Achieving 93% engagement: How TELUS Digital deepened personalization via OHLQ's mobile experience

Since 2020, Ohio Liquor, a partnership between JobsOhio Beverage System and the Division of Liquor Control, has relied on TELUS Digital’s expertise to design, build and market the liquor enterprise in Ohio. The successful relaunch of OHLQ.com established a strong foundation for content, omnichannel marketing and real-time inventory checks.

Because Ohio is one of eighteen liquor-control jurisdictions in the U.S., current regulations have prevented ecommerce checkout functionality on OHLQ.com. In the absence of traditional online KPIs, like revenue and bottles purchased, TELUS Digital reimagined an omnichannel measurement strategy centered on purchase intent to measure ROI. Purchase intent is classified as low, medium or high per session, using signals such as local search behavior, onsite engagement and in-store sales data, which serves as a proxy for revenue without a checkout button.

Yet the web channel's success pointed to an even greater opportunity to deepen personalization for an audience that was already primed for it. Over 80% of OHLQ's audience was already mobile-first.

The right mobile app could transform product search into a high-reward, personalized discovery journey, maximizing revenue opportunities on exclusive products and converting customers from top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel.

How TELUS Digital and OHLQ solved the mobile engagement challenge

TELUS Digital built the OHLQ app on React Native to fully leverage mobile capabilities and transform the customer experience from high-effort searching to high-convenience discovery. The core of the solution was enhanced personalization and streamlined communication.

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The power of push notifications

During highly anticipated events, such as bottle lotteries and other exclusives, OHLQ users had become increasingly attuned to perceived unfairness in alerts and messaging, sometimes due to rate limitations in email releases. Push notifications ensured all secure account holders received geo-aware updates simultaneously on their preferred devices, transforming a manual discovery process into an automated, targeted notification system.

Tailoring the mobile user experience

Mobile’s fast authentication enabled the seamless collection of light preferences, powering personalized results. Here are key features of the OHLQ mobile app:

• Product detail pages enhanced for discovery: By rethinking content design, we made it easier for users to search and find product information, increasing purchase intent.
• Filters for relevance: In addition to offering crucial filters, the team leveraged live store stock and geolocation to let users filter for “in stock” and “nearest to me.”
• Ohio bottle lotteries and exclusives: Users can explore upcoming lotteries, engage in one-tap bottle lottery entry and get reminders when they’re open, reducing manual effort.
• Multimodal shopping lists: Users can count on a seamless experience, persistent across both web and app platforms. This is helpful for building shopping lists, which, when accessed on the app, show which stores have the majority of their list items. Inventory is updated in near real time.
• Offline content: Users can access content, even when they don’t have a connection, ensuring convenience and usability.
• Third-party app integrations: Native GPS integration enables users to easily obtain directions to store locations from their preferred navigation app. When ecommerce eventually becomes a feature, payment app integrations will allow easy checkout.

The partnership advantage

The mobile app was built on the strength of TELUS Digital's partnership with OHLQ, which offered a number of advantages, including:

Single source of truth in digital strategy

The use of a single TELUS Digital team, already engaged for OHLQ.com, ensured a cohesive, creative and omnichannel strategy across all digital channels (app, web, email, social). This approach guaranteed brand consistency and a seamless customer experience.

Streamlined client operations

Managing both the app and other channels with one experienced team simplified the design, approval and creative processes for the client. This ensured a connection between all channels without adding extra burden or coordination complexity to the client’s workload.

Accelerated time-to-market We leveraged our existing knowledge of OHLQ’s architecture (specifically the Optimizely CMS and back-end/CRM integrations) to rapidly build and deploy the native app.

The flagship OHLQ mobile app and its impact at launch

The OHLQ mobile app was launched well ahead of the crucial October-December retail period, and its true test arrived on Single Barrel Saturday, OHLQ's largest annual release, which historically generates the heaviest digital traffic. The result was immediate and record-breaking: The app helped generate over $6.65M in a single day, a 27.5% increase in sell-through on the day of the event compared to prior years.

Conversion and revenue efficiency

The OHLQ app's performance during Single Barrel Saturday served as a definitive proof point of the platform's efficiency, resilience and revenue-maximizing capability. The app successfully coordinated personalized access to over 130 rare barrels across hundreds of statewide locations.

The platform maximized revenue yield from available stock through efficient digital distribution. OHLQ realized a near-perfect sell-through rate, achieving 99.97% of the previous year’s bottle sales despite an 8% reduction in purchased inventory.

App resilience and stability

The technical architecture was validated under extreme load conditions during peak retail activity. The strategic architectural decision to offload high-traffic, personalized actions to the secure native app ensured critical platform stability.

Sustained engagement and cross-sell discovery

The streamlined UX/UI and powerful recommendation engine drove sustained engagement and organic discovery of existing inventory. This has continued through regular, recurring usage. Users browse new inventory weekly at their set locations, creating consistent engagement spikes for OHLQ exclusive bottle drops.

The evolving OHLQ experience

OHLQ now has a new, effective way to measure purchase intent in the absence of ecommerce, and Ohioans are embracing the streamlined digital experience. Specifically, shopping list functionality is playing a significant role in user retention, acting as a direct measure of purchase intent. With its robust features, the app is rapidly becoming the essential tool for Ohioans to engage with spirits brands.

Customers can now:

• Find and browse more than 5,000 liquor products and check availability on the go.
• Receive early notifications about special releases, exclusives and bottle lotteries.
• Create, manage and share personalized lists of products from their OHLQ account.

Exceptional app store download metrics (48K and counting), conversion stats of up to 86%, 93% engagement rate and high customer satisfaction — evidenced by “High Likelihood to Recommend the App” survey results — confirm the positive impact on the overall customer experience.

TELUS Digital crafted a product that maximized conversion on high-value products while delivering a customer-centric experience designed for long-term growth and sustained engagement.