New Zealand Marketing magazine

Nexus Supreme Winner

Affinity ID and Progressive Enterprises get personal with Onecard mySpecials

It’s rare for one campaign to win four Nexus Golds and two Nexus Silvers. But the Onecard mySpecials entry from Affinity ID for Progressive Enterprises did just that in 2009, making it easy to understand why it won the Nexus Supreme.

The Onecard mySpecials scheme marks the first time any New Zealand retailer has been able to apply data-driven marketing principles to promote its full range of weekly specials to individual customers. And it represents the culmination of careful planning and strategy development by Progressive Enterprises to cost-effectively deliver an ongoing direct communication programme focused on providing individual Onecard cardholders with highly personalised interactions that support its brand development and customer engagement strategy.

The programme involved the promotion of a much wider range of weekly specials than traditional print catalogues, and it focused these specials on each customer by analysing their individual purchasing history to prioritise relevant products and deliver them to their inbox.

To each, their own

The programme optimises the matching of what is on sale and offers it to the right customer at the right time. This moves beyond the production of static print catalogues to highly personalised communications that are seamlessly integrated across both email and web. Customers receive communications that recommend relevant products—and at a discounted price. And, for Progressive Enterprises, a new environment has been created, with increased business efficiency, sales and customer engagement.

The programme communicates over 25 times more products than traditional print catalogues, but ensures each customer only gets a small list of product offers uniquely relevant to them

This has been achieved through highly innovative development, integration and automation of data mining, email and web marketing. And it has increased sales and store visitation from customers involved in the programme, achieved high levels of customer engagement and delivered an efficient production system that publishes highly personalised weekly content.

Getting personal

Central to the strategy is the promotion of a broad range of supermarket specials that are unique to each customer and easily digestible. And the only cost-effective way to achieve this was through digital media. The programme communicates over 25 times more products than traditional print catalogues, but ensures each customer only gets a small list of relevant product offers. Furthermore, the programme promotes individual product savings (which is all traditional print catalogues can do) and identifies and promotes the cost of a total shopping list (basket) and the total savings a customer can make.

Dancing with data

Achieving weekly delivery of these personalised top 10 product lists requires intensive processing of massively large data sets that contained 26 weeks of transactional history. Data from five different sources (customer contact data, purchasing data, pricing data, product data— images and descriptors—and communication content history) is managed and integrated with a high degree of automation to support efficient production of outputs within a short production window. Maintaining pricing integrity and controlling integration with Progressive Enterprise’s internal systems was also a requirement.

Uniquely identifying the relevant products for each customer and then producing the communications within 12-24 hours of receiving final pricing data represented a significant production challenge. Over 3.8 million customer-to-store-to-product recommendations are produced for over 180,000 customers and, added to that, a custom font system that uses actual product packaging was developed to creatively highlight personalisation.

Hero worship

Selection of products for “hero-ing” (relevancy) was achieved by scoring each product uniquely for each customer based on their shopping patterns at product and sub-category levels over a 26 week period. This was then adjusted by using a weighting algorithm that further prioritised products based on the volume of discount and then filtered this against customers’ previously received content. The result is a prioritised set of products (recommendations) that are unique to each customer and allow cross-selling suggestions to be presented to that customer based on sub-categories that are evident in their shopping history. And full tracking of individual offers (products and prices) provides the ability to directly model relationships between communication exposure and sales outcomes.

VIP lists

While promotion through email focused on a small, highly relevant set of products, multiple search methods were made available on the web to enable customers to create, manage, print and save totally customised shopping lists that drew on the full range of products on promotion. These shopping lists were central to the approach and strategy. Progressive Enterprises wanted customers to add products to their list and then print for use in-store. To provide a good user experience on the website, multi-search options were included for customers to find products. Once found and selected, these products are automatically added to this shopping list from wherever the customer is on the website. Notes or information relevant to the product selected can be added by the customer from the product detail pop-up and are also automatically added to the customer’s shopping list. These lists can be saved for future use and are remembered by the site, with the list, in both email and on web, automatically calculating total spend and savings amounts for each customer.

The search

Recognising that individuals search for information in different ways, the programme employed four key search options. Firstly, a simple browse feature, augmented by a second search feature that uses filtering via free-text data entry in the search box. The website automatically recognises keywords and uses these to filter across all product categories.

More advanced search features recognise important keywords as the customer types the product name. Once recognised, a hyperlinked pop-up becomes available and provides a short list of products available for selection. The final search feature, ‘quicklist’, can easily find and display all products for a store from a single page. This interface can be customised uniquely by each customer (controlling category display, section minimisation and maximisation, colour coding and naming, moving and repositioning sections on the page) and while all products are displayed on the quicklist, specials can also be readily identified by the inclusion of underlined hyperlinks, which, when clicked on, generate a small popup for those products.

Customised custom

With product relevancy a key communication driver, smart templates with self-healing functionality (selecting and displaying relevant products) were developed to address some specific communications requirements. This template involved checking ‘on the fly’ data completeness so that if a highly prioritised product could not be displayed (for example, if it lacked a product image) it would select the next most highly ranked product and adjust product display settings automatically. This included maintaining product display integrity across both email and web.

Customers can also change the store for which they are viewing products. And when this happens, all pricing information (store name, dates, sale price amount, save amount, list total and list savings) is automatically updated.

The system was designed with a high degree of automation with embedded quality assurance reports automatically produced to ensure data, and especially pricing, integrity throughout the process.

By September 2009, customer engagement was outstanding, with an open rate of 52.2 percent and a click through rate of 30.5 percent. In addition, 78.6 percent of customers who opened the email were converted to sale (compared to conversion to sale of approximately 45 percent for unpersonalised and untargeted emails) and incremental sales targets were achieved.