Launching Myanmar's first major online grocery store and driving record revenue growth through full-funnel performance marketing, CRM-backed retargeting, and multi-channel campaign execution.
City Mart Holdings is Myanmar's largest retail chain, and City Mall Online was their first foray into e-commerce grocery. Despite the brand recognition behind it, the platform was struggling: sales were not picking up and return on ad spend was extremely low. The business needed a step-change in performance during their high-stakes Mega Sales Weeks in August, September, and November 2019.
As Performance Marketing Manager at Nexlabs, I led the paid media strategy and execution for this campaign. My responsibilities covered campaign architecture across paid social and digital channels, audience strategy, creative briefing, CRM integration for retargeting, and performance optimization throughout the campaign period.
The approach was built around a full-funnel multi-channel strategy spanning paid social, organic, earned, and traditional media. The key innovation was implementing Myanmar's first CRM-backed scalable retargeting and conversion mechanism, which allowed us to build audience segments from actual customer data rather than relying on broad interest targeting.
On the creative side, we developed different video formats for different audience segments and funnel stages: awareness-focused content for new audiences and high-intent conversion creative for retargeted users. Each piece of creative was optimized for mobile-first consumption, reflecting how the Myanmar audience predominantly accessed content.
Budget allocation was structured around the Mega Sales Week windows, concentrating spend during peak intent periods while using the weeks before to build audience pools through upper-funnel activity. This meant our retargeting audiences were warm and ready to convert when the promotional windows opened.
Over the 3-month campaign period, City Mall Online saw a 264% lift in revenue growth, a 128% lift in new shopper acquisition, and achieved 53x return on ad spend — breaking the client's previous CMO benchmarks. The campaign established a repeatable performance marketing framework for City Mall Online's future promotional cycles.
The CRM integration was the highest-leverage decision in this campaign. Using actual customer data to build retargeting segments, rather than platform-estimated audiences, dramatically improved conversion rates and ROAS. It also taught me that in emerging markets with strong mobile penetration, the gap between first-party data and platform-inferred audiences is larger than in more mature markets, making the investment in proper tracking infrastructure disproportionately valuable.