Leading lemon tea brand Taning partners with Yunxi Shuying to drive data-powered growth.

Taning Lemon Tea: A Digital Transformation Success Story

Background

Taning is a lemon tea brand that started in Guangzhou. In just three years, it has grown to over 380 company-owned and franchised stores with a survival rate of more than 90%. From the beginning, Taning invested heavily in building a strong supply chain. The brand began testing digital tools to support its growth as digital transformation trends emerged. While these efforts helped, Taning—like many new tea brands—soon faced growth challenges that required a more advanced digital strategy.

Business Challenges

Taning’s digital transformation hurdles included:

Separate sales channels – online/offline, WeChat, Alipay, own stores, and third-party platforms weren’t connected.

Basic customer loyalty programs – no strong system for membership levels, rewards, or repeat purchases.

Poor use of data – customer and sales data were scattered and incomplete. Marketing and financial data weren’t accurate.

Inefficient operations – slow store opening process, heavy reliance on manual work, and poor communication between HQ and stores.

Slow tech response: IT updates took too long. Multiple external providers made it hard to integrate systems.

Solutions

1. Built a unified digital platform

Taning integrated all its separate systems—including membership and sales data—into one central platform. This helped turn data into useful insights and created a full loop from sales to marketing to customer analysis.

2. Connected all sales channels

The brand linked its POS systems, self-run mini-programs, and third-party platforms into one multi-channel network. As platform fees kept rising, shifting traffic from public to private channels became essential. This integration helped Taning build its own customer base and strengthen brand loyalty.

3. Improved marketing with smart tools

Taning set up a complete customer loyalty system with membership tiers, user incentives, and tagging. It used automated marketing tools to run better campaigns and used data to improve strategies over time.

4. Used data to make better decisions

The company created dashboards to track key business, customer, and behavioral data. HQ could monitor franchisee performance—like sales, member activity, and voucher usage—while franchisees could see how HQ’s campaigns were boosting their growth.

Results

In 2021, Taning began working with Yunchi Tech to accelerate its digital transformation. Using Yunchi’s full-range solutions, Taning integrated front-end and back-end data into a multi-channel management platform. This improved the user experience, simplified operations, and enabled more creative marketing.

Most importantly, data began to guide business decisions—making management easier, speeding up responses, and helping Taning meet its growth goals in a new expansion phase.