Flavour of season: It's a premier league for food delivery firms this IPL

Downloads of food delivery apps like Zomato, Swiggy, Domino's, etc. have gone up in April over February

Food delivery companies like Zomato, Swiggy, Domino’s, and Blinkit (controlled by Zomato) are cashing in on the urge to splurge on food and snacks by viewers of the ongoing Indian Premier League (IPL) whose numbers are hitting new highs.
 

Both Disney Star on terrestrial and JioCinema, which is streaming the matches on its digital platform for free, have seen a huge viewership surge. Star Sports reported that it had surpassed a viewership of 400 million in the first 29 matches, which is 37 million more than the total viewership reach of IPL 2022.

Its competitor, JioCinema, announced 24 million viewers concurrently watched a recent IPL match, surpassing the previous high of 18.6 million in IPL 2019.  
 

Simultaneously, food delivery players have seen a big increase not only in the downloads of their apps during this IPL season, but also in their active daily and monthly users, according to data collected from Sensor Tower, which tracks the numbers by BOFA Global Research. They say  this will benefit Zomato and its quick commerce app,  Blinkit, and expects its first quarter of 2023-24 revenues to bounce back. According to Sensor Tower data, Zomato’s app downloads hit over 4 million in April from sub-3 million in February. 
 

Swiggy downloads crossed 3 million from less than 2 million in the same period. Domino’s Pizza, which delivers only its own food products, also got a leg-up, touching close to 3 million downloads, compared to 1-million-plus downloads in February.

The food delivery companies are also wooing IPL viewers through various marketing programmes.

For instance, Zomato has tied up with Star Sports in a promotional drive, under which it has swapped its home icon with a cricket field to identify itself with the tournament.
 

It has also launched the “Zomato Prediction League”, an in-app gamification, wherein you can predict the winner of the day’s match and win coupons worth Rs 10 lakh every day, which can then be redeemed on its platform. The response to this scheme has been growing. As many as 260,000 consumers participated in the match between Delhi Capitals and Royal Challengers Bangalore and 32,000 people won credits.
 

Swiggy, too, has come up with its own strategy to reel in customers with its “Match Day Mania” programme.

The marketing seems to have worked. According to Sensor Tower data, the average daily active users for Zomato have risen sequentially in April by 8 per cent and that of Swiggy by 5 per cent. In March, the month-on-month growth for Zomato and Swiggy was 4.9 per cent and 4.6 per cent respectively, and they hit 6.1 million users and 4.4 million users, respectively.
 

The monthly active users (MAU) for both are also up by 5 per cent over the same period, whereas in March, it grew month-on-month by only 2-3 per cent.  In the case of Zomato, the MAU in April was over 55 million, while for Swiggy it was close to 40 million. Even Domino’s has seen its MAU go up to around 13 million.
 

The marketing blitz has also played a role in the retention of customers. The retention of daily and monthly active users for both Zomato and Swiggy is at around 12-13 per cent, while in the case of Domino’s, it is 6 per cent.