According to consumer Insights gathered by emnos, shoppers aren’t just looking for useful grocery coupons, they want relevant grocery marketing solutions in the form of suggestions and tips that will simplify their lives, save on time, and provide them with pertinent information around food and wellness.

Of customers surveyed, 64% said they would like to receive more content from their grocers, and 83% feel their retailers are not providing sufficient information and resources to help them meet their lifestyle goals. In other words, consumers are telling us the marketing they are receiving isn’t personalized and relevant enough to meet their individual needs. Shoppers today expect you to know more about them than you actually do.

Marketers have heard for years that in order to be truly relevant and personalized in their marketing, they need to deliver the right message, at the right place, at the right time, through the right channels. But what does “relevant” really mean? How would you know you are relevant enough, in your messages and incentives, to get the most out of your marketing programs and campaigns? We set out to examine these questions and found something interesting in the process. When we examined relevance, we found four elements that refine the definition in important ways.

We concluded that when marketers optimize each relevance element they get the best outcomes from their programs and incentives.

Getting Your Data Right

To truly create relevant offers and incentives, customer data and insights are required – but according to a study by Experian one of the biggest challenges marketers are having is gaining insights quickly enough (40%), followed by having enough data (39%), and having inaccurate data altogether (38%).

Needless to say, to do this well requires a detailed customer data record. It requires the ability to analyze aggregated customer history for market and individual level insights that identify effective messages and promotions. But the more we started working on this, we discovered something surprising. The information we really need in this customer record, doesn’t come from the proverbial “big data” repositories you might have or acquire. This isn’t necessarily a “big data” play. It’s really about getting your “small data” right.

We found that, at a minimum, there are two critical data elements you will need to succeed. Customer basket-level purchase details, and redemption data. The good news: you should already have this data in your systems. But unless you’re paying big money for a data aggregator, it probably doesn’t exist in a clean, aggregated, accessible repository. Or perhaps not in a timely enough manner to gain the insights required to meet rapidly moving market situations.

And, unless you have an analytics team that is focused on generating insights that are appropriate for specific markets, regions or locations, you will continue to be limited in your ability to make tactical decisions of how to design and execute customer-relevant campaigns and offers. You simply won’t know how to optimize timeframes and channels to increase customer frequency and spending results. What’s more is that this information is required to intelligently affect the best marketing decisions, allocate dollars, and attribute business results properly. This is true at every level of your system; local, region, and national.

The Future of Personalized Customer Engagement

Point-of-sale basket-level data is the strongest entry point into deeper insight about customer purchase behavior. Combining offer redemption data allows attribution to specific campaigns, results and, ultimately, ROI. Having this information leads to better decisions about offers, timing, channels, and messages. Without the insight this data provides, gut decisions will prevail. Generic, low customer-value and non-differentiated offers might have moved the dial in the past – but the future is clearly dependent on a more refined customer experience by optimizing the key drivers of relevant incentives, localized for market and store context, and delivered through well targeted channels. Messages that capture customer attention will motivate the desired behavior.

How are these deep customer insights obtained in your organization? And what is the most effective way you’ve found to use them in your marketing to deliver relevant offers, tips, product and nutritional information and wellness advice? We’d love to hear about your experiences in the comment section below.

Starting Your Personalization Journey

If you haven’t yet started, but share in this data-driven personalized marketing vision for your restaurant, retail, convenience store, or grocery organization, and don’t know where to begin, feel free to reach out and connect with us to learn more.