FOODNEKO is a brand of Woowa Brothers Japan Corporation. It is a food delivery service that delivers food from restaurants with the help of bike riders. FOODNEKO sells meals via their mobile app. According to their mission statement, they strive to deliver “What you want to eat, where you want to eat and when you want to eat.”
“Woowa Brothers said the conditions are better this time as the food delivery market in Japan has been expanding fast due to the new stay-at-home environment caused by the coronavirus. Like Korea, Japan also has many densely populated cities, making it a market with strong potential for growth in food delivery."
Key challenges
- Expansion to the Japanese market ruled by established players like Uber Eats or Demae-Can.
- Difficulty to acquire new customers.
- The need for a promotion engine that will enable fast time-to-market.
- Possibility to react to the competitors’ offers and get a competitive advantage by launching flash sales.
Woowa Brothers tried to launch a food delivery service in Japan a couple of years ago, but it was tough to enter the market back then. They came back with FOODNEKO in 2020 when the market conditions seemed better. The Japanese market was still quite a challenge for Woowa Brothers. Japan already had big players on the market (Demae-Can and Uber Eats) when FOODNEKO, a Woowa Brothers brand, launched its operations there.
FOODNEKO needed a smart strategy to enter such a competitive market. Sales promotions came to the rescue – thanks to launching various discounts, they could offer competitive prices without driving prices down long-term. They needed promotion management software to launch new sales promotions fast, test the promotions before launch, and manage the campaigns easily.
FOODNEKO started using Voucherify in 2020. Their promotional strategy is to use both public and unique (personalized) coupons. They also use both amount and percentage discount coupons, all depending on the campaign goals.
Solution
From the marketing point of view, they appreciate the following features in Voucherify:
- Campaign timeframes let them run flash sales or limit the campaigns to a specific time window.
- Redemption limit per customer lets them decrease the chances for coupon fraud or abuse.
- Real-time segmentation lets them target specific customer groups, for example, customers who are placing their order for the first time or those placing it for the second time.
- Redemption conditions let them limit the campaign to be used, for example, only in specific stores or using a particular payment method.
- Metadata that can be assigned to the campaign and the redemption allow them to easily manage the campaigns and track the redemptions.
- Code prefix and length customization allow them to brand or contextualize coupons.
From the technical point of view, what was very important for FOODNEKO, was testing their campaigns before launching them. They have managed to do it quickly in Voucherify by setting up a couple of projects, some connected to test environments, where they check campaigns before their go-to-live date. This allows them to make sure that the campaigns are set up correctly and will not burn their budget.
Here is a couple of real-life customer-facing campaigns FOODNEKO launched using Voucherify:
- Acquisition-focused coupons, for example, offering a 25$ in voucher just for creating an account on the app or discounts for the first or second order.
- Sorry coupons assigned by the Customer Service Team.
- Coupons incentivizing particular customer behavior, like leaving an app review, subscribing to the newsletter.
- Happy hours, where there is a discount available after a certain hour or in a specific time window.
- Social media campaigns with more gamified contests.
- Discounts for food offered by certain restaurants.
- Discounts for newly opened restaurants.
- Incentives for influencers to try out new foods or restaurants.
- Discounts available on everything on certain special days.
- Recurring discounts in specific time frames, for example, a 22% off at the end of each month starting 22nd of the month.
- Flash sales, for example, 15% off only during one day.
Employee motivational incentives:
- Top rider recognition award for the employees.
- Coupons for new employees as a joining perk.
Coupons for partners:
- Incentives for merchants.
- Incentives for media agencies.
- Gifts for partners.
- Incentives for brand ambassadors.
