are reportedly 51,300 e-commerce sites in Vietnam, 41,200 in Malaysia, and 29,500 in Singapore — the most it has ever been.
With such an oversaturated market, customer retention is becoming more crucial than ever for business survival and scalability. But how do companies stand out in cutthroat environments where thousands of sellers are fighting for customer attention?
One company which has pioneered ways to boost customer retention among Southeast Asian startups is CleverTap, a customer engagement and retention platform that provides the functionality to integrate app analytics and marketing. CleverTap, in collaboration with e27, is spearheading a six-month long roadshow titled ‘The Big Leap’. For the Singapore leg of the roadshow, the partnership brought together a panel of industry leaders to discuss Retention Playbook: Bringing retention best practices across SEA, where they explored the importance of monetisation for startups and ways to achieve that by utilising opportunities in the post-pandemic digital environment with a keen focus on customer retention.
CleverTap has six regional offices all around the globe and a solid presence in APAC. The company helps build amazing user experiences for the world’s leading digital-first brands with their smart, all-in-one platform that combines the best analytics, segmentation, and engagement tools so that businesses can build valuable, long-term relationships with their customers. This makes CleverTap the perfect institution to pioneer efforts anchored on helping businesses retain customers.
Also Read: Success is a moving target: CleverTap Co-founder Anand Jain
How CleverTap makes a difference
With the volatile state of the pandemic, the global economy is not entirely crisis-free. The future looks uncertain and risky due to disrupted supply chains caused by wars, political unrest across different nations, trade conflicts, inflation, and an impending recession. As such, there has been a dramatic decline in global funding, reaching US$74.5 billion in the third quarter of 2022, hitting a nine-quarter low. In order to weather such economic blows, businesses must come up with creative ways not only to capture customer attention, but to retain them.
This is the onus behind The Big Leap’s Singapore leg: To help digital-first brands in the region stand out, capture customer attention, and engage and retain them. Trusted by 10,000+ mobile businesses, CleverTap has proven to be a global leader in helping organisations engage and retain clients.
The Panellists included key stakeholders from diverse industries: Achint Setia, Chief Revenue and Marketing Officer at Zalora; Igor Mostovoy, VP of Product at 99.co; Sistla Sumanth, Director for Digital Technology APAC at RBI; David Setiawan, Head of Marketing at JobStreet; Baptiste Le Gal, CRO APAC at Vestiaire Collective; and Avantika Jain, General Manager at Fave.
Through the event, CleverTap managed to bring together over 100 growth leaders in Southeast Asia to create a platform for sharing insights on how to develop engaging experiences to grow customer retention, increase customer lifetime value, and spark massive scalable growth with customers at the forefront.
Executing lessons learnt during the pandemic for a better future
One of the most pertinent lessons from the recent pandemic is how businesses must focus on executing strategic plans for a more resilient future.
Jain kickstarted the panel discussion by sharing how Fave, a rewards app that relied heavily on redemptions at physical stores, was hit badly when the pandemic came. “The offline aspect almost vanished, and we were forced to switch to online. Interestingly, we’re seeing that consumers are not returning to physical stores even after the pandemic is seemingly over. If anything, the online behaviour is ramping up,” she shared.
Fave plans on leveraging this trend and this development is so pivotal for the rewards app that currently, they are planning to roll out a cashback scheme in partnership with online merchants as part of their business model. For Vestiaire Collective, things were slightly different when COVID came. As a mobile-first platform, they saw a lot of users come in. On the other hand, Baptiste shared that when many users come in, it becomes a task to keep them engaged and retain them.
Setiawan from JobStreet shared that for them, there was a slowdown during the first year of the pandemic, but in the second year, they saw a jump. “We launched a big campaign back then to tap into the evolved talent pool, specifically looking at working from home. We ran a lot of articles trying to educate users on how to start going to interviews in this new candidate-first landscape, and that worked for us,” he added.
Sumanth talked about the importance of collaborations, highlighting how RBI’s partnerships with AliPay and Grab helped the company survive when F&B was probably one of the worst-hit sectors.
For 99.co, the struggle was that online traffic remained high owing to the boom in real estate due to factors like surging rent prices and people looking for bigger homes as work-from-home prevailed. Enquiries, however, stopped because people couldn’t visit the actual properties. In order to address this challenge, 99.co’s groundbreaking solution was to revolutionise customer experience by replicating their services in a digitalised environment, conducting their open houses online, and training their agents to operate through their digital platform.
Also Read: The Big Leap roadshow kickstarts in Jakarta with a panel on the Gen Z market
Taking The Big Leap for customer retention could boost your startup amid market woes
“Go where your customers are,” highlighted Sumanth from RBI. The first step towards engaging customers is having a presence on a platform of their preference. One of the emerging trends in 2022 is the dramatic shift towards mobile, which is expected to ramp up in 2023 and beyond. In 2022, there will be 326.3 million smartphone users in Southeast Asia, with Indonesia and Vietnam leading the way. These users will make up 88.0 per cent of the region’s internet users.
“It is established that people are moving towards mobile more,” shared Setiawan. “We look a lot into the lifetime value of our customers, and we run many retaining campaigns. In fact, we have tripled our retention budget since the pandemic,” Setiawan added.
Retaining customers is more expensive than acquiring customers. Sumanth shared that while running campaigns is crucial, it is even more critical to track the success of those campaigns. “What’s working, what is driving more conversions: looking at the results and quickly adapting based on feedback from these campaigns is a must,” he said.
Mostovoy also stated that if you are keen on seeing results next year, you should’ve started your retention campaigns last year! “To feed information in your apps, you need to run campaigns that are relevant to the users, and have a keen focus on keeping them coming back,” he added, emphasising the importance of competition analysis and being innovative and dynamic to stay ahead.
To learn more insights and engage with industry leaders from your country, register here and check out upcoming The Big Leap events. You may also visit https://clevertap.com to learn more about how CleverTap is helping customers like Gojek, ShopX, Canon, Electronic Arts, TED, English Premier League, TD Bank, AirAsia, Papa John’s, Tesco Kotak Mahindra Bank, SonyLiv, Swiggy, PharmEasy, and Dream11 retain customers.
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