Engagement is the holy grail of marketers, and in today’s world of hyper-customization, engagement is about making sure you hit three targets: the right content, to the right audience, and at the right time. But that’s easier said than done when your customers are omnichannel and you need to scale your operations to meet them where they want. Creating precise, personalized campaigns can take a lot of time and resources. How can you scale? Is it really worth it? 

Over a six-month period, we compared the shoppers who received personalized offers to a similar group of shoppers who were not part of the program. The results blew our minds – the revenue for shoppers who were part of the personalization program was 8% higher than for the other customers. In fact, we found that shoppers spent between $2-4 more on every dollar that the company spent on personalization. That’s an indisputable return on investment. 

So how did they do it? We crunched the data and put together three key takeaways to help you build your own successful personalization campaigns.

Takeaway 1: More about the customer, less about the discount

Personalization flips traditional marketing strategy on its head. Instead of starting with a discount and shouting it out wherever you can, in a strong personalization campaign, you start by thinking about the customer. Ask yourself what offers can you create to grow that specific customer’s engagement. Where is the best place to target your customers – in a mobile app, online, in-store, and when?

Don’t bombard your customers with generic offers – that might be counterproductive. Instead, dive into your data to focus on where your offers will have an impact, look at sales performance across competitive offers, and tailor your campaign to your objectives.

When running personalization at scale, make sure you leverage automation and AI to create audiences. This will enable you to put together a bank of offers and match specific offers to specific customers aiming at a variety of objectives – retention, cross-sell, upsell, win-back.  

Using the granular customer science and insights on sales and categories performance on the NIQ ACtivate platform, the teams were able to tailor each offering to the right customer, and on the right channels. And it showed. 

Takeaway 2: Increasing brand collaboration

Personalization usually isn’t a one-company show – retailers and brands have to be aligned in order to launch the right offer at the right time to the right customer. By sharing insights about the customer behavior and preferences with partners enabled them to better see the opportunities of personalization campaigns, resulting in encouraging suppliers to increase their investments in supplier-funded coupons. In turn, they launched campaigns that worked for everyone. 

Give brands access to insights on customers’ behaviors and preferences and have them involved early on, in the personalization process. This enables them to take an active part in the definition and measurements phase, and it enables grocers to grow their revenue, while still maintaining control of the entire process.

Takeaway 3: A proactive tool against churn

Engagements that matter are not measured only in the increase in turnover and basket size. It’s also about retention and giving customers the type of experience that keeps them coming back again and again. 

As a large grocer, our customer’s challenge was to give their shoppers the warm and personal experience of a Mom-and-Pop shop and create the same type of loyalty that customers show to smaller grocery shops. Using NIQ Activate’s AI platform and real-time personalization capabilities, they were able to deliver campaigns that mattered to their customers, offering them added value through personalized circulars, unique coupons, and smart shopping lists to remind them what they might need to buy and when.  

Personalization performs

Successful personalization programs are about making sure you give your customers real value. That means being proactive, understanding their preferences, and optimizing their shopping experience, at scale. 

If you want to learn more about how this grocer managed to scale its personalization efforts, share insights with their brands and create engagements that matter for their customers and its business, make sure to download the full case study.