Apnamart – Turning Referrals into a Retention Engine for Tier-2 India
About the Brand
Apnamart is a fast-growing quick commerce brand serving Tier-2 cities in India through a hybrid model of physical stores and on-demand delivery.
In India's quick commerce space, growth often comes from discount-led acquisition—but retention is the real differentiator. Margins are thin, user attention spans are short, and competitors like JioMart or Blinkit are only a tap away. For brands like Apnamart, the challenge isn't attracting customers—it's keeping them engaged, profitable, and emotionally connected in a market where loyalty is rare and switching costs are low.
Challenge
Apnamart's retention problem stemmed from three main gaps:
Limited Customer Understanding — They lacked structured data on customer attributes such as gender, location, preferences, and spending behavior, which made meaningful segmentation and personalization difficult.
Lack of Performance Visibility — The marketing team did not have a strong framework to measure campaign effectiveness: • No consistent way to track both qualitative and quantitative performance metrics • Key metrics like engagement, click rates, and conversion lift were poorly defined or missing entirely • Campaigns suffered from limited creative variation, no experimentation, and overlapping audience reach—leading to fatigue and diminishing returns • Overall performance analysis was static, with little insight feeding back into future campaign planning
Over-Reliance on Discounts — Retention campaigns leaned heavily on discounts as the primary lever for repeat purchases. This approach attracted deal-seeking users but failed to build long-term loyalty or emotional affinity with the brand.
Solution
Our AI Agents plugged directly into Apnamart's CleverTap and data lake within a week. We began by creating an understanding layer through surveys that added 15+ key attributes about their customers. Using this enriched dataset, we segmented users into micro-cohorts and ran personalized retention campaigns.
Instead of relying on discounts as the only lever, we deployed referral-based retention strategies—using customers' social networks to drive repeat engagement and acquisition simultaneously. The campaigns were designed to identify and activate "superpower users"—customers who were highly engaged and had strong influence in their communities.
Levers for Retention
Apnamart's success came from using multiple engagement levers in combination:
Discounts — Short-term activation and win-back offers for low-frequency buyers
Referrals — Turning loyal customers into advocates, creating a compounding loop of high-LTV users
Surveys & Insights — Continuous data collection to enrich personalization and refine campaigns
Category & Margin-Aware Recommendations — Campaigns tuned to profitability, not just volume
Results
• 28,000+ referral codes generated organically within the first week—without any marketing spend
• 33× ROI unlocked, driven by referral-led retention loops and reduced acquisition costs
• High-LTV customers grew disproportionately, validating referrals as a more sustainable retention lever than discounts
• 15+ new customer attributes collected via surveys, enriching segmentation and campaign personalization
Key Takeaway
Retention in quick commerce isn't just about repeat orders—it's about creating a feedback loop between understanding, personalization, and motivation.
For Apnamart, the biggest unlock was shifting from discounts to data-driven engagement:
• Building an understanding layer helped personalize at scale
• Measuring campaign performance surfaced sharp, actionable insights
• Incentive design evolved from transactional discounts to community-driven referrals
Referrals became the new discount—but more importantly, data became the new growth engine.