Reelo: Empowering retailers even during the pandemic using smart marketing

• ByStartupStory     |    September 27, 2021

Parin and Prit Sanghvi, two Brothers born to a retail business owner, happened to observe that how their father’s business had barely changed in the past decade, solely relying on frequent customers to keep himself onboard. Realising that this is a significant problem faced by millions of retailers across India and globally, both the brothers came up with an idea to improve customer engagement and experience particularly for small and medium enterprises. Most retailers have no knowledge about customers who don’t return after their first visit. They wanted to give retail businesses a leg-up against competition that’s growing by the day. That’s why Parin and Prit jointly built ‘Reelo’ which was launched in Nov 2017 at Ahmedabad.

Reelo is a Canva for intelligent customer engagement that empowers retailers with no marketing or technical skills to increase their sales with smart marketing. To bring customers back more often and spend more on each visit, Reelo pools personalised digital rewards, messaging tools, and automated promotions in an easy-to-use marketing program. Offline businesses in F&B, Beauty & Wellness, Grocery, and Retail are the key sectors where they operate currently.

Reelo has a passionate team of 7 members, who are on a mission to make intelligent customer engagement frictionless and effortless for millions of retailers and be the new way retailers grow their business.

Big national and international tycoons like Westside, Starbucks, Amazon, have had the power and opportunity to adopt new technologies to their benefit. However, local retailers have been left behind and struggled to hold on. With customer insights and an easy-to-use system, Reelo solves the problems of complex, and bulky customer management practices by deploying a loyalty marketing system that is both quick, easy-to-use, and affordable. It provides businesses with access to large customer behavioral data, tools, and facilities which were earlier available to bigger competitors only.

“The current tools available are really complex, overpowering, and expensive that they become inaccessible for most retailers. These tools are built for sophisticated marketers who work at enterprise brands and have the knowledge and understanding of data-driven marketing. Reelo is built for modern retailers who are non-marketers but aspire to build a strong brand. Our product comes with a 14-day free trial and plans start as low as Rs. 833 / month. This makes it extremely easy for any retailer to try and use our product and get started with Reelo.

Multiple tools already exist to help e-commerce businesses but our product is building a community of merchants and shoppers in the offline space as well, which opens a lot of opportunities for us to move forward to help any type of business connect to the right set of customers,” Prit said.

Coping with the pandemic

The founders said, the startup, however, initially faced few challenges amid the pandemic. But soon, shifting to a virtual world, proved to be a blessing in disguise as they were able to build a wider community, by connecting to customers from different parts of the world.

They shifted to a completely remote team, expanded across different cities of the country which in turn enabled them to build a talented team without any geographical boundaries and connecting customers and retailers from different parts of the country. The focus of the team is on the Product & Technology and Go-to-market strategy to create tools that will enable retailers to focus on the business, while Reelo helps them bring their customers back again and again, easily and automatically.

Reelo pivoted to a complete product-led growth approach and launched a new version recently to allow customers to try the product for free. Customers can also use Reelo forever free and continue to get unique insights about their customers forever. Users can upgrade to paid plans if they want to do more. With this, retailers in any part of the world will soon be able to sign up for free and get started with using Reelo.

“We believe that even though the world is affected by the pandemic, the offline markets are not going to fade away. It has become more important for offline businesses to be better able to understand their customers. Reelo aims to educate and empower them in every way possible,” Parin Sanghvi added.

Milestones achieved so far

Since its launch in November 2017, Reelo has become one of the fastest-growing startups in India. Reelo is onboard with over 2000 retailers and has connected with over 4 million users across 50 cities in India. Reelo has captured over 15 million transactions and also generated $350 million additional revenue for their partners.

Looking ahead

With the recent fundraise, Reelo is ramping up its tech infrastructure and adding significant ML capabilities. They plan to invest in GTM strategies and expand globally. They are building a strong product and marketing team to meet the aggressive roadmap and are looking for talented folks to join them.

“We believe, over the next decade customer engagement will continue to dominate the world and for small and medium-sized retail businesses to survive and compete, they will need to flip the traditional approach, leverage data, and put customers first. The businesses that win will be the ones who can make it easy for their customers to keep coming back to them again and again. Our business aims to achieve that,” said Parin Sanghvi.

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