3 E-Commerce Strategies Grocery Retailers Can’t Live Without
If the last few years have taught the grocery industry anything, it's that e-commerce is no longer just the way of the future.
That’s because winning with digital has quickly become a necessity as grocers adapt to a world changed by COVID-19. The pandemic served as a major catalyst for grocers, with a majority of them experiencing the equivalent of more than five years of growth in just five months in 2021.
And while the boom of online grocery shopping appears to be reaching a plateau, there’s no going back for online grocery shoppers. Online grocery is now a $32.7 billion industry, online traffic and average order values (AOV) are rising year over year, and consumers are more likely than ever to shop online for groceries.
Statistics like that are why Bloomreach offers a suite of products that drive true personalization and growth. Our technology empowers brands to unify their most critical sources of data — product and consumer — and use those insights to power personalized customer journeys that span every digital channel.
Here are three of the most important strategies that online grocers can use to offer incredible customer journeys.
1. Improve Basket Size and Speed With Semantic Search
While in-store grocery shopping often starts with preparing a list and combing the aisles for products, the online shopping experience starts with search. In fact, nearly 42% of online shoppers begin their shopping journey at the search bar.
That’s why it is vital to tailor your customers’ search results to make sure you’re serving them the right products at the right time — which is exactly what Bloomreach Discovery delivers.
When Albertsons realized that half of its e-commerce revenue stemmed from search, the company decided to leverage the Semantic Search capability of Bloomreach Discovery to deliver more accurate and optimized results for customers.
Our powerful product search incorporates natural language processing, advanced attribute extraction, and past visitor behavior to surface the most relevant products for visitors and improve conversions. It’s designed to help shoppers find exactly what they need as quickly as possible.
With Bloomreach Discovery, Albertsons saw an increase in basket-building speeds of over 25%. With our algorithms powering product search and recommendations, Albertsons better serves customers at a faster pace, enabling higher-value carts and more conversions.
Curious about all the ways that Albertsons personalized its customer experience with Bloomreach? Read our case study to learn more.
2. Enrich Product Discovery With Store-Specific Ranking
One of the biggest challenges for modern grocery businesses is finding a way to balance the universal experience of visiting a website with the localized experience of shopping at a store.
With products, categories, and even customer preferences that vary by store, state, and region, how can grocery businesses offer a familiar brand experience while keeping the customer journey as local as it needs to be?
That’s where Bloomreach Discovery’s store-specific ranking plays a pivotal role. With merchandising capabilities that allow you to cater to shoppers on a local and hyper-personalized level, you can make sure your customers don’t fall through the cracks of your customer journey.
Bloomreach Discovery allows Total Wine & More’s merchandisers to carry out different search strategies based on regional markets, including store-specific ranking. The alcohol retailer’s merchandising team can deploy specific strategies based on product and market those products to different regions of the country. This is vital for an industry like grocery where store-specific relevance is inseparable from a customer’s online experience.
With our AI-powered Discovery engine, Total Wine & More can serve results that are automatically personalized and re-ranked based on the most important factors — like the state you live in, the neighborhood you shop in, your income, and more.
Interested in learning about all the revenue-driving ways that Bloomreach empowers Total Wine & More? Watch our on-demand webinar.
3. Personalize Email Campaigns to Power Experiences That Covert
When it comes to getting the most out of your marketing efforts, email is king of the marketing channels. No matter the industry or audience, it’s the most lucrative way to reach your customers.
But getting more clicks, conversions, and revenue from email isn’t as easy as it sounds. You need to personalize your email campaigns to truly connect with your target audience.
With Bloomreach Engagement, our real-time customer data platform (CDP) combined with intelligent marketing automation, you can easily build an email marketing program with advanced targeting and AI-powered personalization without sacrificing deliverability and ease of use.
BrewDog, a Bloomreach customer and an award-winning Scottish craft beer company, chose Bloomreach Engagement to help them reach more inboxes and convert more customers. The company took a group of 80,000 customers and split it down the middle for an A/B tested email campaign. Half of the audience received a non-personalized version of an email while the other half received a version optimized with their personalized data.
As expected, personalized data made all the difference. The customers who received personalized emails clicked through 15.6% more of the time, had a 11.5% higher conversion rate, and generated 13.8% more revenue compared to the 40,000 customers who all received the same non-personalized email.
Want to learn more about BrewDog’s personalized email campaigns? Check out our case study.
Power Your Online Grocery Experience With Bloomreach
Streamlining repeat purchases, targeting localized search queries, and optimizing email campaigns are all pieces of the same puzzle — a personalized customer experience. And to craft a strategy that revolves around your shopper, you need the right tools to power every touchpoint of their unique journey.
That’s why businesses turn to Bloomreach to create transformative commerce experiences. Our technology empowers brands to deliver personalized experiences across all their digital channels. By combining the power of unified customer and product data with the speed and scale of AI optimization, Bloomreach ensures the right product is put in front of the right customer — every time.
Ready to see what your business can achieve with Bloomreach? Schedule a personalized demo today and let’s get started.