60% of our customers who buy in the store are online browsers : Avnish Anand

After a muted festive season last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, this year, the willingness to spend is higher. As per a ZestMoney Survey, 72% of Indians plan to splurge on electronics & gadgets, while 59% prefer BNPL to fund festive purchases. 62% of the respondents revealed that festive budgets have gone up compared to last year. A recent market research by YouGov gives a big boost to the Diwali Expense Index, which is generally indicative of Q3 sales growth in India.

The Indian festive season is a crucial time as consumer demand is at its peak with many planning several small and big-ticket purchases. With increased vaccination and the general opening of the economy, the survey has witnessed a positive sentiment around budgets and shopping at physical stores, even as online shopping continues to be popular among people.

As part of Adgully’s Festive Mood series, we have been covering the market, brand and consumer sentiments during the festive season this year. In conversation with Adgully, Avnish Anand, COO and Co-founder, CaratLane – A Tanishq Partnership speaks about how the brand is leveraging the festive season this year, the overall festive spends, online jewellery buying trends and a lot more.

• What kind of trends have you seen in Consumer spends, ad spends by brands & sales during this festive season?

Similar to the situation last year, the festive season is arriving on the back of a period where consumers have not had too many opportunities to spend. We are positive that this festive season will follow a pattern of pent-up demand across categories. Our integrated omni-channel strategy is nicely falling into place. Traffic to the website and apps is up by almost 90% last year and all channels - stores , online, CL live, Tah and WhatsApp are working together beautifully to deliver higher conversion and growth over last year. Keeping this in mind, we have announced beautiful new collections across price points. We launched affordable yet uniquely crafted designs across the kids, occasion wear as well as more everyday wear designs. Continuing to keep our focus on gifting, which is a big trend in the festive season, we have made our sub 20,000/- catalogue really strong. We also expect the Solitaire segment to pick up due to the wedding season and we have focussed on new design additions and better listing of Solitaires in our catalogue. To nudge the customers further we have some really attractive offers as well across the catalogue, especially incentivising higher ticket sizes. From self-buyers, to gifters we have something for everyone.

• What is the kind of online/offline split seen in brands marketing strategies?

Our marketing strategies and campaigns are designated with the objective to empower our customers by offering cutting edge experiential solutions and making them aware of the same through strategic amplification across multiple marketing platforms. At CaratLane, we constantly try to understand their needs and offer innovative solutions to enhance our consumers' jewellery buying experience, by virtue of which we strive to enhance our brand value and affinity. Being a digital first brand, we continue to strongly drive the discovery of the brand online through social media and search engine optimisation to drive our acquisition and retargeting. We further use mailers, push, SMSs and other mid funnel activities to guide the customer to their channel of preference, enabling more meaningful interactions in try at home as well as in retail. The online influenced retail orders stood at 60% against 52% last year. 

• What is your overall festive season spends for this year? What kind of campaigns and marketing strategies have you drawn up to engage with your consumers this year? 

We have focused on our omni marketing strategies, where we are driving the discovery of the brand online. We prefer that customers browse the website and then walk-into a store or set up a Try-at-home appointment. A lot of our customers end up purchasing on our app or website. Approximately, 60% of our customers who buy in the store are online browsers. We have scaled up our digital spends across platforms to capture all the high intent browsers.

The focus will be across price points, our sub 20,000 catalogue is extremely strong and is a great hook for gifting purchases, as well as for kid’s jewellery.  Apart from this we will also focus on key collections that we launched for the festive season like Dunes & Bloom, which are very contemporary designs perfect for occasion and everyday wear.  Since the wedding season has started, Solitaires is also an import category for us. We will focus on unique designs and competitive pricing for solitaires. 

In addition to this, to incentivize customers we have aggressive offers on all Diamond designs and exciting promotions on higher price points.