Supermarket Bags 4.2 Million Loyal Customers

Client’s Marketing Challenges

The client is a large regional grocery store chain with over 300 locations – a subsidiary of a larger multinational 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.

The Bottom Line

The client’s 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 the 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.

Money Mailer’s Approach

Money Mailer unique approach to one-to-one marketing at the retail level helped win the business over several large nartional direct marketing companies. The client wanted a direct mail communication program that would speak to each customer household with individual offers and rewards as well as identifying co-op with other services and products.

Our Advertising Solution

Money Mailer 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 of 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 signups averages over 50,000 enrollees per week as the database would eventually reach 4.2 milion 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 Real Bottom Line

The focus on one-to-one customer communications made this one of the most successful card launches in the grocery industry. Our relationship continues with this grocer and its agency for 5 years until the program was configured to be 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 other integrated mdeia spends by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

50,000 enrollees per week netted 4.2 million loyalty customers.