Marketing CMS for Blinkit’s Native Mobile App

The challenge

Blinkit’s marketing and category teams depended entirely on the engineering team for widget controls, running A/B tests, and various other tasks which affected the productivity of all teams.

The solution had to be flexible enough to accommodate the advanced marketing needs of Blinkit, such as personalizing experiences, running A/B tests, segmenting content and offers, and integrating with the rest of their marketing tech stack.

Another important aspect was that the CMS integration should not affect the performance, aesthetics, or UI integration with native elements of the app.

The approach

Our approach was to first understand the engineering infrastructure that powers the Blinkit app and analyze the risks. We then presented a solution and a demo that exposed a JSON that could be consumed by mobile apps. With this, we commissioned a proof of concept to validate core integration with the app.

The proof of concept involved controlling banners and a couple of simple widgets on the app with a CMS. Once we validated the POC, we aligned our sprints to business events and short-term team needs.

The solution

Decoupled Drupal

We chose Drupal 8 for its CMS, RESTful, and rapid development capabilities. Drupal's role-based access, easy and robust third-party integrations, caching mechanisms, and flexible architecture allowed for deeper integrations as a provider and a consumer in the distributed architecture.

With decoupled Drupal, we were able to get the best of both worlds: the power of a CMS and the performance of a native mobile app.

Reusable component library

We built a reusable component library using the paragraphs module. This allowed the marketing team to easily drag and drop components, customize them, and preview the impact before publishing them directly to the app. The component library standardized the markup and schema for the app, making it easier for the team to work and maintain it.

Content moderation

We implemented a moderation workflow and revision-based system to mitigate risk and ensure that configuration mistakes could be tracked and rolled back easily. We also implemented a custom caching strategy with deep CDN integration for all assets to improve performance.

Widgets scheduling & segmentation

We enabled Widgets Scheduling and Segmentation for the marketing team to schedule widgets, products, campaigns, and promotions well in advance. The CMS also allowed them to personalize the experience by creating variations for different user cohorts.

Webhooks

We implemented Webhooks to post data to various Blinkit endpoints on creating and updating a layout. This allowed us to integrate the CMS with other systems to automate tasks and improve efficiency.

The outcome

By using Drupal 8, Blinkit has been able to increase the productivity and communication of its marketing team by giving them the ability to control layout, content, and widgets without development help. The teams were able to reduce the content roll-out time and make changes quickly and easily.

Drupal CMS improved the content authoring experience, providing the marketing team with the ability to run experiments and personalization for various user cohorts. The CMS can handle high traffic without any outages or issues.