- To celebrate this partnership, we’ve conducted an interview with Rohitashwa Bhotica, Senior Manager at Future Group, and pillar in their recent digital transformation with the release of their app, Future Pay.
- He gave us some very interesting insights about connecting with Future Group’s audience, how to use location data to optimize campaign performances, and what lies ahead for Future Group.
PlotProjects partners with Future Group, one of India’s largest supermarket chains with more than 2 million daily customers and renowned brands like Big Bazaar and Brand Factory. The flagship technology of the group is Future Pay, the widely used app, coined India’s most convenient digital wallet, allowing users to pay and manage all their loyalty accounts from multiple brands.
Future Group’s Digital Transformation: Future Pay
Rohitashwa Bhotica, senior manager at Future Pay since 2014, is one of the pillars of Future Pay’s recent restructuring of its many loyalty programs. Before Future Pay, Rohitashwa was working for Investments and Private Equity fund Everstone and has a strong financial background.
When Rohitashwa first started with Future Pay, they had multiple different loyalty campaigns scattered between their many brands within the group. One of his main goals was to orchestrate a digital transformation by aggregating all the loyalty programs to one digital loyalty app so that customers wouldn’t have to bring their physical loyalty cards to stores anymore. The app has been a success from the start. The current app facilitates the use of many loyalty programs across a large number of stores with the use of in-app online payments and in-store discounts.
Creating Emotional Relationships With Their Customers Through the Future Pay App
Future Pay’s upcoming challenge lies within the creation of an emotional relationship with their customers. The Future Group has worked tirelessly over the last 20 years to build a trusted brand image. The introduction of the Future Pay app has brought their customers closer to the brands, however, there is still more work to put in in order to create a stronger relationship between the app and its user base. Future Pay already has some initiatives planned in order to improve user retention such as sending location-based notifications to open the app while customers are outside the supermarket and a fast track in stores for app users only.
Rich Location Data Insights: The Key to Performance Optimization
Future Pay also uses rich data insights to optimize their data profiles in order to enhance their features and personalize their campaigns. For optimal performances, PlotProjects’ accurate location data is instrumental to Future Pay’s increased app usage. Indeed, Future Pay now knows when users are at home or at work and can predict when they will visit a store. With this location information, Future Pay can send notifications to their users at the right moment with, for example, products they love. Another example is to send a notification about bringing an umbrella if it is raining, therefore strengthening the emotional connection with their app users.
Rohitashwa from Future Pay comments on the partnerships with PlotProjects:
“PlotProjects has been helping with the success in sending relevant messages, increasing the number of store visits, and increasing the Average Order Value.”
Future Pay’s advanced architecture and expert data team allow for external technologies to be implemented fast. Their data science team has the freedom to experiment with the data, always keeping the company’s business goals in mind. Future Pay’s data scientists had a lot of success by combining data from different stores to better understand their user base. Their wishlist includes the implementation of a delivery service app.
How the Future Pay App Has Proven to Be an Effective Marketing Channel
The Future Pay app has been a very rewarding component of Future Group products. It has greatly improved the customers’ experience with their loyalty programs. It also has had a positive impact on their relationship with their user base, which translated into increased visits and revenue (see the numbers below). Another upside of the Future Pay app is that it reduced marketing spend, as it has proven to be a very effective marketing channel.
Rohitashwa’s tip for supermarket chains that don’t have an app yet is to build one in order to easily reach your customers as part of your omnichannel strategy. From the app, it is easier to then send customers to your e-commerce platform. You are then killing two birds with one stone, achieving lower marketing spend and a direct link to your e-commerce site.
Future Pay in Numbers
- 20 M+ downloads
- 5 M+ monthly active users
- Majority of active users uses the app 4-5 times a month
- Average order value of 2,000-3,000 rupees
- Average cashback of 5%
- Avg number of MTU of 4.2 Million/month
- Avg number of notifications sent of 50 Million/month