Consumer engagement (engaging your consumers) is the first step towards brand success. Let’s show you how to drive value-driven consumer engagement in this blog post.

Table of Content

• What is Consumer Engagement
• One Missed Call Campaign Example
• How Did Consumer Engagement Evolve in 2021?
• Benefits of Consumer Engagement with Technology.
  • Build a long-lasting relationship with customers
  • First-party enriched data-sets
  • Give customers a heightened experience every time

• Physical Engagements & Rewards Types
• Top 10 Consumer Engagement Case Studies
• Bonus: Type of Consumer Data Gathered
• Recap: Key Takeaways
• Conclusion

What is Consumer Engagement

Consumer engagement is the “First Connect” of your brand to build relationships with your customers. Creating the first impression of your brand while interacting on multiple channels with your consumers is a vital consumer engagement strategy.

In a hyper-connected world of communication, connecting with your customers and expecting them to buy more, promote more, and demonstrate more loyalty, requires more than sales, support, and services. User or customer engagement is a two-way conversation between the brand and customer which educates or motivates them, depending on their buying journey.

Businesses are now adopting more and more customer-centric approaches while implementing their marketing strategies to build top-of-mind awareness and foster a lasting relationship.

Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) One Missed Call Campaign

The global leader in consumer goods, HUL, devised a simple yet impactful consumer engagement strategy to make “First Connect“ with its untapped customers. This was tagged a Missed Call Campaign. Want to know how it went? Watch the video below.

An effective communication helped the HUL brand to reach an untapped market of rural India and establish a long-lasting relationship with its brand.

Despite being India’s leading laundry detergent, even with a lower cost per wash, it struggled to reach the rural Indian markets where electronic media did not reach.  

HUL started sending out a promotional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for people in rural areas to give missed calls to virtual numbers. Users hang up before the receiver picks, so the mobile numbers are stored in the system showing the person called. After the call gets disconnected, the caller would receive a call back with interactive famous personality voices.

The campaign was promoted through outbound calls, radio, and SMS messages, and now, people started sharing the Toll-Free numbers to listen to the pre-recorded calls. HUL registered 18.2 million missed calls with this campaign, reaching 2.6 million rural consumers with 300% sales growth.

How did consumer engagement evolve in 2021?

After the advent of technology, global communication is no longer just restricted to mobile SMS but has become an “Omnichannel”. Customer connect at various touchpoints is key to winning consumer connect. Traditional multichannel methods – like advertising, point of sale, and after-service follow-ups are prevalent during the customer buying lifecycle.

The Umbro addition for consumer engagement has been the technological engagements where different digital channels are being utilized.  Gazillions of methods are introduced worldwide, creating interactive mobile apps, artificial intelligence, chatbots, gamification, and instant gratifications.

Leveraging these channels is more accessible than it sounds, with many technology-driven Martech companies having such in-built platforms. They are ready to integrate consumer engagement campaigns on the go by creating customized plans suited for your business needs.  

Benefits of Consumer Engagement with Technology

1. Build a long-lasting relationship with customers

“When brands can measure the depth and degree of customer interaction against the preset actionable goals will lead to right  customer relationship with your brand.”

The way customers interact with your brand or channels you want them to use depends on your strategy. However, the power always remains with the customer on decisions during the interaction. The bottom line for a permanent impression on your customer is giving them what they are interested in.

If you decide to include an offering that goes above and beyond your product or services, give something that makes a meaningful addition to their lives – this will ensure that your customers buy from you continuously. Our motto here is to convince you that a tech-driven approach is always easier than traditional approaches.

