OYO Boosts Push Notification CTR by 15% Using AI Optimization

OYO is a global platform that aims to empower entrepreneurs and small businesses with hotels and homes by providing full-stack technology products and services that aims to increase revenue and ease operations. OYO offers 40+ integrated products and solutions to patrons who operate over 157,000 hotel and home storefronts in more than 35 countries including in India, Europe, and Southeast Asia, as of March 31, 2021. With a unicorn valuation and a pan-India presence, OYO is one of the most well-known and popular hospitality brands in the country. Known for its technology-driven process and a deep emphasis on customer experience, OYO naturally prioritizes customer engagement above all else.

OYO, a global platform that empowers entrepreneurs and small businesses with hotels and homes, was facing challenges in maximizing the impact of their customer interactions across various campaigns. The company runs different campaigns with triggered journeys based on customer action on their app, and it was crucial for them to understand which message variant was performing the best. The results of effective engagement campaigns would reflect in the incremental CTR (click-through rate) improvement, which ultimately adds to the bottom line in terms of new and repeat hotel bookings. However, the process required a lot of manual intervention to configure the better performing variation and maximize its use. This was particularly difficult with automatic trigger and period campaigns that run for longer durations. Additionally, it resulted in the loss of CTR during the initial stage of experimentation.

To overcome these challenges, OYO implemented Sherpa, MoEngage’s proprietary machine learning engine, which allowed the team to complete the testing and optimization quicker and in real-time. Sherpa automatically maximizes campaign performance by predicting the right message and optimizes the percentage distribution in the variations to maximize the CTR from the campaign. With this machine learning-based feature, the message variation with chances of highest interaction is intelligently predicted on the fly and sent to customers to maximize engagement. Post the implementation, Sherpa automatically assigned message variations to the customer segments who qualified for a campaign and optimized the distribution across the variations based on their performance, for the duration of the campaign. The team at OYO predominantly used Sherpa’s content optimization capabilities for triggered campaigns.

• The implementation of Sherpa has not only led to a significant increase in OYO's CTR but also helped in identifying the best-performing campaigns. For instance, OYO observed the campaign variants with mystery elements (message variants not disclosing the discount amount) performing much better than the other campaigns. This understanding of what works well and what doesn’t will go a long way in creating effective, engagement campaigns for customers. Moreover, the use of Sherpa's content optimization capabilities has eliminated the need for manual intervention in setting up and optimizing campaigns, saving significant time and effort for the team. The machine learning-based feature has also enabled the team to predict the message variation with the highest interaction and send it to customers to maximize engagement.

• Steady increase in the quarter-on-quarter clicks with an absolute improvement being 15% in Q3, 2021

• Identification of best-performing campaigns, leading to more effective and engaging campaigns

• Real-time optimization of campaigns, saving time and manual effort