Meet Distacart
Distacart is the leading online purveyor of authentic Indian products for over 40 countries worldwide, including the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. With an ever-growing customer base and thousands of five-star reviews, Distacart has continued to expand its offerings and network of local sellers, ensuring customers can enjoy the riches of authentic Indian products at affordable prices.
Challenge: Distacart sought more visibility into its customer segments to reduce churn risk
Since its founding in 2018, Distacart’s locally sourced Indian products have driven demand from customers across the world. Like most Ecommerce companies with audiences of that size and depth, Distacart relies on robust segmentation tactics to optimize its marketing flows.
In the past, CRM Director Sujeet Pankaj used marketing automation platforms to uncover actionable insights surrounding different segments. While these platforms helped Distacart's marketing team improve messaging across owned channels (like email and SMS), they fell short as standalone solutions in several ways:
- Distacart's marketing team would spend hours manually uploading customer lists — which reduced bandwidth for strategy and execution.
- Dividing customers into clearly defined segments wasn't feasible because the available data was so shallow. This made it challenging to identify and target at-risk customers.
Witnessing these shortcomings firsthand, Sujeet knew it was time to introduce a more granular approach to segmentation at Distacart. He needed a tool that would help cement the company's messaging across segments and reduce churn — that's when he found Segments Analytics.
“Our previous marketing automation platforms offered some relevant customer insights. But turning those insights into valuable segments required us to manually pull a lot of data, and we still couldn’t go deep enough.”
Solution: Segments’ powerful customer analytics help Distacart put targeting on autopilot
With Segments, Sujeet unlocked a bevy of actionable insights surrounding Distacart's customers while condensing the segmentation process from hours to minutes. He attributes this success to these key benefits of our platform:
- Lifecycle segments that boost retention
Using our Lifecycle Journey dashboard, Sujeet can identify MVPs, low-value customers, and users on the brink of churn in mere minutes. With over 12 lifecycle segments to choose from (each with its own level of churn risk), Distacart's retention efforts have never been stronger.
- Top-level insights into product journeys and purchase cycles
Segments also offers Sujeet insights into consumer purchase timelines, allowing him to schedule flows to arrive at the most opportune times. If, for instance, Sujeet wants to look at a cohort of first-time purchasers, he can track how many days it takes for that cohort to lose interest and plan follow-up flows to hit just before they churn. Segments even shows him what products customers are buying in what sequence so that he can build his messaging around the most timely product recommendations.
- Automated flows tailored to each segment
Once Sujeet has the raw data he needs from each customer segment, he can use it to build out a fully automated calendar of customized flows to send through each channel. If he wants to target a cohort at medium risk of churn, he might use Segments to schedule an email offering a 20% discount. Or, if he wants to target a cohort at exceptionally high risk of churn, he might use Segments to schedule an SMS push notification offering a 30% discount.
Because Segments’ interface is so intuitive, Sujeet was able to enjoy all of these benefits without overcoming a learning curve. “The tool instantly generates customer lists that used to take me hours to upload,” Sujeet notes. “And I never have to worry about when to send out notifications since everything is already automated.”
“Segments breaks down our customers in every way you can imagine. Whether we want to identify which cohorts are at high risk of churn, which customers are not quite at risk of churn, or even which customers are the most loyal, we can use their automated retargeting options to send out customized flows in minutes.”
Results: Distacart reduces time spent on customer segmentation by 30% with Tresl
Partnering with Segments proved to be pivotal in helping Distacart craft timely and engaging flows while recovering customers on the brink of churn. Today, the platform has become a core pillar of Distacart's segmentation and targeting workflow.
Here’s what Distacart has accomplished at a glance:
- 20% increase in at-risk customer CVR
- 50% average email open rate
- 30% reduction in time spent on customer segmentation
With its targeting strategy on autopilot, Sujeet and the rest of the Distacart team can’t wait to continue using Segments to understand their customers on increasingly granular levels.
“Our experience with Segments has been all thumbs up. We plan to continue using it as long as it continues to bring us excellent, quantifiable ROI.”