For example, by offering a discount coupon, annual sales, a newer approach of instant gratification is being welcomed into the markets. One way is by offering a gamification reward integrated with any leading fintech enabler to distribute the rewards – where customer interaction, brand awareness, and rewarding a loyal customer is achieved within a minute. Click through the link to know how it is done. http://william.unomok.com/

2. First-party enriched datasets

“Data is the new oil.” Every fraternity member from mid-senior to higher-level knows how good insightful data is key to driving business decisions. The same applies to the consumer engagement strategy. While companies run different loyalty programs, they unknowingly leave behind the core crux of procuring enriched customer data. Well-designed platforms must include or give you accurate customer data throughout the tenure of your loyalty programs. The company acquiring any technology enablers of consumer engagements must always ask them to provide the data to be future-ready.

3. Give Customers a Heightened Experience Every Time

Inching closer to your customers in this era requires a unique approach at every engagement touchpoint or channel your brand creates. To stand out from the digital noise, you need to draft a story that keeps interaction simple yet impactful – irrespective of the type of brand’s products or services.

There needs to be a theme that supersedes your competition in your domain or anywhere else in the market. This tactic will set your brand apart, and customers will identify with your brand.

Physical Engagement and Reward Types

Let’s dive into the top 10 consumer engagements case studies that created a unique identity for these globally renowned brands

1. Oil & Gas – Total
2. Beverages – Diageo
3. Oil & Gas – OVH
4. FMCG – Fonterra Future Dairy
5. Beverages – RIO
6. FMCG – Ruchi Soya
7. Consumer Goods – LUX Innerwear
8. Beverages – Bacardi Breezer
9. Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) – Perfetti Van Melle
10. Beauty and Personal Care – Otentika

1. Oil & Gas – Total

Client Overview

TotalEnergies SE is a French multinational integrated oil and gas company founded in 1924 and one of the world’s seven “supermajor” oil companies. They needed unique consumer data insights to plan their marketing spend, encourage trial purchase, drive brand loyalty and stimulate sales in the Nigerian market.

What were the Challenges  

• Total wanted to regain its place as a market leader
• Create a top of the mind brand awareness
• Reward their customers

Passenger vehicles in Nigeria are most frequent, and 81% of cars are second-hand, requiring frequent servicing and high demand for automotive lubricants.

Type of Loyalty Reward

Instant Gratification

Consumer Engagement Strategy

The loyalty solution is deployed to allow the consumers to unlock instant rewards after purchase. The solution only required customers to scratch off the silver panel on the lubricant bottle to reveal a unique code, and text the code, to receive rewards instantly.

Outcome

• Total discovered their peak purchase time to be 9 am and peak purchase day to be Saturday
• 57% of total sales during promo came from first-time purchases, which drove sales increase by 50%
• The client registers about 500,000 first-time and repeats users
• Product sellout recorded in 2 months Vs. 3 months average

What made the campaign unique?

Total worked with Sproxil to provide lubesure tags placed on lubricants for consumers to scratch and win different rewards after purchasing lubricants. And, the company sought to discover unique consumer purchase insights to optimize its marketing spend, encourage the trial purchase and boost sales.

2. Beverages – Diageo

Client Overview

Diageo is a global leader in beverage alcohol with an outstanding collection of brands across spirits and beer. They produce an outstanding collection of over 200 brands – old and new, large and small, global and local – that are enjoyed in more than 180 countries around the world.

What were the challenges

The client realized that counterfeit operations had penetrated their supply chain for one of their products, McDowell’s No1 Whisky. They wanted to drive sales of the original product by embarking on a promotional campaign by running various loyalty programs across India.

Type of Loyalty Rewards

Air-time Recharge | Swiggy | Big-basket | BookMyShow

Consumer Engagement Strategy

Every bottle has been given universally unique codes, and the regulations were printed on the inside of the bottle cap. After opening the bottle, the customers send an SMS printed under the bottle cap from a mobile number to Sproxil’s designated code service. The moment SMS was received by Sproxil, the consumer received instant free mobile recharges to that number or any other rewards as per the campaign.  

