MUMBAI: UberEATS uses its own ride and customer data from Uber in India to target its marketing by location, destination and time of day to grow orders more efficiently, according to a senior executive at the company.

Speaking at the recent Consumer Insights & Analytics Conference, Manan Javeri, head of launch at UberEATS in India, said Indian consumers spend eight times more on food than on transportation.

The food industry in India is worth US$50bn, is growing at more than 10% year on year, and UberEATS is now present in 14 Indian cities just a year after launch.

With such a localised food culture, one size certainly will not fit all when it comes to strategy, even in a single city, so the company is able to make its marketing hyper-local and hyper-relevant through the location data consumers provide via Uber-owned services. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: UberEATS leverages data for hyper-targeting in India.)

“If you open your Uber app while on a trip, and if you scroll down, you will discover that you are able to order your food while on the ride, and we already know your destination because Uber asks for the destination,” Javeri said.

“It already knows where you are going, and it will pick up the restaurants which are located in the destination where you are going, and how quickly can it be delivered to you from the time you are going to reach there, because it already knows what time you will reach there. This is very relevant for commuters who use Uber every day for workplace travel,” he explained.

“This is super-relevant for us, and we have seen that a lot more conversions happen from this kind of communication than just broader communication – in fact, 12 times more. It’s like texting you at any point of time versus when you’re taking an airport ride after 9pm. So it’s about relevance.”

Javeri went on to discuss the value of knowing about a customer’s riding preferences.

“If you are a commuter who takes a lot of pool rides [Uber’s ride-share option] versus a commuter who sometimes takes pool rides and sometimes takes UberX on the weekends because you would go out with the family, then based on your lifestyle choices, we can bundle food and rides together,” he said.

“For example, we have seen Uber usage increase on Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings, so we know people are stepping out for leisure or entertainment, and we try and translate that into food preferences. That’s the link we are working on.”

Sourced from WARC