Driving strategic customer re-engagement with centralized audience orchestration

“Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma.” - Anthony Bourdain

Cuisine is inextricably linked to culture. Whether it’s ramen in Tokyo, shrimp gumbo in New Orleans, or bangers and mash in London, there are certain foods that wouldn’t exist without the unique environments they were created in.

In the 21st century, technological advancements have transformed the way in which we access food, both at home and when traveling. And while specific cuisines are still regionally unique, the services we use to order food have become more and more consistent across the world. No matter where you live, chances are all you need to do to access your favorite local dish is open up one of the delivery apps available in your city and place an order.

Delivery Hero, now the world’s leading local delivery platform, has introduced its online food delivery services in more than 40 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, powering the apps that many of us use to order our favorite foods.

As Delivery Hero has grown, the marketing organization’s Audience team saw an opportunity to use the information being collected across channels to strategically re-engage their customers and increase order frequency. That said, the team was running into several customer data management challenges that hindered them from realizing the full value of the data they were collecting.

The number of martech tools available to growth teams today can cause even the most experienced teams to feel overwhelmed. Growth stack challenges arise not only when selecting which tools to implement, where buyers can run into a paradox of choice, but also once tools have been implemented and customer data becomes siloed in different systems.

The Delivery Hero team had done the hard work of evaluating different options in the market and building a best-in-breed tech stack. To use these tools effectively, however, they needed to be able to integrate data across tools.

The team also faced challenges assessing performance across downstream tools. Every engagement platform and media system today has its own segment building capabilities.This is a good thing, as each tool’s segmentation capabilities enable you to use that tool to its full extent. It can, however, introduce reporting complications.

When different tools have unique data sets and distinct segmentation capabilities, each tool will end up producing unique audience segments. When analyzing cross-channel performance, discrepancies in audience segments across channels make it impossible to compare effectiveness.

Working with multiple audience builders across tools made it difficult for the Delivery Hero to run cross-channel campaigns, A/B test channels and adopt incrementality-based measurement, limiting the team to running tactical or channel-specific campaigns. Although they knew there was an opportunity to do more with their data–driven campaigns, the team needed to centralize their data infrastructure to make the most of their customer data.

The Delivery Hero Audience team implemented mParticle as their central data orchestration layer, allowing them to streamline their data pipeline and simplify audience building. 

The team began by sending customer data into mParticle from their Customer Engagement Platform, using a packaged Feed integration, and from their internal servers, using mParticle’s server-to-server API. 

Once that data had been ingested into mParticle from across systems, it could be used to build Audience segments in the mParticle UI. Once each Audience was built, it could be connected to multiple downstream systems without engineering support, saving the team from having to build the same audience in multiple tools and ensuring audience consistency across channels. With this increased agility, the Audience team was ready to begin strategically reengaging their customers at scale.

Before implementing mParticle, the team had run little-to-no cross-channel reactivation campaigns to existing customers. Now, with the ability to connect customer segments to their downstream engagement tools more easily, the team knew there was an opportunity to increase reactivation amongst existing customers.

One campaign that the team ran was advertising to existing customers that had not made a recent purchase. To stand up the campaign, all the team needed to do was build an Audience in mParticle using the attributes that had been collected into mParticle, and connect that Audience to their advertising tools of choice.

The team followed a similar workflow to set up an additional advertising campaign focused on increasing order frequency of customers who were already active.

The Delivery Hero portfolio includes a variety of apps that focus on specific cuisines, groceries, and even other household goods such as pharmaceuticals and electronics. With mParticle in place, the team was able to unify data across verticals, build strategic Audience segments based on engagement with a certain vertical, and connect those Audiences to different advertising platforms. This enabled the Audience team to activate cross-sell campaigns, such as promoting the Delivery Hero quick commerce offering, which gives users the ability to make small orders of everyday products at record speed, to customers that hadn't tried the service yet.

In addition to helping build more strategic Audiences, mParticle also gave the Delivery Hero Audience team better control over which downstream systems they were connecting those Audiences to. This came especially useful as the team looked to adapt campaigns to the social media trends in each market. For example, while Twitter was the one of the most popular social platforms for Delivery Hero’s customers in the LATAM region, the team found that customers in MENA were more active on Snapchat. By centralizing Audience building in mParticle and connecting regional Audiences to specific downstream media systems, the team was able to run the same campaign across regions with increased efficiency. The ability to roll out campaigns across different markets also meant that if a regionally specific initiative was successful, the team could make a few small tweaks and adapt it to other regional markets.

Going to market with mParticle as a central data orchestration layer enabled the Delivery Hero Audience team to run integrated campaigns that they couldn’t have beforehand. The ability to simplify segmentation and connect data between systems without developer support opened up a new world of possibilities for the Audience team, who are now able to strategically re-engage their customers, whether dormant or highly-active, and execute campaigns with greater efficiency.

With the campaigns run thus far, the team has been able to generate:

Moving forward, the Delivery Hero Audience team is continuing to evolve their campaigns, test new channels, and deliver relevant, valuable experiences to their customers. 

To learn more about mParticle and try out the mParticle Audience builder for yourself, you can explore the mParticle platform demo here.