Outcome

• The campaign captured consumer data who made cross purchases on other brands from McDowell
• Within 2 months, over 20 million unique consumers engaged across 30 different regions
• Now 30% of existing consumers are engaged over WhatsApp to enter into a promo
• The client can track sales through an analytics dashboard

What does the client like about Sproxil

The Sproxil Champion solution has shown us how much we can do online, offline, and even in trade while ensuring our consumers enjoy our brands.

3. Oil & Gas – OVH

Client Overview

OVH Energy is the company behind the Oando retail brand in Nigeria. They are an indigenous marketer of choice, providing trusted petroleum products and services.

 What were the Challenges

OVH Energy is a marketer of petroleum products like Fuels, Oanado Lubricants, and Autocare. The client was unable to centralize the consumer data on a single platform, thus hindering the company from running loyalty programs for a strong distributed retail network.

Type of Loyalty Reward

Instant gratification

Sproxil provided an automated analytics dashboard to gather consumers’ data and instantly rewards consumers.

Consumer Engagement Strategy

Sproxil provided an automated system to collect customer data, analyze all consumer entries and instantly reward winners for staying loyal to the brand.

Outcome

• Top SMS users were identified as mechanics, and a trade influencer program was planned
• Over 10,000 repeat buyers were identified for remarketing

4. FMCG – Fonterra Future Dairy

Client Overview

Fonterra is a global dairy nutrition company owned by 10000 farmers and their families, united by a fundamental belief in the power of dairy to make a difference. The company recently started its operations in India with a range of products and needed a new consumer engagement partner to run a loyalty campaign.  

What were the Challenges

The dairy industry is a heavy competition field dominated by many large players and wanted consumer engagement experts to create brand awareness, showcase the product’s benefits, and educate the consumers.

Type of Loyalty Reward

Instant Gratification + Discount Voucher for Purchase for Modern Trade Outlets

Consumer Engagement Strategy

At Point of Sale (POSM), a QR code leads the consumer to a gamification platform; the consumer will enter details and play a game to win assured rewards.

5. FMCG – RIO

 Client Overview

‘New’ is the philosophy that started Rio’s brand strategy in 2009. They created India’s First Fusion Drink to break the monotony of the market and make the beverage enthusiasts experience what ‘different’ tastes like with a wide range of different products.  

 What were the Challenges

The company needed consumer engagement experts to launch loyalty programs for new product launches. A seasoned player in providing on-pack loyalty programs, the client chose to promote their wine tetra packs with Sproxil.

 Type of Loyalty Reward

• Instant Gratification & Lucky Draw
• Assured Rewards with Mega Prices

Consumer Engagement Strategy

Coupons are to be pasted on the cans, and consumers can redeem the assured reward by sending an SMS.

6. FMCG – Ruchi Soya

Client Overview

Ruchi Soya is the largest manufacturer of edible oil in India. Patanjali Ayurved acquired it in 2019. According to a report published by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ruchi Soya has been ranked at 175 in the top 250 consumer products companies in the “Global Powers of the Consumer Products Industry 2012”.

 What were the Challenges

The client needed to implement a loyalty program during the festive seasons. The festive season in India is a highly competitive market, and the client needed to boost its sales during that period.

Type of Loyalty Reward

Scratch and Win

Consumer Engagement Strategy

On-pack cashback, communication on the pack – just scratch and win, SMS win assured cashback. 

7. Consumer Goods – LUX Innerwear

Client Overview

Lux Industries is a leading Indian innerwear and hosiery company with headquarters in Bengal, India. The company has expanded its product range to include underwear and thermal clothing for women and kids and exports its products to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

What were the Challenges

As the competition in the innerwear market was fierce and the effectiveness of paid media was declining, brands wanted to move towards influencer marketing. It was difficult for the field force alone to influence the consumer and needed a technology that gathered data and helped communicate more effectively whenever required.

Type of Loyalty Reward

SMS Pin Code Reward Systems

Consumer Engagement Strategy

Lux used mobile as the channel of communication, intending to incentivize the retailers to stock more Lux products and create goodwill that would translate into sales even after the campaign was over. The campaign was designed so that loyal retailers of the brand could get cash rewards directly from Lux after accuring a certain number of points. For this, customized labels were designed and fixed on cartons of the product.

