Cred Marketing strategy

 Cred Marketing strategy matters 

Here's an example of great marketing and on the spot customer conversion. That too at a very negligible cost.

Meet Kunal Shah, the founder of FreeCharge who recently started Cred. Cred is a credit card payments app which awards points against every rupee of your bill. These points can be used in the app to avail discount coupons, passes and memberships with selected partners like dineout, Cure.fit, swiggy etc. A great product which has been growing at a rapid pace.

Recently, me and my friend used the points for a 1 month free gym (cult.fit) membership. Around 5 days later, my friend received a call from cred. It went something like this:

Exec: Hi sir, this is Raj from Cred

Friend: Hey Raj

Exec: Sir, you have been a valuable customer for Cred. For this, we would like to send you a gift. Can I have your address?

Friend: (feeling weird) Ok… That's great, but I am not comfortable giving you my home address

Exec: It's Ok sir, I don't need your home address. Please provide your work address, we will ship it there

Friend: (feeling excited) Ok.. Here you go.

Two days after the call, he received a package from cred at his work place at around 12 PM. It was simple white box containing this:

A red velvet cake!

Now, people do receive packages from Amazon or Flipkart on a daily basis, but no one receives a freaking cake in their name in the middle of office hours. A mouth-watering anomaly of 1 kg!

He brought that cake to his desk, thinking about what to do about it. People started gathering around like a colony of ants enquiring what it was about with one eye on the cake.

Now think about the scenario. With this small investment, the company checked all the right boxes:

1. Customer Satisfaction: The customer used their app. They reciprocated by sending him a gift.
2. Strategy: This action was directed towards a very targeted audience. Customer's friends and colleagues are the potential future customers, a very strong segment. Low hanging fruits indeed .
3. Advertising: Being a non-conventional product, it is difficult (and expensive) to send across the message through TV and social media ads. The existing customer has all the answers to the questions an intrigued audience may have. He has become their free front man now. He explains the product, its benefits and his experience with it, which is obviously positive due to point 1.
4. Conversion: People are getting to know about the product from a reliable source, all the while stuffing their mouths with free cake. They get to know about the rewards, the kind of benefits they get (more free stuff). Hence, people download, install and start using the app. On the spot conversion!

That day, around 5–6 people downloaded the app. Messages that used to go to the spam folder of their brains now came from a reliable source.

A similar thing happened at my workplace as well. That person sent an email to the whole office - ‘Cake on my desk’. I don't know how many more conversions Cred had that day.

You have to admit, their marketing strategy is so good, that I am writing about it.