American supermarket chain

achieves 3%

incremental sales with personalized marketing

logo

Present in Eastern United States, since

1930

“Our partnership with Manthan and use of their customer analytics solution to power our digital engagement and personalization platform, has helped us deliver the kind of contextualized digital experiences and interactions that consumers are expecting from their brands of choice. And most importantly, we’re seeing these efforts translate into incremental sales and profits for our retail clients. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.”

- Randy Crimmins,

Chief Strategy Officer at Relationshop

ABOUT THE CLIENT

The client is one of the largest privately-owned retail chains in New England, and has been in operation since 1930s. Headquartered in Massachusetts, it is listed in Forbes Top 500 private brands and specializes in grocery, fresh foods, pharmacy and other prepared foods.

BUSINESS PROBLEMS

  • Poor customer engagement and low conversions from marketing campaigns
  • Multiple channels were deployed, however, there was no integration among digital systems and communications were the same for all customers
  • Low digital penetration on e-commerce and mobile app channels, customers did not find the messages and offers unappealing

SHIFT TO DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING TO INCREASE CUSTOMER SHARE OF WALLET

Supermarkets have three levers to increase share of wallet from existing customers – acquire them into new categories, reward them with incentives, and retain them on at-risk categories.

ACQUIRE

Introduce existing customers to new categories they currently don’t buy from you

REWARD

Provide relevant incentives to engage, increase their purchase frequency and upsell

RETAIN

Win back customers who discontinued buying certain categories, or reduced frequency of purchase from you

Manthan, along with their specialist partner Relationshop, deployed a Customer Data Platform at the retailer to create a unified view of the customer across online and offline channels. This view was used to generate insights, understand customer journeys, identify products of interest and utilize propensity models to gauge likelihood to respond, buy, churn, etc. Armed with this information, the retailer adopted a personalized marketing approach that was curated to each customer’s preferences, transactional behavior, lifecycle stage, and promotional activity. The recommendation engine was crucial to enable this, and business could easily set rules such as:

  • Only pick offers that are active in customer’s home stores
  • Offer deep discounts for acquisition targets, lower discounts for ‘reward’ category
  • Only recommend products on offer

MORE THAN ‘PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT THIS ALSO BOUGHT’

Recommendations are often based on products - If an individual buys X, he is also likely to buy Y. While this is a good start, there is a need to be more relevant to customers, taking their preferences into account.

With targeted communications, personalized recommendations, and offers across all channels, including their web and mobile app platform—the retailer saw a 100 percent increase in digital account growth, 4X increase in mobile app usage, and millions of dollars in incremental margin contribution.