 Outcome

• 5000 retailer has signed up within 2 month
• 23,000 individual retailers verified with 60% response
• Data collected from Sproxil’s portal helped Lux build a comprehensive database of their retailers

What made the campaign unique?

The goodwill generated by this campaign will not end with it. Retailers will find themselves stocking more of Lux products out of habit.

8. Beverages – Bacardi Breezer

Client Overview

Bacardi Breezer is an alcoholic fruit-flavored drink made by Bacardi that comes in a variety of fruit flavours. In India, Bacardi Breezer was the first entrant in the ready-to-drink category and is currently the market leader in its segment.

What were the Challenges

Breezer Vivid Shuffle (BVS) is a platform for India’s burgeoning hip-hop movement, created with the intent to represent the talent of the underground fraternity five years ago. Upon its launch, the initiative became a movement for artists in the first year itself. Acted as a platform that speaks the language of the streets across India.

– Maximum consumer registration through the first interaction activity

– create a loyal customer database by offering rewards.

– promote brand and product awareness.

Type of Loyalty Reward

Instant Gratification

Give instant reward value/coupons that attracts the consumer to be involved perennially with the brand (Each registrant received Rs. 150 Paytm Voucher)

Consumer Engagement Strategy

An interactive approach helped us get instant customer attention by sensitizing their cognitive senses on their devices or phones. Sproxil’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology-enabled experience helped each user click and upload their selfie, thus enabling instant gratification. As deemed, we extended our campaign through multiple channels such as the web, on-premise, and gadgets/devices.

• Campaign Activity

1. Scan QR Code
2. Register with name & contact
3. Download your Caricature Selfie to share
4. Receive Rewards

Outcome

Easier said than done – “Trending” or “Viral” the saying came true for the client. The campaign

was able to engage over a million consumers through the BVS campaign and overwhelmingly

developed as the customer favorites in bringing consumers that exceeded the clients’

expectations.

• 1 million Consumer Engagement
• 52% Boost in Sales
• 1K Social Media Followers

What the client liked about Sproxil

Sproxil has played a vast and vital role in engaging consumers and boosting sales. With Breezer’s vivid shuffle campaign, the brand achieved 52% conversion from activity to sales via a fun & exciting act.

9. Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) –  Perfetti Van Melle

Client Overview

Perfetti Van Melle is a Dutch multinational company of confectionery and gum. It was formed in 2001 with the merger of the Perfetti group of Italy and the Van Melle of the Netherlands. They are one of the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors of confectionery and chewing gum.

What were the Challenges

Perfetti wanted to reward their estimable consumers by ensuring 1% of 190,000,000 monos (1.9m) promo stock redemption rate during the promotion period. Replace manual-based consumer promotion where physical marketing collaterals were used and replaced with digital rewards systems.

Type of Loyalty Reward

Instant Gratification – Sweepstakes Rewards

Consumer Engagement Strategy

Generating Codes to be printed on the back label of the mono wrapper. Providing a back-end system that generates weekly reports on promo performance, i.e., redemption rates, prize deliveries, etc. Ensuring winners are rewarded promptly with images shared

Outcome

• More than 20,000 new and repeat customers were registered across Nigeria
• Over 2.8 million consumer entries were recorded for the period under review.
• Over N1.3m (3000 USD) & N6m (15000USD) worth of airtime and cash disbursed respectively to 25,000 customers.

What the client liked about Sproxil

Sproxil helped Perfetti achieve 5.8% of the promo stock redemption pool during the promo period.

10. Beauty and Personal Care – Otentika

Client Overview

Otentika is a women’s beauty products brand where African heritage is crucial in redefining the brand. Due to counterfeiting issues with one of the top products, they turned to Sproxil to regain consumers’ trust in African markets.

