How we started 2022 by celebrating our users!
2020 was a difficult year for businesses everywhere. Back-to-back lockdowns, tourism took a pause, people were laid off from jobs and there was so much uncertainty. By the end of the year though, things looked a little better. So we at udaan wanted our users, or as we call them buyers, to know that despite a pandemic and changing times, they had been unstoppable! This feature was created with some major hustle in a matter of a week or two and yet it received great response from our retailers.
In 2021, we decided to bring this feature back — only bigger and better. Celebrating our users’ achievements should never stop!
What is Udaan Recap?
It is a recap of some interesting moments and achievements of our retailers during the year. The feature would be live only for two weeks after the new year begins and could be swiped through like Instagram stories. Not only would this make the buyers more aware of their symbiotic relationship with udaan and improve loyalty with the platform, but bring in a great amount of delight.
The Team
For product design: Aishwarya Rao, Arushi and I — an all girls team was formed, the A Team :)
The stunning visuals were created by Vishnudath, while Charmaine Paul coined the name of the feature and came up with some quirky copy ;)
How we crafted YIR 2021
In YIR 2020 we allowed our buyers to share the data stories on social media like Whatsapp status and Facebook, which are the two most used social media platforms. However, this year we wondered ‘would our buyers really want to share their sensitive business related information?’ Could there be a more interesting and rewarding way to spread the word about their relationship with udaan?
We then studied how others do it. Spotify Wrapped is the gold standard for the Year In Review feature. They celebrate their listeners’ love for music at the end of each year and it is so cool that we all want to share our ‘wrapped’ on social media.
Next we got the whole team involved in a workshop to brainstorm ideas for the feature and to get our creative juices flowing. The goal of the workshop was to get ideas for the following questions:
- What would the narrative of the stories be?
- What are the essential metrics that the buyers would find interesting? (which could create dopamine spikes)
- Any other rewards (gifts) that we can give our buyers? How can buyers spread the word about their great business year with udaan?
- How should it look? (create a mood-board)
Having collected some interesting ideas from the team, we iterated with some ideas of our own.
The Narrative
We decided to focus on celebrating the buyer’s achievements and their amazing business year. Keeping in mind that they are already well aware of the basic information related to their purchases and journey on udaan, we wished to wow them with some unique bits of information.
The visual theme
Purely Indian, vibrant, celebratory and uniquely udaan. ‘Indian truck art’ was the base of our theme, and we very super excited to use this theme as it has never been seen before on any online platform.
The metrics- dopamine spikes
The relevant metrics change across the various categories of buyers on udaan such as Food, Lifestyle, Pharma etc. However some metrics remain equally important across all domains such as savings made on udaan, purchases made using udaan credit, their year on year growth, and so on. It was crucial to involve the PMs (or category teams) in order to get the data that would make this interesting for our buyers.
The reward
A strong knowledge of our buyers’ behaviours gave our colleague (Shubham Bhatt) a brilliant idea of a suitable ‘reward’ for our buyers. Just like the elders in our families, our buyers also use WhatsApp statuses heavily and share image forwards on festivals and special days. So here was our idea (drum roll)
A custom creative wishing a Happy New Year, with their store name on it! Buyers could download this graphic and then share it on their social media or simply with their contacts on WhatsApp.
Conclusion
The feature went live in January 2022 and received a very positive response!
While large companies and MNCs have the resources to evaluate their business performance and growth every year, the smaller retailers across India are not able to get in-depth knowledge about how their businesses performed. A yearly recap is a cost effective way to not only make them aware of their growth, savings, top sold products and other business related information, but create a stronger bond between them and udaan. We are sure this will increase trust towards the platform and also create awareness among retailers who are not yet aware of udaan.
