How Zalora supercharged its churn analytics with Mixpanel Warehouse Connectors

Zalora, a leading ecommerce fashion and lifestyle platform, has long leveraged Mixpanel to accelerate its growth. Our newest data warehouse releases have enabled Zalora to enrich their product analytics with valuable business data. The Zalora team is now able to identify high-value segments, pinpoint stagnant users, and take proactive steps to reduce churn. By understanding how engagement evolves over time, Zalora can now home in on the strategies that drive growth.

Here’s how they did it. 

Zalora has always understood that nurturing ongoing customer relationships is one of the best and most efficient ways to drive revenue. For Zalora’s B2C ecommerce platform, their North Star metrics are all related to churn and customer retention. 

As Senior Product Analyst Joy Yuen tells us: “In our team, we like to say that all roads must lead to revenue. And one of the best sources of revenue is returning customers.” 

This focus on customer lifetime value drives Zalora’s product team to invest heavily in understanding why customers churn and how they can improve those numbers across different customer segments. 

Mixpanel has long been Zalora's go-to for analyzing critical ecommerce funnels like checkout completion and add-to-cart rates. However, to understand the complex dynamics of churn, the product team wanted to leverage Mixpanel’s fast exploratory analysis for this critical business data.

Zalora’s revenue team creates critical customer segmentation definitions, such as categorizing users as “likely to churn” or “deal hunters,” and stores these definitions in their data warehouse. The product team needed a way to enrich Mixpanel's powerful analytics capabilities with this segmentation. Combining self-serve analytics with this rich business data would help them understand how customers evolve over time, identify churn-risk segments early on, and proactively implement strategies to boost revenue.

“On a high level, it’s important for us as a business to understand how a customer has grown with us or if they churned and outgrew us. We need to know their whole history with our brand, and that’s something we were lacking from an analytics perspective.”

The challenge lies in the dynamic nature of customer segments, which could change daily based on a user’s interactions and purchase behavior. While Zalora's data warehouse held the source-of-truth groupings for which customers fell into which segments, traditional solutions struggled to keep pace with these real-time shifts. Zalora could use a workaround like manually exporting monthly snapshots from their warehouse and reuploading to Mixpanel, but that introduces significant lift on their data engineering team. 

No matter how difficult, not tracking this data isn’t an option.

“On a high level, it’s important for us as a business to understand how a customer has grown with us or if they churned and outgrew us. We need to know their whole history with our brand, and that’s something we were lacking from an analytics perspective,” Joy says.

Mixpanel’s newest data warehouse release, Profile History, allows the Zalora team to access accurate segmentation data from the warehouse without any of these manual workarounds. Profile History enables teams to point Mixpanel at history tables in their warehouse and voila–product teams can now analyze user behavior and journeys based on up-to-date segment definitions. 

Now, Zalora uses Profile History to proactively combat churn by analyzing the behavior of churn-risk users over the previous year. They are now able to understand how customers evolve and make informed, proactive decisions to drive growth and retention–all without hefty manual workarounds from their data team. 

When customers haven’t purchased with them for 12 months (which is how Zalora defines churn), they can easily see what customer behavior has been up to that point, including their movements through different customer segments, before landing in the “churned customer” segment.

The product team then uses these insights to influence their roadmap and prioritize features that combat churn. As Zalora Product Analyst Jian An Lam explains:

“When we are considering new features, we always need to go back and look at past historical data to understand how users performed while they were categorized in different segments so we can better personalize the experience for users.”

Thanks to these deeper insights, the Zalora team has had lots of what they call “delightful surprises,” from realizing the value of a previously under-analyzed feature to understanding why customers take certain actions.

“When we are considering new features, we always need to go back and look at past historical data to understand how users performed while they were categorized in different segments so we can better personalize the experience for users… Mixpanel helps us fill that gap better than other reporting tools could.”

Most recently, the team has been investigating how user actions correlate with conversion rate. With Mixpanel, they found that users who add their credit card as a payment method convert up to 400% more than those who don’t.

“Mixpanel isn’t just for monitoring,” Joy concludes. “It allows us to explore and actually understand user behavior better and tell the story. Mixpanel helps us fill that gap better than other reporting tools could.”

Zalora’s success is just a glimpse of what’s possible. If you’re interested in learning how our recent data warehouse releases can unlock deeper business insights and drive growth for your team, let’s talk.