Mercari, a popular online marketplace in Japan, faced a few challenges when it came to expanding its business in the US. With established giants like eBay and Craigslist dominating the market, Mercari had to find ways to differentiate itself and stand out among its competitors.

Additionally, US shoppers were primarily making one-time purchases, whereas Mercari's business model was built around repeat purchases and a network of online buyers and sellers. Mercari leveraged tools like BigQuery and GrowthLoop to power targeted campaigns that educated shoppers on the value of their platform, ultimately enabling Mercari to establish a foothold in the US market and grow its user base.

Mercari leveraged tools like BigQuery and GrowthLoop to power targeted campaigns that educated shoppers on the value of their platform, ultimately enabling Mercari to establish a foothold in the US market and grow its user base.

The Challenge

Mercari aimed to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value by getting purchasers to make repeat purchases. However, they faced a challenge in converting existing first party data into effective campaigns. Despite having a data science team and BigQuery, they lacked the ability to streamline their data for marketing activation. 

The Solution

An early adopter of the data cloud, Mercari engaged GrowthLoop in 2018 to transform Marketing Technology. Working exclusively in Google Cloud and BigQuery, our team helped Mercari to address its needs step-by-step. 

Leveraging Existing Data Science Capabilities

Instead of Mercari’s ML models left sitting on the shelf or only utilized for business intelligence and analytics, GrowthLoop was the connector that Mercari needed to take full advantage of their Machine Learning team’s hard work. Mercari was able to leverage their existing data science models that were built in BigQuery like churn prediction, item recommendations and LTV prediction and activate them for marketing for the first time. 

Empowering Marketers to Self-Serve

By providing Mercari's marketing team with the ability to build its own customer lists that leveraged their predictive models without requiring continuous support from other teams' data engineers and business intelligence analysts, GrowthLoop enabled Mercari to combat churn with a single, self-serve solution.

GrowthLoop's audience platform was connected directly to the Customer 360 and predictive model's results in BigQuery, allowing the marketing team to launch and sync audiences across all of Mercari's major marketing channels, such as Braze, Google Ads, and Facebook. In addition to self-serve audience building and activation, Mercari’s marketers had access to view incremental lift on any key metric–right within the GrowthLoop platform. 

Creating Audiences

Mercari's next goal was to launch retargeting campaigns and measure their ability to reduce churn. To achieve this, Mercari implemented tailored segments and automatic A/B testing in their ongoing experiments. With the combined power of analytics and activation provided by GrowthLoop, Mercari's marketing team was able to create custom email audiences utilizing the modeled data that wasn’t previously accessible. 

Refining Audiences Across Channels

Mercari then shifted their focus to Facebook for paid media retargeting, leveraging GrowthLoop's lifecycle segmentation framework to target customers at the optimal stage in their user journey. The right buyer at the right time. In addition to reaching customers on social media, Mercari’s marketing team wanted to get in front of those active shoppers with  Google Ads. The last challenge was to show the right product to these shoppers in order to secure the transaction for Mercari. They used GrowthLoop to develop new segmentation models based on product category propensity. Activating this modeled data put the right product in front of active shoppers enabling Mercari to achieve even greater success with their product listing ads on Google.

Acquiring New Customers

In addition to their efforts to reduce churn and improve retention, Mercari aimed to enhance user acquisition. However, the team faced difficulties in measuring the performance of UA campaigns due to new iOS and Facebook data privacy restrictions, which made measuring campaign attribution virtually impossible. 

With GrowthLoop's support, the team was able to activate targeted campaigns based on a user's geographical location, enabling Mercari to make informed decisions about their UA campaigns using incrementality analysis between geographic regions rather than flawed cookie-based attribution data. This approach allowed Mercari to achieve their goal of acquiring new users in a scalable motion.

Overall, by leveraging their first-party data in BigQuery and working with GrowthLoop, Mercari was able to supercharge their growth, increase customer engagement, and achieve better ROI on their marketing efforts.

How to Drive Growth like Mercari: 3 Easy Steps

1. Assess Your Team's Requirements and Current Capabilities
2. Work with the Appropriate Service Providers
3. Understand Your Target Audience

How to Get Started

Many brands use GrowthLoop and BigQuery to achieve marketing and sales success. Whether your company operates in the retail industry like Mercari, financial services, travel, software, or any other industry, you too can become part of the growing community of businesses that drive sustainable growth through real-time analytics. 

If you have Customer Data in BigQuery…

1. Book a GrowthLoop + BigQuery demo customized to your use cases.
2. Link your BigQuery tables and marketing and sales destinations to the GrowthLoop platform.
3. Launch your first GrowthLoop audience in less than one week.

If you are getting started with BigQuery…

1. Get a Data Strategy Session with a GrowthLoop Solutions Architect at no cost.
2. Use our Quick Start Program to get started with BigQuery in 4 to 8 weeks.
3. Launch your first GrowthLoop audience in less than one week thereafter.

‍