“Good marketing allows our customers to create better service experiences and customer experiences for their customers,” says Seed’s Marketing Strategy Director Jesse Sandqvist.

This viewpoint was confirmed in a pilot that Seed Media conducted in autumn 2015 with Finnish grocery chain K-citymarket and its customer loyalty program K-Plussa.

“In the retail sector, the customer experience is naturally created in the shops to a large extent,” Sandqvist says. “We decided to test the impact of targeted mobile marketing messages based on location data at the K-citymarket in Turku’s Kupittaa district.”

K-citymarket customers identified from K-Plussa customer data were sent a message announcing the opportunity to participate in the development of a new mobile service. The 100 people who replied fastest were included in the focus group. In addition to being quick to reply, the focus group members had to give their consent to having their mobile devices identified in the supermarket.

When entering the supermarket, the members were sent a special product offer or other customer benefit to their phones once a week. As the pilot went on, the offers became more targeted toward each customer’s buying behavior.

“The results were very positive,” Sandqvist says. “The focus group members shopped at the supermarket more frequently and their visits were longer. Their average shopping basket value increased by 14 percent. The customers were also happy with the service. Their only complaint was that they only received one promotional message per week.”

Benefits to retailers and consumers

Analyzing consumer behavior and sending targeted offers is a matter of routine in online retail. Seed Digital Media brings tools from the realm of digital marketing to brick-and-mortar stores.

The pilot combined all of Seed’s core competencies: customer identification, digital in-store marketing, and the targeting of messages based on marketing automation. The most significant innovation in this approach is the ability to identify the customer as they enter the store, and responding appropriately. Traditionally, stores only identify customers at the checkout, and marketing messages are sent afterwards.

“When you want to have an effective impact on consumers’ buying behavior, it isn’t enough to send the right message via the right channel at the right time; you also need to send the message to the right place,” Sandqvist says. “Our pilot showed that the right place could be the foyer of the shop. The results would probably be quite different if we had sent the special offers and promotional messages at random times, when the consumer is sitting on the sofa at home.”

Appropriately targeted customer marketing benefits both retailers and consumers. Retailers increase their sales, while consumers benefit from targeted offers.

“The feedback we’ve received has been 100 percent positive, and we’ll continue to develop the service further,” Sandqvist says.

Text: Paula Häkämies, student (communication)