What were the Challenges

Sales of Otentika® creams had declined substantially due to an abundance of counterfeit goods that were hard to distinguish from the original product.  The Managing Director of the company, Mr. Okonkwo, had chosen Sproxil Champion rather than the Defender solution because according to him “Nigerians don’t work for nothing.” Rewarding his customers was his best chance at enticing them to try and thus believe in the product again

Type of Loyalty Reward

Sproxil – Short-Code SMS System

Consumer Engagement Strategy

A built-in product authentication so that genuine buyers would receive rewards. While purchasing a tube of cream and sending SMS for free to Sproxil’s short-code, the customers would verify the product’s authenticity. The customers’ phone numbers were automatically entered into a raffle for the ultimate prize.

Outcome

• Trust is restored amongst customers were encouraged by incentivizing
• In 2 months, Corporate Focus saw an increase in sales revenue of 600%
• Customers can easily detect fake from original and hence restoring confidence in the brand

What the client liked about Sproxil

Many customers had stopped buying due to loss of faith in the brand, and sales numbers declined to a dangerous low.

Type of Consumer Data Gathered

Consumer engagement is an ongoing process where brands thrive on incentivizing the customers at different times of the year, for example, during the festive season. While carrying such activities, brands gather vast numbers of consumer data that can be utilized for future consumer engagements.

Utilizing the gathered data is critical to your business for consumer engagements. Once you compile the data in one place, you can easily find out who your consumers and brand loyalists are. The decision-making becomes easy to decide on the type of campaigns, the reward or incentives value, or budgeting.

Loyalty solutions partners develop such platforms where you can accumulate consumer data. The right data type you need for effective engagements shall give you total engagements, genuine verifications, unique users, or repeated users. When you can easily procure such data of consumers on a single dashboard is a sure way that you are on course to more likely to be subscribed for products or services you are selling.

With tens of millions of consumers engaged over a decade, Sproxil provides an analytics dashboard to assemble consumer data on a dashboard. This facilitates marketers and brand owners to track the growth, seasonal fluctuations, or geographical engagements. The below image is one sample representation of client data provided by Sproxil.

Recap: Key Takeaways

The sum of the entire blog is to engage your consumers across industries such as Beverage, Oil & Oil&Gas, Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Consumer Goods, Consumer Packaged Goods, Beauty, and Personal Care.  The technology used is Instant Gratification, ScratchN Win, SMS Pin Code Reward System, Text-N-Win consumer promotion, Air-time Recharge, and many others. 

The massive number of consumers engaged for these globally renowned brands.

•  Total Energies registered 50,000 first time users
• Diageo engaged 20 million consumers across 30 different geographical regions
• OVH Energy identified 10,000 repeat buyers
• Lux signed up 5000 retailers and identified 23,000 retailers
• Bacardi Breezer engaged 1 million consumers and 28.1 followers on social media
• Perfetti Van Mella engaged 20,000 new and repeat customers in Nigeria
• Otentika registered 600% sales boost in 2 months

With enormous experience in providing Customer Experience – CX, bringing more loyalty towards your brand is easier than it looks with Sproxil. Our expertise in consumer engagements and solutions to multi-national brands made us the most trustworthy loyalty solutions providers globally.   

Concluding Remarks

“First Connect” with your customers is the key differentiator in making customers loyal to your brand. The greatest advantage to the marketers is that you have 24*7 accessibility with the consumers to gain their attention.

Seeking the right motivation from the discussed examples and embracing the technologies, you can offer something relevant, valuable, enjoyable, and periodical to engage consumers. However, it would be best to lay the foundation strong once you first connect with consumers to gain fruitful business. 

Sproxil is one of the most ambitious technology enablers driving consumer engagements for over a decade in Nigerian and Indian markets for tens of millions of consumers. Our fast consumer markets and evolving technologies can help you set up a consumer engagement campaign for any business across the globe.