PlatformsFeaturedSoutheast Asia

SEA report says e-commerce, retail, D2C consumers engage with brands on web more than mobile

Teddy Cambosa - July 5, 2021

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Singapore – As the industries of retail, banking and finance, and digital entertainment become more and more active, these industries have ramped up their personalized customer engagement across their target users in Southeast Asia, as a new report from customer engagement company MoEngage shows.

According to the report, daily active users (DAUs) of e-commerce, retail and D2C brands increased by 13.36% in the first four months of 2021. When studying the monthly active user (MAU) trends of the same brands, web MAUs had increased the highest (by 8.7%) compared to mobile. 

The report notes that such activity is recorded most likely due to pandemic movement restrictions and shoppers working from home, as opposed to shopping via mobile on the go.

As the report targeted three main channels in their report namely push notifications, email, in-app messages, and website messages; they found out that push notifications that used behavioral attributes with an added layer of personalization from shopping brands saw deliverability of up to 85.67% and campaign conversions increased to over 27%.

There has been an increase of 54.9% in the number of DAUs across all digital banking, fintech, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, insurance, and cryptocurrency platforms during the first four months of 2021.

In terms of email click-throughs, it saw better click-through rates and conversion across all industries as compared to the generic ones: open rates of emails from shopping brands went up to 28.17% and the 0.5% of emails that were behavior-based in the digital entertainment sector saw 2.4 times better click rate, while in banking, behavior-based emails boosted conversions by 2.72 times compared to generic broadcasts.

Finally, the report noted that digital media and entertainment brands using custom user segments based on behavioral and user attributes to send in-app messages to Android users saw twice the increase in click-through rates and conversion rate of up to 50.05% as compared to sending the same message to all users.

“Consumer behavior in Southeast Asia has changed rapidly over the last year, and digital adoption across industries has accelerated during the pandemic period. We’re pleased to provide organizations globally with a holistic view of how their current and prospective customers are behaving and guide them through their insights-led customer engagement and business growth journey,” according to Saurabh Madan, GM for SEA and ANZ at MoEngage.

The report concludes by stating that the findings demonstrate the importance of closely analyzing consumer behavior across every critical channel and developing both proactive and reactive outreach in association with these insights.

“Laser-focus on this [customer engagement] establishes customer-centricity, ensuring that brands meet and exceed the expectations of their customers and boost long-term loyalty and repeat business,” the report added.