Everyone loves eating out, especially millennials. From first dates to anniversaries, lunches with friends to dinners with family, and employee interviews to office brunches, dining always seems to bring people together. Dining out is an opportunity for everyone to escape and enjoy a special occasion and treat themselves. Dine in trends This eating out trend justifies how dine in makes up the 67 per cent, to the total QSR sales. But reserving a table at your favorite restaurant can quickly become a hassle. With all the call waiting time and mostly unanswered calls, it’s hard to reach the restaurant staff for reservations. Modern technology has blessed us with apps like Dineout which streamline the process so we don’t have to worry about calling up a restaurant for reservations. Dineout says, “Foodies Love Us!” and we couldn’t agree more! The Journey so Far India’s largest dining out platform, helping more than 40 million diners to discover new restaurants, reserve a table, and offer discounts has been a part of Times Internet Limited since April 2014. dineout's journey with CleverTap Their mobile app works with an aim of pre-empting and fulfilling the wants of today’s diners. While initially it simply meant allowing diners to reserve a table at their favorite restaurant, in 2016 they expanded with multiple benefits for all dining out needs: Restaurant Discovery: Connecting diners to the best-in-the-city restaurant discounts and deals. Dineout Pay: Giving diners a cashless payment experience across restaurants and an opportunity to earn cashback on every payment. And even pay bills using cashbacks. Gourmet Passport: A unique membership with massive benefits for the real connoisseur of food. My Cash: Enabling diners to keep 100% redeemable cash in wallet. Dineout has its presence in 17 cities and still expanding to other territories to help diners save up to 60% on their food bill. Curious to find out more about Colombia Phone Numbers List their vision for the future, we connected with Shalini Sinha, the Product Growth Manager at Dineout, to learn how this platform became so successful. Moving from Acquisition to Retention Shalini works at the intersection of Product and Marketing teams and takes care of all the product communication. Her core responsibilities revolve around defining audience segments and preferred channels for product communication to improve the target metrics for each quarter. It further includes retargeting users and ensuring repeat users on Dineout app. Shalini mentioned that earlier Dineout’s focus was mainly acquisition, but with the massive growth they witnessed, they are allocating their focus at retention. Moreover, the ROI from acquisition was seen to be lower as compared to retention. Thus, they realized it’s time to divert their efforts towards retention. For acquisition, they started giving more weightage to organic efforts as compared to paid. Allocating their efforts in the right direction showed results in a short span of time, when in August, the paid and organic contribution to lead gen became 25% and 75% (respectively) and compared to 40% and 60% in January. Boosting users from 123 million in 2014 to 167 million by 2015, coupled with budding ecommerce market, the food tech market in India is anticipated to grow at a robust pace during the forecast period. However, it’s important to have a 360 degree engagement approach to retain customers as well as onboard app user. Consumers are impatient and because of high competition in the industry, the chances of them hopping from one app to another are high. Simply put, brands have to be on their toes all the time to retain users. And the same applies to Dineout. Dineout led research based on their feedback campaigns. This research showed a massive education gap that needed to be filled to improve retention. This gap did not apply to all users, but a certain set of users — mostly those who haven’t completed any transactions or made any reservations on Dineout. The research highlighted that the retention rate for these users was noted to be low majorly because Dineout didn’t inform them about their other features/benefits besides reservations. Shalini added other metrics for month-over-month tracking along with Acquisition Rate, CTR, and Average Transaction Value. It was necessary to track these metrics to understand if their efforts are paying off or if any optimization is needed. Building Unique User Journeys In order to retain customers, users need to be understood and treated (engaged) uniquely. For this, Dineout leveraged CleverTap to build a unique user journey for each user with tailored communication channels. Dineout began exploring all communication possibilities with CleverTap starting with segmentation and personalization. Shalini mentioned that even before collaborating with CleverTap, they had been trying to put a strong foot in the area of user retention, but because the personalization and segmentation possibilities were v