Anphonic has published a new report called The Shelf Index. And what they found in India may change how you think about retention everywhere.
Most DTC brands trigger their re-engagement flows at day 60. The data says that's too late.
Anphonic, a Rebuy Gold Partner based in Mumbai, spent four months analyzing 13 brands and more than ₹200 crore ($21M USD) in tracked transactions to find out when customers actually come back. Their findings have been published in a new report called The Shelf Index.
What they found in India may change how you think about retention, and most of it runs counter to the default templates your engagement platform offers.
I sat down with Anphonic's Vicky Kukreja and Viraj Choudhary to walk through what they found, and what DTC brands should do about it.
Kukreja: Anphonic is the ecommerce personalization arm of the Alchemy Group, a tech-first digital media & content agency. It's predominantly a content-led business, doing content monetization, content creator marketing, and talent representation. Those three businesses have been operating in India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, and more recently spreading into some African regions.
Tech understanding is our pursuit, not building it. We realized there is an opportunity to make the most of it and find the right partners, such as Rebuy, and figure out a collaborative way that can fill a gap in the market.
We started as a distribution-led business, then slowly moved into a services-led business, and now we’re starting to position ourselves as more of an intelligence layer.
Our focus is the merchant layer between the top 500 and 5,000 Shopify merchants, the middle of the pyramid.
Kukreja: Coming from the ads business, I was part of the digital transformation team that did the India Watch Report in 2018-2019. I took some inspiration from there. Data can sometimes be so overwhelming. So the idea was never to focus on the quantum of data, but on the depth.
We studied a lot of the Shopify stack and a lot of Rebuy customers in the North America market, and tried to see apples-to-apples comparisons in the same categories in both markets: health and wellness, food and beverage, snacks, protein brands, to see how the journeys are different.
We never came across a playbook that was independent of investment into ads on Google and Meta. And having been in the ads business for over 15 years, it put a question mark on how retention can be done better.
Kukreja: At day 60, if a brand has a communication trigger to a certain cohort of customers, the attention span of users to even recollect that the brand exists and they made a certain purchase — it's very hard. And hence, we see poor conversion rates.
The hypothesis is that the default flows in engagement platforms use generic templates that often result in low conversion rates. If a young brand in high growth mode leans on these templates, there’s an assumption that the first four weeks aren't important. That assumption needs to be revisited.
"When was the last time a customer got influenced to make a purchase by looking at an ad just once? Very rare."
I keep questioning people in the ecosystem: how much is the cost of sending a single email in Klaviyo? A few cents? Same on WhatsApp. Why? Because even the large companies know that one email, one message, is not going to make a difference.
When was the last time a customer got influenced to make a purchase by looking at an ad just once? Very rare. Why do you think that on day 60, if you send a message, no matter what the offer is, even if you say "it's free," somebody might miss it. It’s about the right timing, also.
Kukreja: We’re working with a lot of brands within food and beverage, protein, snacks, spices and condiments, coffee, and supplements and health and wellbeing. These are not like apparel. There is a routine, a regimen that people buy into. The nature of these products requires reordering and restocking.
Coming from the ads ecosystem and seeing performance marketing very closely, we saw that gaming websites were so hardcore on performance and had retention and engagement metrics tracked so closely. We looked at it from that perspective: let’s look at it from day zero to day 90 and see how it fits.
“Their cohort is actually making a purchase in the first three or four weeks, but the trigger most of the brands had installed was somewhere between six and eight weeks.”
We saw that if a customer had already made a purchase, they were still getting the same generic promotion messages without any acknowledgment of what they already bought. We started questioning a lot of these brands. Some of their cohort is actually making a purchase in the first three or four weeks, but the trigger most of the brands had installed was somewhere between six and eight weeks. And in 80% of cases it was always an offer-led, standardized push.
We realize that a major part of these brands have certain customers who will come back to their site to make a purchase. And if they do come back in the first three to four weeks, or sometimes three to six weeks, they will continue to be shoppers on the site. But if they do not come in that time frame — around 21 days — it’s not that they’re not your customers. They could be buying from other channels. But they might not come back into the shopping funnel unless there are triggers.
And that is what led us to another understanding. During the report, we learned about loyalty. In the Indian ecosystem, people are adopting into it but they are not actively using it. If you look at loyalty, most brands have capabilities and the technology to use tier one, tier two, tier three, and maybe create membership programs. Yet, few offer memberships. We are trying to learn more about it and how we can have better personalization flows kick in there.
Kukreja: If you compare the US and India, one big difference in this category is subscriptions. In the US, buyers can easily opt into recurring orders through Shopify checkout. In India, most brands use third-party checkouts and regulations limit auto-pay, so true subscriptions are rare.
That’s why we’re working with brands to partner closely with re-engagement platforms and lean into underused features like the reorder landing page.
When you send me, as a customer who’s already made a purchase, to a reorder page, you are already acknowledging the fact that we know each other. That is very important rather than a general “check out this new collection.”
"If [brands] just spend on acquisition and try to maintain their CAC, they will not focus on the power customers."
It takes me back to retail, to general modern retail. If you go into a neighborhood store and they say, “Good to see you back, how are things going? Do you want your usual, or are you going to try something new today?” There is relatability. There is someone who knows you, someone who knows what you might want.
When a customer comes in for the first time, we make the Rebuy Smart Cart™ look like the salesperson. But the reorder page doesn’t need to be pushy. It just needs to be relatable.
Kukreja: If you’re very new to personalization, upselling, and cross-selling, first consider bundling. If you are selling products A, B, and C as a bundle, you have higher chances of at least selling out one product.
Choudhary: I was talking to one of my existing clients and they had a repeat purchase rate of 67%. That is the kind of potential you can see in India for a baby skincare or repellent brand, because they have figured it out and disrupted that number with the help of the optimizations they are doing regularly on the website. Retention is driving 80% of the revenue in their business. We enabled a simple reorder widget for them, and the repeat purchase rate that was covering 80% of revenue grew to 82%. That is an additional 2% just from implementing one specific use case.
For any brand facing a challenge with retention, they need to test out and check their potential. If they just spend on acquisition and try to maintain their CAC, they will not focus on the power customers, the ones spending the most after their second and third purchase.
Kukreja: Visit benchmark.anphonic.ai. That is where you can actually see your own benchmark score against the cohort and download the report during the process.
Choudhary: I'm re-watching one of my favorite sitcoms, The Office. And currently I’m into house music. There is an artist based out of Britain known as Fred Again. I’m currently listening to him.
Kukreja: I’m reading two books. One is “38 Letters” by Rockefeller for his son, about life journey, growth, self-success and wealth, and the necessary chapters of learning through life. The second is a book called “How I Almost Blew It Up,” a compilation of around 12 digital entrepreneurs of India, all of them running fundamental growth businesses. A lot of valuable learnings from there.
Vicky Kukreja is the founder of Anphonic, the commerce business within the Alchemy Group. Viraj Choudhary leads partnerships and customer success for Anphonic. Anphonic works with DTC brands across India and emerging markets, combining Rebuy’s personalization platform with localized retention strategy. Learn more at anphonic.ai.
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