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Yemeksepeti manages explosive growth, while keeping annual email marketing costs with in-house system

Yemeksepeti manages explosive growth, while keeping annual email marketing costs with in-house system

 

With 99 per cent market share, Yemeksepeti (literal translation: “Food Basket”) is the biggest online food delivery portal in Turkey, and one of the country’s largest online retailers.

 

Founded in 2001, the company aims to make ordering food online as easy as possible for its customers. It currently works with 3,500 restaurants across 12 cities throughout Turkey and has 600,000 subscribers generating approximately 500,000 unique visits per month.

 

Yemeksepeti lets customers place orders with its partner restaurants through its website at www.yemeksepeti.com and have their meal delivered to their door. The company takes over 15,000 orders per day via their website and also gives after sales support to their users and member restaurants over the phone, email and through IM.

 

As the company’s business happens around the clock, it’s essential that orders are confirmed in real-time. The whole ordering process must also be run extremely tightly to ensure that once a customer order is placed, the food is delivered to the customer’s home within a pre-agreed time, often within 30 minutes.

 

Delivering exceptional business growth

 

Yemeksepeti developed most of the technology powering its online food delivery service in-house. This includes the e-commerce platform that integrates with the applications used to distribute emails, which in turn are used to confirm customer orders, as well as deliver promotional offers.

 

Melih Ödemi?, Yemeksepeti founder and head of IT said: “Customer emails are very important to us, and the relevancy of customer data plays a key role in ensuring the most useful content gets to the right individual. For example, because people can order their food from so many different restaurants, the geographical location of the customer is critical. This means that we only send promotions and mailings from restaurants near to them.”

 

However, as Yemeksepeti’s business grew rapidly in the early years, so too did the volume of customer data. It soon became too difficult for Yemeksepeti to manage this data efficiently with its home-grown email platform, forcing the company to explore other email options. ”

 

In 2006, Yemeksepeti moved away from its internal email platform and opted for an email service provider (ESP) to manage the huge volume of emails it needed to send. Ödemi? said: “We needed to send 1.5 million marketing emails a month. On top of that, we had to distribute around 500,000 transactional emails a month to confirm orders. Since these orders needed to be confirmed in near real time, an email glitch anywhere in the system could wreak havoc with our ordering process, which in turn would impact our and the restaurant’s revenues.”

 

In order to address these challenges, Yemeksepti moved to a more sophisticated and reliable ESP. However, with its number of customers skyrocketing and plans to extend the business into further Turkish cities and abroad, paying the per email costs charged by the ESP would cause Yemeksepeti's emailing costs to spiral out of control and impact the firm’s profitability.

 

Deployment delivers best of both worlds

 

Ödemi? said: “What we really wanted was the best of both worlds. We wanted the cost-control benefits of owning the email platform while retaining the sophistication, efficiency and reliability benefits of an industrial-strength ESP-type solution.”

 

Yemeksepeti selected StrongMail Message Studio and its Transactional Email Platform to provide a service that would integrate with its existing e-commerce platform. StrongMail Message Studio is an email marketing system designed to let companies like Yemeksepeti improve their email campaign management, data segmentation and targeting. As a complementary product, StrongMail’s Transactional Email Platform lets companies transform generic, plain-text transactional email into highly branded, personalised messages capable of driving incremental revenue through relevant cross- and up-sell offers. For Yemeksepeti, a branded, personalised experience managed through transactional and marketing emails would help build customer loyalty.

 

The project began by using StrongMail’s Strong Start implementation service and Product Mailing Programme (PMP) to gauge and optimise email deliverability effectiveness with ISPs. As a result, the first email was sent within a couple of days of deployment.

 

“With the ESP, we faced deliverability issues, most of which were caused by the ESP’s other clients mailings. This was seriously affecting our sender reputation,” added Ödemi?. “With StrongMail, we were able to start with a clean slate and build up our own reputation based purely on our own email campaigns. This has led to higher deliverability rates and, ultimately, more successful campaigns.”

 

Measured return on investment

 

For the first year, Yemeksepeti decided to lease StrongMail platform at an annual cost similar to that of the previous ESP. However, after a year of steadily increasing email volumes, Yemeksepeti opted to purchase the StrongMail platform. By offering Yemeksepti this unique flexibility to move from a leased option to a soft licence model, the retailer was able to greatly reduce its costs over the long term.

 

By implementing StrongMail's in-house solution and eliminating the ongoing annual ESP costs, Yemeksepeti expects to see a 80% return on investment (ROI) within the first year of purchase. This ROI will even be higher in subsequent years once out the one-time purchase cost and escalating email volumes is factored in.

 

Ödemi? concluded: “If, after five years, we have also doubled our email volume, then the ROI delivered by the StrongMail platform would also double from 240% to 480%. That is a fantastic statistic; one that’s good enough to eat.”