How AI and Online-to-Offline Integration Drive Sales for Toy Retailer Budynok Ihrashok

Today, businesses face a critical challenge: not just acquiring new customers, but actively retaining the ones they already have. This is especially pressing in offline retail. Once a customer leaves the store, they often disappear entirely – their behavior, interests, and potential for repeat purchase go untapped.

As customer acquisition costs rise, the ability to retain clients becomes a genuine competitive advantage for retailers. To achieve this, companies are unifying online and offline data and automating personalized engagement workflows. Without this, brands lose not only loyalty but also any ability to predictably influence revenue.

The case of Budynok Ihrashok shows how a customer data platform transforms from a technical tool into the strategic backbone of omnichannel marketing. By unifying customer data, orchestrating channels, and applying AI-powered solutions, the retailer didn't just scale its communications – it generated measurable revenue contribution and built a foundation for long-term business growth.

Omnichannel Strategy at Scale

Budynok Ihrashok built a strategic approach to audience engagement through Yespo CDP. Communications cover five channels – email, widgets, Viber, Mobile Push, and Web Push – with monthly message volume exceeding 2 million.

The platform sits at the center of the retailer's marketing architecture. Through the CDP, the business determines who to contact, when, and through which channel – based on customer behavior, purchase history, and current context.

The 360° Profile as the Foundation for Personalization

For most retailers, up to 75% of sales come from offline. The problem is that without identification and follow-up communication, these customers effectively drop out of the marketing funnel.

Yespo CDP allows retailers with high physical store traffic to stay connected with this audience – rather than losing them – and to logically continue the relationship, build loyalty, and generate additional sales. The platform unifies data from the website, mobile app, and offline locations into a single customer profile, which becomes the foundation for:

• deep audience segmentation
• personalized product recommendations
• automated customer journeys through triggered communications
• communication frequency control to prevent message fatigue

Building a unified profile is an ongoing process that includes:

• collecting anonymous behavioral data from the website and app
• identifying the customer at the point of purchase – in the app, on the website, or in-store
• continuously enriching the profile with new behavioral data
• updating relatively static information through surveys

For example, when a customer uses a loyalty card to earn bonus points at checkout, Yespo CDP identifies them by phone number or loyalty card number and records the purchase in their profile. This allows the brand to go beyond the transaction – launching data collection campaigns, continuing engagement across other channels such as email and Mobile Push, and guiding the customer toward their next purchase.

This approach expands the number of touchpoints available with each customer. More importantly, it creates the foundation for a personalized experience where every subsequent communication is grounded in the customer's actual interaction history, interests, and needs.

In "Budynok Ihrashok," the customer profile includes not only basic information but also data about children – age, gender, and dates of birth. In retail, these parameters are central to personalization and significantly impact the relevance of communications.

How CDP Enables a Complete View of the Path to Purchase

Budynok Ihrashok is a typical omnichannel retailer: customers move continuously between the website, mobile app, and physical stores. In this model, a unified customer profile helps to understand how behavior in one channel influences decisions in another.

For example, a customer might open an email, click through to the website, browse a product, and then complete the purchase in a physical store. Without a CDP, these appear as two separate events. The platform connects them into a single workflow and reveals how online campaigns drive offline sales. This changes how marketing effectiveness is measured and provides the basis for scaling the channels that actually deliver results.

The Role of Channels

By send volume, email has traditionally led at Budynok Ihrashok – it holds the largest contact base. The second-largest channel is Viber, which plays an important role in offline retail by exerting a broad influence on customer behavior in physical locations.

Mobile push has taken on a distinct role in the retailer's omnichannel strategy. Although this channel has only been actively used for a short time, it's already delivering strong results. On one hand, mobile push helps optimize costs by partially replacing the more expensive Viber. On the other hand, the mobile app changes customer behavior: it provides quick access to the loyalty card, increases the number of touchpoints (push, in-app, inbox), and improves conversion.

In triggered workflows, mobile push already outperforms Viber in conversion rate, even at lower send volumes. It's the channel for the most loyal audience, and its potential is growing quickly.

Widgets also perform well in campaigns – particularly those with gamification elements. They strengthen engagement, increase time spent on the site, and help collect data more effectively for downstream personalization.

Triggered workflows as the Core of Retention

Triggered communications allow the brand to respond to customer actions at the right moment, rather than chasing them with mass sends. The retailer actively uses 25 triggers; the highest-converting ones are:

• Birthday
• Reactivation
• Abandoned cart
• Welcome

A notable feature of the Birthday workflow is that it accounts for both the adult's and the child's birthday. This level of personalization significantly increased conversion and turned a basic trigger into one of the most profitable.

A key takeaway from the Budynok Ihrashok case: don't limit yourself to the most common triggers like abandoned cart and browse abandonment. Depending on the niche, back-in-stock alerts, price drop notifications on viewed items, new arrivals, and others can be equally effective.

AI Recommendations: Personalization at Scale

Budynok Ihrashok actively uses the Yespo CDP product recommendations across triggered and promotional campaigns, on the website, and now within the app as well.

These recommendations are powered by a transformer model that analyzes not only individual customer actions but also the sequence, context, and content of their interactions with products. This allows the system to better understand customer intent at a given moment, rather than simply surfacing "popular" or similar items.

Unlike traditional recommendation models that operate on behavioral similarity across users, the transformer model generates relevant suggestions even for new products with no sales history. At the same time, the business retains control over display logic – it can promote specific brands and categories, or set display conditions based on age groups, as with LEGO sets.

Budynok Ihrashok uses 18 product recommendation algorithms; the highest conversion comes from the Similar Products block.

CDP's Contribution to Revenue

Yespo's experience shows that at launch, a CDP typically contributes 1–2% of additional turnover. But with consistent work from the team – campaign optimization, trigger development, and new channel adoption – businesses typically reach 10–15% of turnover generated by the CDP within 6–12 months (depending on the niche). This level of contribution is the hallmark of a mature omnichannel model.

In the Budynok Ihrashok case, approximately 14% of all orders are attributed to the CDP. Of these, nearly 8% are driven by mass campaigns, 4.5% by triggered workflows, and 1.8% by on-site product recommendations.

If you want to turn customer data into real revenue contribution and build an omnichannel model with predictable results – reach out to the Yespo team. We'll help you assess the CDP's potential for your business, identify priority workflows, and launch solutions that will systematically grow your revenue.

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