Vietnam – Vietnamese digital marketing major Blueseed Group has invested a 7-digit figure in the local online retailer startup Greenoly.
Blueseed Group said it will help with the transformation of the online retailer into Vietnam’s next retail champion by transferring its leadership, marketing technology expertise, and what is most important – its vast audience and consumer data expertise.
As part of the investment, Blueseed Group’s CEO Ho Nguyen will join Greenoly as co-CEO and board member, leveraging his career experience that includes senior executive roles within international marketing and tech companies. Nguyen has successfully led Blueseed since the group’s founding, evolving from the leading digital video ad network to today’s diverse focus on the AdTech, MarTech and Data services driving success in today’s digital marketplace. He will focus on leading the MarTech transformation of Greenoly.
Greenoly is a vertical online retail startup focused on health and wellness products launched in 2020. While such businesses can thrive easily in Vietnam due to strong demand growth for health and wellness-related products in the short term, the momentum isn’t always transformed into long-term growth and success. Blueseed Group Chairwoman Nga Nguyen knows this all too well.
Nga Nguyen brings with her two decades of business and investment experience, including her startup-to-unicorn experience with VNG – Vietnam’s first digital unicorn which contributes to her intricate knowledge in creating success stories in the online space. It is this perspective that led her and the Blueseed Group to invest in driving Greenoly from a small online retailing startup into a MarTech powered retailing platform and in turn to be one of Vietnam’s next retail champions.
Advocating the strategy of Blueseed Group toward Greenoly’s investment, transformation, and growth, Nga Nguyen said, “Leveraging Blueseed’s deep experience in Data and MarTech services and solutions we look forward to developing the most cost-efficient model to acquire new consumers across multiple use cases and grow Greenoly’s market standing. Data initiatives are highly strategic, long-tail investments that impact nearly all areas of the retail business.”
She adds, “Retailers, more than any other industry, feel the need for better customer data solutions. Greenoly already possesses enormous amounts of customer data that lives in dozens of different online and offline tools and systems, but in a few years, it will be a much, much bigger volume of data. Therefore, the top priority will be for Blueseed to enhance retail business with our market-proven Customer Data Platform that can unify data, generate customer insights and scale their marketing efforts via machine learning algorithms to enhance the effectiveness of their most mature and complex marketing campaigns.”
Nga Nguyen further said, “The next big steps for Greenoly will be nurturing and strengthening the loyalty of these consumers and catering to their new needs as they develop. The final game-changer will be developing Greenoly’s 5-star personalized consumer experience. Customer centricity is the new game in town, it requires online retailers to prioritize personalizing the customer experience. To win in this new competitive space retailers need to increase the personal relevance and experience based on customer preferences. This highly personalized experience also needs to be maintained across the new omnichannel world leveraging new technologies to better serve customers in whichever environment they prefer to engage in.”
The Vietnamese Health and Wellness space has proven to be a fertile space. A recent report released by BritCham Vietnam found that the segment is valued at over 13t VND (over 570 million USD) with over 13% annual growth. It also found that the growth is driven by several key consumer groups including a fast-growing middle class, women turning to health supplements for beauty, sexual and overall female health purposes, growing numbers of younger consumers looking to improve vision and memory, and a growing elderly population demanding relevant health supplements.
Events like the Covid-19 pandemic are accelerating the shift towards e-commerce. Helping this will be more quick delivery services as more customers enjoy the convenience of the doorstep experience. Today, consumers have high expectations for how they want to shop, demanding frictionless, fast, and comfortable shopping experiences 24/7. The retail-champions of tomorrow will be the ones who focus on just-in-time delivery, plan successfully using the right customer decision trees and proper promotional messaging based on personalized propositions. All of these can only be achieved progressively by investing increasingly in tech-driven retail business.
