enrollees per week
Supermarket Bags 4.2 Million Loyal Customers
The Challenge
The client is a large regional grocery store chain with over 300 locations – a subsidiary of a larger multi-national grocer with over 20,000 stores around the world. In the late 1990’s they were seeking a direct marketing partner to help launch a customer loyalty program in conjunction with a major re-branding campaign developed by their advertising agency.
Our Solution
We helped coordinate the launch of the loyalty program by first enrolling all 17,000 grocery store employees into the program. It gave the client 90 days to test all of the applicable logistic processes before rolling out the same program to the general public.
Near the end of the 90 day period all the calculations were made about spending levels of each employee. When the program went live – backed by a full media push and strong word of mouth of all participating employees – customer sign-ups averaged over 50,000 enrollees per week as the database would eventually reach 4.2 million card carrying loyalty customers.
Over the course of 5 years we helped to successfully execute a wide variety of reward programs based on:
- Special events/holidays – give loyal customers first look at special promotions.
- Co-op opportunities – match customer lifestyle preferences with complementary goods/services like discounted cruises, golf vacations, jewelers, etc.
- Competitive blunting – time the delivery of additional rewards around competitor’s openings.
The Results Were Amazing
50,000 enrollees per week netted 4.2 million loyalty customers.
EXISTING SITUATION
The clients goal was to develop and grow a core group of primary and secondary customers that would provide more revenue and bottom line growth to the grocer. This grocer was looking to move out of EDLP (everyday low price) approach to a more upscale, customer centric strategy. By focusing its rewards on top spending individual customers, they hoped to influence a higher level of loyalty which in turn would lead to greater profitability within the chain.
THE APPROACH
Money Mailer’s unique approach to one-to-one marketing at the retail level helped win the business over several large national direct mail communication program that would speak to each customer household with individual offer and rewards as well as identifying co-op with other services and products.
THE RESULTS
The focus on the one-to-one customer communications make this one of the most successful card launches in the grocery industry. Our relationship continued with this grocer and its agency for 5 years until the program was configured to the handled internally by the grocer themselves. During our tenure, the grocer was able to successfully leverage growth and profitability by:
- Growing the higher margin categories by knowing where and who to reward.
- Learning which categories and products were important to primary customers.
- Creating custom trade areas and subsequent targeting helped reduce their integrated media spends by hundreds of thousands of dollars.