SwiggyInstamart innovates with the #KhaliKaKhaaliCart campaign, boosting its social engagement by over 125% during its birthday week

Users were encouraged to fill the blank in the sentence ‘Khali ka khaali cart mein hoga ___________ from SwiggyInstamart!’ with a grocery item of their choosing and DM it to @Swiggy_Instamart on Instagram. Depending on the absurdity of their choice of grocery, each user received an equally absurd image featuring The Great Khali propping up that grocery item with a thank-you note and an extra delight: A gift-wrapped discount code. How do you gift wrap a text message? On Instagram’s DMs, you can!

“Similar to Swiggy’s ‘Voice of Hunger’, we’ve created another unique UGC campaign driven by Instagram DMs that saw participation from users and brand handles. It’s not every day that you see brands across categories coming together for a campaign at this scale. ‘Khali Ka Khaali Cart’ is a great example of collaborative marketing on social media.” said Ashish Lingamneni, Vice President – Marketing at Swiggy.

SwiggyInstamart got a total of 1.9M impressions and grew its following by 12% in JUST 4 days. The activity received 2000+ DMs on Instagram and achieved an all-time high engagement of 9X on Instagram.

Anisha Wilkinson, Assistant Manager – Social Media Marketing at SwiggyInstamart, said, “The secret ingredient was leveraging a hidden feature on Instagram DMs. By emphasising innovation through existing features on Instagram, we reeled in folks outside our follower base and increased our engagement rate and organic follower acquisition to all-time highs.”

After the first 1700 organic interactions, influencers like Saurabh Gadghe, Atman Desai and Govind Menon joined the bandwagon. Their amplification moved the engagement rate up by another 10% across platforms.

Pearl Alex, Creative Lead at Schbang, believes, “Audiences enjoy brand campaigns that seem like the folks behind it are having fun with it too. Nearly every reply crafted by our copy & design teams was served back to users with a chuckle. From their reactions in the DM, it’s clear that they enjoyed being in on the joke.”

This sort of personalization at scale goes a long way in making an emotional connection with the brand and ultimately influences the business. “The #KhaliKaKhaaliCart campaign shows exactly how a user-friendly social media-first approach can help a D2C brand like SwiggyInstamart engage with its audience at a more personal level by generating top-of-mind awareness. All while leading to a greater business impact,” Nikhita Anil, Associate Vice President at Schbang, said.