Multimodal offering
he Careem SuperApp quickly becomes an “everyday life” app, covering multiple needs from delivery and house cleaning to fintech, taxi, and even cross-city travel. How do you know which service to promote to a particular customer?
We experiment with promoting stand-alone offerings like ride hailing, but the primary strategy, for now, is promoting the value of the super app as a whole. Our job is to ensure that customers know the variety of things the superapp can do. As soon as we get new customers signed up, the data science and product teams come in to experiment with different offerings and discounts to identify your demands and onboard you to the services needed most. It’s also our shared effort to engage acquired customers with specific services after onboarding.
Speaking of the main acquisition channels, brand awareness and organic growth is the essence of our growth strategy. Platform-wise, given that Careem is operating in 15 countries, it depends: we play with ad platforms differently country by country. For example, in Saudi Arabia, it will be Snap; in Dubai, it could be Instagram, Google, and Whatsapp.
Do you try to forecast the LTV of newly acquired customers to predict ROAS?
I believe that it’s pretty hard to predict how long the customer will stay with you from day one. When a customer uses the app longer, it’s easier to see the pattern and assign it to a particular segment. So the number one goal for us is to follow the customer journey in the first weeks to see which services we should push and what we can cross-sell based on the actions made in the app.
How do you identify a perfect customer for Careem to steer your campaigns? Is it tied to services they use, engagement, or something else?
LTV at Careem seems to be a little more complex metric than it’s usually measured. Different services under one umbrella bring different margins. Partners manage some offerings like house cleaning and some are Careem-owned. Service maturity also matters a lot for the marketplace. Therefore, we focus on the top two contributors of the lifetime value right now: retention and frequency. On frequency, we are keen to follow natural frequency for a specific need as a benchmark, like how many times people usually need to clean their home or order something from a pharmacy. Our team measures retention for each service but has learned that measuring a persona’s success is the right strategy for us. So the health check analysis happens on the super app level as a whole.
Speaking of personas and personalization, do you have specific local regulations to comply with, similar to GDPR?
Since Careem is an Uber company, we have to comply with European and American regulations in addition to local law. I would say that customer data protection in our region is the stickiest it ever was.
