How I used a little loyalty logic to create unlimited content for Lieferando.de

It’s been an exciting five years running Talon.One. But, as many may already know, it’s not the first business I’ve set up.

10 years ago I founded a little company called Lieferando with my partners Jörg and Kai. It’s now a household name as the market leader in food delivery in Germany.

After we created a loyalty program at Lieferando, one of the major problems we wanted to solve:

We came up with a basic loyalty program to help... 

"Give users 10 loyalty points when they write a review longer than 15 words."

Participation was huge and around 12% of orders on Lieferando got rated. The last data available was around 24.000 orders with 3.000 reviews per day.

Here are some numbers from October 2013, a lifetime ago:

12,750,000 words of content (16.5 times the length of the bible)

1,300,000 ratings on Lieferando

3,000 new ratings per day

So we amassed a lot of written content. But what could we do with it?

We had four major relevant pages for organic traffic.

We used every bit of content and automatically inserted into the relevant pages based on the review. For example: A sushi restaurant’s review could be published in any SEO page with the category sushi, as well as the postcode page and the city page.

Thanks to our little promotion, we now had more content than we ever dreamed of. But most importantly, it was relevant, unique and user-generated.

Obviously, we encountered a lot of bad reviews. And they’re not something we wanted to go unnoticed. We still published them, but only after a review by a support agent.

We started to see a clear pattern for negative reviews:

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This wasn’t good, but we needed a way to make it work to our advantage.

We created email templates that directly corresponded to the complaint. This was easy as 99.99% of the time the cases fit one of the above.

We had five different personas with slightly different emails, but we also added spelling mistakes (did you spot it?) to make them more personal. 

On top of that, depending on the quality of the customer, the email template allowed us to auto-create a set-value coupon to them. 

Responding to a review took around 20 seconds. In return these customers became our best performing customer cohorts.

What's more, many of them actually reached out to us and thanked us for acknowledging their reviews. They assumed bad reviews would be ignored and appreciated receiving coupons in return.

It’s not enough to think about loyalty in terms of a loyalty program. You need to think holistically about your customer and try to engage with them beyond a simple loyalty wallet functionality.

As you can see, we offered customers a coupon with a discount for their next order instead of additional loyalty points, as this is more transactional. 

This is the overall idea for Talon.One - Thinking about the technical part of the user promotion experience and providing marketers with endless abilities to address it.
Find out more about the Promotion Engine and how it's helped our customers in our Content Library.