AINews & AnalysisNewsletter

PharmEasy is Using AI Tools to Improve Customer Engagement

PharmaEasy

User retention and giving consumers a good experience is extremely important for any brand that wants to become a success in the digital world.

While the last one year or so has been difficult for many businesses, brands having a robust online presence got their customer engagement right. However, to respond quickly to consumers’ demands across all channels and to offer relevant, personalized experiences to consumer base in the digital world are often challenging – the key is to have a strong digital backbone.

PharmEasy, an online pharmacy and healthcare platform, realized this mantra early in their digital journey. The company sells medicines online by connecting to a registered retail pharmacy and get medicines delivered to customers’ doorstep.

Founded in 2014, the pharmaceutical supply chain in India now has approximately 1,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers, 55,000 distributors and sub-distributors, and 800,000 pharmacy stores. This makes it a highly fragmented market that PharmEasy was looking to digitize.

 The major challenge that we faced was engaging users across multiple touchpoints during their browse or purchase journey on the app,” says Nitin Chugh, Head of CRM at PharmEasy.

In other words, the online merchant was looking to enable effective user segmentation and understand their behavior within the app. Needless to mention, cart abandonment has been an issue, as is the case with most ecommerce players.

PharmEasy was also looking to improve its click-through rate (CTRs), which is the ratio of users who click on a specific link as compared to the total number of users who have received a web page, an email, or a digital advertisement. As Chugh explains, “All we wanted was to create an improved personalized experience so as to prevent user drop-offs at critical steps across the app.”

It was then that the online pharmacy platform approached CleverTap, an AI-powered customer engagement and retention platform to gather insights.

According to Chugh, “A few functions of CleverTap such as journeys, trigger campaigns, and native displays really stand out and assist us in curating a contextual, personalized, and effective buyer experience for our users.”

CleverTap’s Native Display Campaign has played a crucial role in its marketing efforts across various touchpoints. PharmEasy used the feature across the search results page, thank you page, and product details page.

Chugh informs that the flexibility to configure native display campaigns based on user properties has been remarkable. “This flexibility has also enabled us to run contextual banner ads for different search keywords on the search results page. The partnership with CleverTap has helped us study and understand our users in depth. As a result, we can deliver better services and experiences to our end users.”

Chugh highlights some of the benefits as a result of this partnership, including reduced shopping cart abandonment, as he says that trigger campaigns for cart and search abandonment have led to a 1.5-2x increase in direct conversions.

PharmEasy was also able to reach customers with content targeted to their specific behaviors and preferences that helped the e-pharmacy boost engagement and conversions. The AI-based platform helped PharmEasy fully understand who their users are and what exactly they do within the app.

 The solution helped PharmEasy understand the details of the user’s journey and what makes them convert or drop-off at each stage of the funnel was important for the team. The analytics and engagement tools helped us craft effective campaigns targeted at reducing drop-offs, says Chugh.

PharmEasy also dramatically improved its CTRs. “Its push notifications are more effective since they started using push templates, and similarly, the email campaigns have been running well and producing meaningful results.

“The CRM team at PharmEasy has seen their campaign CTRs jump by 10x using push templates. The CTRs for our email campaigns have seen similar improvements,” says Chugh.

“With the help of CleverTap’s live user segments, real-time data, automated segmentation, and personalization features, we are now able to scale our marketing efforts in a much more advanced and efficient way. The system not only allows us to do experiments and analyze results quickly, but also makes our marketing decisions more scientific and data-driven,” says Chugh.

He also mentions the special support of the customer support team for solving our queries and addressing our concerns.

“We helped PharmEasy understand their users, tailor their brand communications, and provide an enhanced user experience,” says Dave Dabbah, Chief Marketing Officer.

He believes with the help of their AI-based solution PharmEasy could optimize the user’s lifecycle journey by delivering a seamless brand experience leveraged through various messaging channels.

Chugh says, as part of the company’s social responsibility effort, PharmEasy has increase the number of awareness campaigns through mobile marketing channels. For the same reasons CleverTap’s cross-channel communication to fulfil their social responsibilit

“We have launched a state-wide communication campaign where PharmEasy sends state-specific lockdown rules, COVID-19 toll numbers, and information about vaccine appointment availability,” he says.

 Going forward, PharmEasy will use the vendor’s marketing tools to drive the COVID-Free India initiative across the country by building large-scale awareness around testing and vaccination protocols as well as delivering holistic healthcare communication that is accessible to everyone.

An Avendus study estimates that online spending in India is expected to clock a 35 percent-plus CAGR from $39 billion in 2020 to $200 billion by 2025. Hence customer retention and giving them a superior experience should be the key mantra for companies that want to succeed in the digital world.

Leave a Response

Sohini Bagchi
Sohini Bagchi is Editor at CXOToday, a published author and a storyteller. She can be reached at [email protected]