Even though eGrocery is growing in popularity, 97% of groceries are still purchased in-store.
Still, digital channels allow consumers to research and gather information during the pre-shopping and planning stages. They also offer tremendous opportunities for grocery retailers to attract customers and increase loyalty.
To get the most out of these digital channels, grocery retailers need to become aware of customers’ expectations as they interact with brands.
Consumers are looking for relevance and personalization everywhere. They don’t have the patience for one-size-fits-all messages that don’t speak to their needs or their relationship with the brand.
The trends that are driving the grocery industry, which include the convergence of online and offline channels, the increase use of social media to connect with customers, the focus on customer experience over price, the empowerment of frontline employees, and the increasing availability of big data — all point to the need for providing a highly-personalized shopping experience.
Grocery retail chains, such as Walmart and Albertson, have been implementing personalization strategies to successfully generate growth and revenue.
In order to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to implement a hyper-personalization strategy that delivers personalized content and offers to your customers as part of a omnichannel marketing strategy.
Single Customer View – The Foundation of Omnichannel Marketing
Many grocery chains already have loyalty programs which allow them to collect a large amount of customer data.
The challenge is to integrate this information with other customer data collected from other channels and compile it all into a 360° customer profile that will allow retailers to deliver targeted messaging and relevant offers.
With this single customer view, technologies, such as machine learning, can be further utilized to analyze the data and apply the insights to inform marketing strategies.
Hyper-Personalization Will Drive Grocery Retailing
Grocery retailers can augment the power of single customer view with hyper-personalization.
Hyper-personalization refers to the use of data to serve up customized content, products, or promotions based on the preferences and shopping behaviors of individual customers. It helps grocery retailers deliver the right message or offers to their customers in the right place, and at the right time.
With hyper-personalization, you can deliver a seamless shopping experience–whether a customer is shopping online or in-store, looking for a particular list of items or hunting for deals–to increase the relevance and timeliness of your marketing message and promotions.
How Grocery Retailers Can Use Hyper-Personalization
Grocery retailers can now use omnichannel marketing software to tap into the power of hyper-personalization.
Here’s how to get the most out of your customer data:
1. Create Nimble Personalized Campaigns Backed By Analytics
Replace large-scale, one-size-fits-all marketing campaigns with more frequent small-scale ones to deliver a personal touch. You can analyze customer data to optimize the timing of the messages, offers, and product recommendations for each customer segment.
2. Leverage Real-Time Data
Shorter campaigns allow retailers to react faster to real-time information gathered from customers’ responses to the content and promotions.
By using omnichannel marketing software to gather customer information in real-time, you can personalize customers’ experiences to involve multiple platforms and digital channels. For example, you can use customers’ real-time location and response to pricing to determine the best promotion and offer.
3. Target Advertising Message And Track Results
With the help of omnichannel marketing and personalization software, we may be able to retire the famous saying by John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
You can now tailor marketing messages to mirror the key elements in the acquisition funnel and create advertising messages that speak to individual customers to move them toward purchasing.
In turn, the effectiveness of these offers and messages can be measured so you can determine what’s working for your audience and make improvements to increase sales for your grocery business and increase ROI.
To fully utilize your customer data and deliver a hyper-personalized customer experience, you need an omnichannel marketing software that brings all the pieces together in one centralized location.
Doing so will help you design a 360-degree customer experience and meet customer expectation so you can tap into the opportunity offered by digital channels to collect and collate relevant data, enhance customer relationships, and increase sales.