How bigbasket increased email engagement by 4X with interactive emails

About bigbasket

bigbasket is India’s earliest and most loved online grocer. It was founded in 2011 and is owned by the renowned Tata Group. With operations in more than 100 cities, bigbasket processes around 15 million orders per month.

Challenge

Since bigbasket runs online, email marketing is one of its most important channels for building community and engaging with customers. The team would curate email campaigns to highlight its products' benefits and send them to relevant customers.

These campaigns were well-received and enjoyed a good open rate. However, they were meant to send educational information and were not designed to incite more engagement besides email opens.

However, this strategy prevented bigbasket from leveraging the complete email marketing potential. bigbasket’s customers loved their emails, yet they didn’t engage them further inside their inboxes to keep them hooked.

Goal

At this point, bigbasket decided to add more email campaigns to their strategy to increase engagement. The new email campaigns would be designed for more action and less reading, This means they would have elements that inspire more clicks, such as concise content and contextual CTAs.

Approach

As Team bigbasket researched, they learned that interactive emails can turn static emails into a dynamic experience, encouraging subscribers to engage more. For example, email recipients can play a quiz, fill out a form, or participate in a poll without leaving their inbox.

This functionality sounded perfect for their customers, who would get more information about bigbasket products in a gamified manner. However, creating interactive emails involves coding and takes time.

This is where Mailmodo comes in. It eliminates the need for extensive coding and enables the creation of gamified interactive emails within minutes. Thus, bigbasket opted to create interactive email campaigns with Mailmodo.

“Brands still hesitate to use interactive emails mainly because they are difficult to create. However, Mailmodo completely solves this problem and makes interactive emails as simple as regular ones.” - Akhil K, bigbasket

Below are a few examples of bigbasket’s successful interactive email campaigns created with Mailmodo.

Campaign #1: Helping customers find the right product with an in-mail quiz

bigbasket sent a campaign to promote skincare products with an in-mail quiz about skin type instead of a regular offer email.

In this campaign, customers can determine their skin type after answering a few questions in their emails and will be redirected to a product catalog created for their skin type. For example, if their skin type turns out to be dry based on the quiz, their CTA will take them to products meant for dry skin.

No more generic recommendations solely based on past purchases sent via a boring email.

Check out the template below.

Campaign #2: Hosting a lucky draw competition with an in-mail poll

bigbasket started a lucky draw campaign inside emails called “Matchday Madness” to engage customers during the ongoing IPL, the world’s most popular men’s annual twenty20 cricket league tournament.

Customers would use the interactive poll inside their emails to predict a winner for the running match. A lucky winner would be drawn from those who made the right guess. The lucky winner would then get exclusive cricketing merchandise.

The template also had CTAs to visit the sports store and snacks sections on bigbasket, reaping the benefit of cricket fever. Check it out below.

Outcome

✅ The skincare campaign received a 3X higher click-through rate than their previous campaigns.

✅ The first email of the IPL campaign series engaged 6X more customers than their previous campaigns for IPL.

All in all, bigbasket has successfully restructured its email strategy and incited more engagements. They’re currently exploring more use cases of interactive emails with Mailmodo.

“Many marketers brainstorm a lot to make their emails engaging without considering interactive emails as an option, whereas we’ve realized that they’re not just a tactic but the complete solution to boost email engagement. Akhil K, bigbasket

Key takeaways for your next marketing campaign

✅ Email gamification isn’t as complicated or technical as it sounds. You can use prebuilt widgets like quizzes, polls, and spin-the-wheel to turn your regular promotional campaigns into fun contests and get subscribers to engage more. In addition, the creation process won’t take more than a few minutes.

✅ Contextual CTAs for the win. Some experts suggest only one CTA per campaign. But if you must add more, make it contextual.

In the skincare campaign, bigbasket guides customers toward products that suit their needs. This approach is better than dumping too many CTAs about different product lines and expecting customers to check them out.