How Lazada built a leading promotion app strategy

Since its launch in 2012, Lazada has seen explosive growth, becoming the number one shopping and ecommerce platform in South East Asia (SEA). By using a variety of innovative advertising and promotion app strategies, they have captured a huge share of the lucrative SEA online retail market, providing unmatched service as more people in the region adopt mobile and online shopping channels.

Their signature Online Revolution campaign on 12.12 moved over US$250m of merchandise in 2017 — the last year they released specific figures for that campaign. CNBC reported that Lazada took in close to US$100m in the first hour of their 11.11 Singles Day campaign last year, giving an indication of the strength of growth in the SEA region.

But how did Lazada achieve these fantastic results? And how can their app promotion strategies be replicated by challengers in the region? 

The first tool in the Lazada box is to build a strong network of affiliates, and the second is to investigate how gamification can supercharge your coupon strategy. 

Affiliate marketing is effective because customers are more likely to trust messages coming from influencers or people they already know. By creating a program where there’s an incentive for people to become advocates for your brand, you create a ‘win-win’ situation, rewarding those who drive new business for you. Affiliate marketing is also a good source of high-quality users. At a minimal cost, you can get a big sales bump, meaning there’s a good return on investment (ROI).

There’s also an in-app referral system for regular users, which incentivizes them to get users to join so that the original user can earn a reward.

Lazada makes affiliate marketing easy for potential ambassadors by automating the process of generating affiliate links for approved users. Once users create an account and are approved as a member of the Lazada affiliate marketing program, ambassadors can create affiliate links from their affiliate dashboard before they share them with their target audience.

Affiliates can design their own creatives, including banner ads, carousels, and create video content, which leads to these affiliate links when clicked, or just simply share the link with their friends or followers on social media channels. Lazada rewards affiliates with commissions, giving them a big incentive to share.

Affiliate schemes work within Talon.One’s referral system. You can create a new campaign with the ‘referral’ option ticked to gain access to the referral logic within the Rule Engine. Or you can go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Features’ and tick ‘referral’ to add this to existing campaigns. 

Once you create the campaign, you can then create a rule that runs every time the user creates an affiliate link in the ‘affiliate’ dashboard. In the below example, we have restricted this ability to ‘gold’ level users. Once the referral code is generated, it will pass the unique code to your app, where it can be embedded in a placeholder in the URL. 

You’ll need to set up an integration so the app will pass the referral code to Talon.One backend for validation when the link is clicked, where the reward rules will kick in if the code is successfully validated.

In the below example, the advocate gets 10% of the value of the purchase added to their Loyalty Wallet, but you can configure any kind of reward that works for your brand.

You can see the full documentation on how to set up referral programs in our Help Center.

The first person to use coupon marketing was Atlanta businessman Asa Candler, the founder of the Coca Cola company. His hand-written coupons offered a free Coke to anyone who redeemed one, with the full five cent cost per bottle discounted. Time magazine reports that between 1894 and 1913, an estimated one-in-nine Americans had received a free Coca-Cola, for a total of 8,500,000 free drinks.

Lazada is similarly groundbreaking in its approach to coupon marketing, with a number of interesting tweaks to add urgency, drive interest and get customers to return. They have a number of landing pages where users can find all the latest coupon offers.

In the below example, they use very short windows where coupons are available to keep users on the page, and keep users returning. With big discounts on offer for desirable brands, customers constantly come back to see what the latest offer is. You can also use the countdown timers ahead of a product launch.

Another strategy Lazada use is creating scarcity. With a limited number of people able to claim each coupon, they keep customers on their toes, as they can see the availability of the offer decreasing in real time. This time pressure can move an undecided consumer towards conversion. Lazada informs their users with 

As we’ve covered before, gamified features are a key component of Lazada’s online presence. Lazada’s store benefits from:

This variety of options gives customers the chance to interact with the brand in fun new ways when shopping. 

In Talon.One’s rule engine, it is very easy to create a limited number of coupons per campaign. 

In the below example, the user is notified when the number of coupons left to be redeemed drops below 25.

Introducing loyalty programs can help you work out who your best customers are — and make sure they stick around. Investing in your program can lead to enhanced customer satisfaction, more referrals and glowing reviews. 

Lazada uses its rewards system to nudge consumers towards valuable in-app behaviors, such as watching a live stream. Lazada knows that by convincing users to interact more with the app, they increase the chance of them converting. Plus, earning some rewards gives another nice bonus. 

This Lazada program shows that loyalty schemes don’t have to be entirely purchase-orientated. You can find out how TIER is using loyalty programs to incentivize non-sales behavior in our blog post here.

Loyalty programs in Talon.One automatically open reward point wallets for each customer who opts in. You also have the option to create Loyalty Tiers, where you can segregate customers into different tiers, (eg. bronze, sliver, gold) and create exclusive campaigns for your top tier customers.  

Using loyalty rules, you can choose which customer actions are rewarded with points and how you allow customers to spend these points; as currency, in exchange for discounts, free items or store credit. Really it's entirely up to you and what makes sense for your business.

Your Loyalty Program can be as simple or as granular as you wish by enabling the optional Sub-ledger feature during program creation. With Sub-Ledgers enabled, each customer can have multiple balances within the same program, each tied to different entities.

This is useful if you want to separate loyalty balance across multiple outlets, brands or products without having to create a new Loyalty Program for each.

Lazada’s Slash It! game is the most innovative example of gamification that the company offers. The promotion works by a user starting a ‘Slash’ on a certain item. When they do this, they are given a possible discount, and told how many friends they need to convince to click their Slash It! Link to redeem their reward. If they can convince a certain number of friends to click their promo link, they get a discount. 

This gamifies social sharing, using customers’ desire for a bargain to drive them to use their social circle, drawing in more attention. Social sharing is a powerful tool in mobile app marketing.

There’s also a clear path to conversion for the friends that see the offer — once they’re on the product page and see the bargain offered, they can also start a Slash It! session to benefit from the reward, meaning the social sharing effect is compounded.

Talon.One supports flexible, scalable promotions for companies across lots of industries. By leveraging the power of our Rule Engine, companies of any size can introduce complex (or simple) loyalty or promotion techniques that will power up their business. Our team is always on hand to talk you through how Talon.One can make your campaign vision a reality.