Revolutionizing E-Commerce: Eastern Pickles Boosts Retention 58%, 5.2x ROI with AI

MarkoPolo.ai

1 Witness

Retail & Consumer Goods #AI #E-commerce #Customer Retention #Marketing Automation #Personalization #Predictive Analytics #ROI #Omnichannel Marketing #Abandoned Cart Recovery #Cultural Intelligence

About

MarkoPolo.ai is an AI-powered platform for personal outreach at scale, designed to recover lost revenue by decoding shopper preferences. It delivers 1:1 marketing via email, texts, and voice calls. Key capabilities include:

Predictive Intelligence: Forecasts customer behavior 10-30 seconds ahead with pinpoint accuracy.
Multi-Language AI with Cultural Intelligence: Supports 50+ languages, including local dialects, and infuses messages with cultural context.
Recovery Engine & Channel Orchestration: Boosts cart recovery and orchestrates outreach across 12+ channels (email, SMS, WhatsApp, voice).
Trigger Campaigns: Reacts to billions of micro-events with autonomous AI agents.

It integrates seamlessly with existing e-commerce platforms like Shopify and CRM, enabling hyper-personalized, culturally intelligent engagement to drive customer retention and revenue growth without increasing operational burden.

The Challenge

What went wrong

Eastern Pickles, a rapidly expanding artisanal pickle company in Bangladesh, faced significant marketing and sales challenges despite a loyal customer base and 100,000 monthly orders.

Fragmented Outreach: Marketing efforts relied on generic email/SMS blasts, ignoring critical regional and cultural preferences. Urban customers desired quick-delivery promotions, while rural buyers prioritized festival-tied flavors.
High Abandoned Carts: A dismal 15% cart recovery rate, with up to 70% of traffic comprising anonymous visitors slipping away unnoticed.
Stagnant Retention: Customer retention hovered at a low 32%, limiting repeat purchases and long-term customer value.
Stretched Marketing Team: A small, five-member team struggled to personalize interactions across email, WhatsApp, and SMS. This led to manual follow-ups, diverting resources from product innovation.
Poor ROI from Legacy Tools: Previous marketing tools delivered only a 1.8x ROI, indicating a severe lack of effectiveness in personalized engagement.

Head of Marketing Sohel Aman emphasized the need to "speak their language—literally and figuratively—without hiring an army of agents" to address the brand's diverse customer base.

Solution Approach

How it was solved

Eastern Pickles partnered with MarkoPolo.ai in Q1 2025, initiating a pilot across its top three districts. The platform's edge AI was leveraged to identify and track anonymous shoppers from their very first session, capturing up to 20% of previously invisible traffic. Unlike traditional tools, MarkoPolo.ai analyzed 384 behavioral signals—from hesitation patterns to dwell time—to generate unique, real-time visitor profiles with an average response latency of just 2.4 seconds.

Key features that drove the rollout included:

Predictive Intelligence: Forecasted customer behavior 10-30 seconds ahead with pinpoint accuracy. For example, if a Dhaka user lingered on a mango pickle page while browsing vegan options, the AI predicted a 67% likelihood of exploring gluten-free pairings next and preemptively surfaced tailored recommendations.
Multi-Language AI with Cultural Intelligence: Supported native fluency in over 50 languages, including Bengali dialects. The platform infused messages with cultural context; a Sylhet customer abandoning a cart during Eid prep received a voice call in local Urdu-Bengali referencing family iftar traditions, while a Chittagong urbanite received a WhatsApp nudge with quick urban delivery slots.
Recovery Engine and Channel Orchestration: Boosted cart recovery using AI-driven psychology. The system orchestrated 12+ channels—email for detailed storytelling, SMS for urgency, WhatsApp for interactive polls, and voice for empathetic reminders—selecting the optimal path based on user history and open rates.
Trigger Campaigns: Reacted to billions of micro-events via machine learning-discovered segments. When a user compared three pickle variants, an autonomous AI agent triggered a personalized bundle offer, complete with a 10% festival discount.

Results Achieved

Success Metrics

Within three months of implementing MarkoPolo.ai, Eastern Pickles achieved transformative, quantifiable results across its e-commerce operations:

Cart Recovery Rate: Soared from 15% to 43%, representing a +28-point jump (a 186% relative improvement), directly attributed to MarkoPolo.ai's predictive edge.
Customer Retention: Experienced a 58% overall lift, with repeat purchase rates climbing from 32% to over 50%. The AI's behavioral profiling significantly reduced churn through hyper-relevant re-engagement.
Mobile Conversion Rate: Spiked by 67%, effectively turning mid-session scrollers into buyers.
Marketing ROI: A staggering 5.2x on marketing dollars, dramatically outperforming the 1.8x from legacy tools (a +189% increase).
Revenue Recovery: Recovered 25% of previously lost opportunities, adding $450,000 in Q2 2025 without inflating ad spend.
Operational Efficiency: Customer service tickets dropped 34% (from 1,200 to 792/month) as AI agents proactively resolved queries via voice feedback loops, maintaining a 92% satisfaction score.
Scalability: Eastern Pickles scaled to 150,000 monthly orders without expanding its marketing team, sending 3.8 million personalized messages monthly across diverse districts.
Targeted Outreach: The platform's 67% accuracy in predicting next-category explorations cut irrelevant outreach by 40%, sharpening focus on high-intent signals.

These results underscore Eastern Pickles' successful shift from fragmented broadcasting to intelligent, personalized customer conversations, paving the way for a projected 30% revenue uplift by 2026.

Verified Testimonials

Real voices from people who witnessed this story firsthand

Sohel Aman

👔 Head of Marketing

🏢 Eastern Pickles

Before MarkoPolo.ai, our marketing felt like shouting into a crowded bazaar — everyone heard us, but almost nobody felt we were speaking directly to them. With a small team of five and customers spread from urban Dhaka apartments to rural Sylhet villages, true personalization seemed impossible without tripling headcount and budget.

Within two weeks of going live with MarkoPolo, everything changed.

The platform’s ability to identify and profile anonymous visitors from the very first click gave us visibility we never had — suddenly 65-70% of our “ghost” traffic had names, preferences, and predictable next moves. The cultural intelligence baked into the Bengali-language messaging was a revelation: a simple Eid-timed voice note mentioning “iftar with family” in the Sylhet dialect lifted cart recovery in that region by 63% in a single week.

Hard numbers speak loudest:

Cart recovery jumped from ~15% to 43%
Customer retention increased 58% in under 90 days
We achieved a 5.2× ROI on marketing spend (almost triple our previous tools)
Added $450,000 in recovered revenue in Q2 alone — without increasing ad spend or team size

What impressed me most wasn’t just the revenue lift; it was how human the outreach felt. Customers started replying to WhatsApp messages with “Thank you, apu/bhai!” because the tone, timing, and even product suggestions matched their lives perfectly. MarkoPolo didn’t just automate marketing — it made our brand feel local and caring at a scale we never thought possible.