shopper customer at checkout

The grocery landscape is a highly competitive one - that’s a given. It’s also a given that supermarkets are using all tools at their disposal to attract and retain more shoppers. One of those tools is the loyalty scheme.

The data generated by shoppers signed up to a loyalty scheme can inform decision making and improve the customer experience. According to a survey by YouGov, 65% of the UK adult population belongs to a supermarket loyalty scheme. But what about the 35% of shoppers who don’t, or who don’t use their loyalty card regularly? There is tremendous potential in this segment.

Grocers can take advantage of this opportunity by using their point of sale systems. For loyalty customers, the PoS is a new marketing channel for grocers to use, gathering data about customers and returning offers based on that information before the customer leaves the till. For customers who don’t belong to a scheme, this gets a little trickier, but it can still be done.

With the right technology installed at the PoS, non-loyalty shoppers can be sent on a promotions journey to show them the benefit of belonging to a loyalty scheme, and ultimately persuade them to sign up.

Using anonymised data that is linked in the back end to a specific series of coupons, customers can be given a number of targeted offers over time. This can include offers based on what’s in the basket, promotions on new or complementary products or discounts on historically purchased products.

For example, if the first offer in the journey is a discount on a product in the basket, once it is redeemed at the PoS that data is used to generate the next offer. The technology processes the data gathered in real time (spend, basket contents and frequency of shop) to generate more relevant offers for the customer. The final offer could be a call to action to join the grocer’s loyalty scheme.

There’s no doubt that data plays a huge role in retail, but its value isn’t confined to loyalty schemes. There is tremendous opportunity out there for grocers when it comes to non-loyalty shoppers - all that’s needed is the right technology.

Andy Watts is VP sales & marketing at Ecrebo

Topics