Ace Pre and Post-Purchase Experiences for App Growth
Read about Zalora's growth strategies, and the importance of understanding evolving customer preferences and leveraging data analytics to enhance user experiences.
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A successful app experience is built on understanding the customer’s journey, whether they are in the discovery or consideration phase. Continuous relevance in product displays and easy navigation between pages are key factors in maintaining user engagement, says Dipti Khalate, Head of Growth at Zalora Group.
Dipti leads the growth function across key markets in Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines—as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. She is responsible for driving new user acquisition through a combination of performance marketing, organic growth, and SEO.
Her role encompasses campaign management, media buying, and martech solutions, while also overseeing attribution modeling to ensure accurate tracking and effective decision-making. Dipti drives investment across the marketing funnel using channels like Google, Meta, TikTok, and influencer marketing to fuel growth across all regions.
Dipti discusses Zalora’s growth strategies, emphasising the importance of understanding evolving customer preferences and leveraging data analytics to enhance user experiences and drive user acquisition across Southeast Asia. She also highlights the significance of a problem-solving mindset within her team to foster continuous learning and innovation.
Excerpts from the interview:
How has Zalora adapted its growth strategies to meet the evolving preferences of customers?
There is a lot of awareness in the market. For instance, when somebody is searching for sports shoes, they also want to keep in mind that what kind of sports shoes will be a lot more comfortable and which ones are best for running or athletics. Advertisers need to keep this in mind.
With the evolving needs, the availability of a wide range of products is very important, and pricing still plays an important role in Southeast Asia.
Finally, having the right conversations about good experience post purchase – including packaging and delivery.
Zalora focuses on these four key areas to align with customer preferences and ensure sustainable growth.
What does it take to make an app experience sticky?
To create a sticky app experience, both pre- and post-purchase phases are equally important. Customers typically land on the app in two scenarios: when they are discovering products or when they are in the consideration stage, having already decided on a potential purchase. In the consideration stage, they are checking product availability, pricing, and service. It’s crucial to understand which phase the customer is in and tailor the experience accordingly.
When providing the right experience, it’s essential to build a browsing experience by using algorithms that display more relevant products. For example, if someone searches on Google and lands on the Zalora platform, maintaining continuity is key. If they click on an ad for sneakers, the landing page should display relevant products as part of the discovery phase.
Today, it’s not just about products but also about showcasing quality and functionality. This is where content like influencer-led videos comes into play, offering real-life impact and use cases. Customer feedback and reviews also play a critical role.
The user journey should include easy navigation. Moving between pages should be seamless. If a customer clicks on a product page, they shouldn’t struggle to return to the product listing or homepage.
Additionally, engagement is key. Many platforms now offer interactive content like games, allowing users to earn loyalty or cashback points, which can be used in future transactions. These strategies all contribute to improving app stickiness.
How does data analytics and attribution play a crucial role in optimising ecommerce campaign and driving growth?
These are the two most important key levers for user growth. When we talk about data analytics, the first step is that how do we have the tracking mechanism? In the system, it is very important that you have the right tracking solution, which will help you to understand where you are generating the traffic and if the right traffic is getting attributed to the right channels.
When using platforms like Google and Meta, organic and SEO-driven traffic often mix with paid traffic. Advertisers working with affiliates also face challenges like click injection or hijacking. Having a robust tool to track and attribute traffic correctly is essential to prevent attribution fraud.
Once traffic is accurately tracked, the next step is designing a conversion attribution model. This involves assigning appropriate weight to different channels, depending on their role in the customer journey, from discovery to purchase. Some channels bring users to the platform, but the final transaction may occur days later after additional research, especially in fashion where users explore different options.
Each channel contributes uniquely to discovery, consideration, and the final purchase. It’s important to recognise each channel’s contribution and allocate investments accordingly across the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.
Attribution is key to this process, and data analytics plays a vital role in extracting insights. However, it’s crucial to have a clear objective and a structured approach to analysing data. Without a focused strategy, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. First, determine what data you need and what insights you’re aiming to derive, then proceed with your analysis.
How do you ensure continuous learning and development for your team to stay ahead in the competitive ecommerce landscape?
Continuous learning is very important, but it happens in different ways. For me, I encourage my team to adopt a problem-solving mindset. That’s how much of the learning happens. When you identify the problems you need to solve, you start thinking about what experiments and innovations to pursue. In that journey, you gather a lot of learning.
You might design five experiments—three may fail, but two will be successful. Even the failed experiments provide valuable insights, which you wouldn’t get by sticking to traditional methods of achieving targets or solving problems.
Secondly, I believe in keeping a close track of what the competition is doing, not just in one country but across the region. Since we operate in a regional environment, it’s important that learnings flow between countries. For example, in the last four years, while based in Southeast Asia, I’ve closely tracked what’s happening in the Indian market—the innovations, the tools used, and the experiments done by big players like Nike, Myntra, and Purplle.
These companies have a similar business model to ours. Tracking the competition and making sure to bring in an outside-in view—not just from the country we operate in, but also from others—is crucial. That’s how we build our learnings.
What technology tools do you think can help improve this user experience?
Generative AI tools are definitely at the forefront. The more you make your algorithm learn from the past behaviour of consumers, the better it becomes. In e-commerce, it’s not just about one consumer; one user helps you create an entire audience segment since many users share similar behaviours. Using generative AI to understand consumer behaviour and create audience segments accordingly is crucial for delivering the right experience.
This can then be followed by predictive analytics to enhance the user experience further. I suggest using generative AI more actively to analyse consumer behaviour, create niche customer segments, and deliver unique experiences based on the data you have. This will make the experience far more effective when any consumer visits your platform.
