EXCLUSIVE: How Brookshire Brothers Is Streamlining Its E-Commerce Experience
For Brookshire Brothers, getting the most out of its e-commerce platform and making sure it aligns with its overall business strategy and goals has been paramount. The Texas-based regional grocery chain partnered with eGrowcery in January 2024 to adopt the e-commerce software company’s white-label solution, and Brookshire Brothers Director of Marketing Corry Lankford spoke with Progressive Grocer about the impactful transition.
Progressive Grocer: What motivated your decision to adopt a new e-commerce platform?
Corry Lankford: Our decision was based on talking about the value message of Brookshire Brothers. What we're doing in-store needs to match up with what's happening on the e-commerce platform, so our ability to be able to show complex promotions online to mimic what you're already doing in-store was very, very important for us. That value message in-store did not align with what we had on our e-commerce platform.
When we adopted our new e-commerce [platform] with eGrowcery, we were able to show those complex promotions to the consumer, and therefore it almost created a gamification, per se, of how a customer could advance toward buying one extra item to get this deal, and for us to be able to net down to another sale.
So for us, that was one of the major considerations – matching that in-store experience that we're known for, and have been since 1921, and really making sure that that in-store experience matched up with the e-commerce experience on the value message side.
PG: How else does this platform align with your overall business strategy and goals?
CL: It provides us a way in which we can speak to our customers via text and email, because that's very important for us. We never wanted a platform that was built solely around convenience, because convenience means different things to different people.
I think that sometimes convenience is exactly what it sounds like: Get it to me as quickly as you can. For us, it's also being able to communicate with the consumer whenever we say, “Hey, we are out of Prego, and since we're out of Prego, would you rather have Ragu?” Those are the kinds of questions that we're asking in the shopping experience versus it being a surprise. We've always lived on no surprises within our e-commerce platform, and eGrowcery still gives us that back-and-forth capability, which really aligns heavily with our strategy.
A lot of grocers are getting into the e-commerce space, and have been for a while now, but the big differentiator for us is the customer service side. We have to be able to do that well, and our ability to be able to communicate with the customer at all stages of the order cycle is very important to us. It goes back to what value is. It’s not just about price, it’s the value of the overall shopping experience.
PG: How has the new e-commerce platform improved the overall customer experience?
CL: It's, again, back to that value message. Being able to show the customers what it is that they're getting up front. With our old platform, inevitably you would get the same deals and discounts because of the fact that it would run through our POS, but there's just more visibility to what's going on inside the eGrowcery platform now.
You're able to see it. You're able to know what's going on. Being able to use your digital coupons and see that those are coming off on the front end of your order versus waiting to see those come off on the back end.
PG: How does the platform personalize the shopping experience for customers?
CL: Being able to go back and look at your order history and things that you've marked as your favorites is a really big deal. A lot of platforms have that, but it's being able to seamlessly get to those items and see them within your shopping experience.
Additionally, it’s the digital coupons. If you're a coupon shopper, being able to easily go and see what digital coupons are available to you [is important]. Those two things are really, really big for a consumer because of the fact that they see them right there within the shopping experience. So I think that's a very big deal for us, for them to be able to see that.
PG: How has the e-commerce platform improved employee productivity across your operations?
CL: I think it's more that we don’t have to rely on third-party integrations to be able to text and to be able to communicate with the consumer. The other piece is logistical things like printing order tags. The eGrowcery platform has the ability to print those without third-party software, so instead of having to fill them out manually by hand, those order tags print. So it's helped us to ensure that the right customer gets the right number of bags and just that's a much easier process now.
PG: How has the system integration been with your existing infrastructure?
CL: It was very seamless. We spun up the platform very quickly. Day one was pretty seamless – as seamless as an integration can be of this magnitude. We were very thankful for that, and it was received well by customers and employees. Especially on the employee side, when you start taking away processes versus adding processes, it always makes the transition much easier.
PG: How are you using the data from the new e-commerce platform to drive decision-making?
CL: One of the ways we're using and leveraging data has been with lapsed customers. There's customers that have lapsed and have not placed an order in an X amount of time. Leveraging the data inside of the platform, we can pull lists based on a certain set of criteria and then be able to use that to feed those people a text message that says, “Hey, we realize you haven't shopped here in X number of months. Here's a promo code to get you back involved in e-commerce.”
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We also use a very similar process in getting customers engaged. I think that the magic number is three to five. If you can get somebody to place three to five e-commerce orders, then you're more likely to keep them long term, so being able to communicate with the consumer by using the reports is important. We run that weekly on who our customers are that have placed their first orders and are communicating with those customers and making sure that those lines of communication are open.
Some of the data that we're pulling from the e-commerce platform has been very influential in the way we go to market and the way that we try to make sure we continue to keep customers engaged in the e-commerce platform, or if they're lapsed, to get them re-engaged in the platform.
PG: How do you foresee the platform evolving to meet future customer and business needs?
CL: The biggest thing for me is personalization – and it's really and truly making sure that personalization is a part of the experience. That in-store experience matching up with what you're seeing on e-commerce is super important, and personalization is definitely part of that.
The other piece is for other business types and other business ventures like our coffee shops, and modifying the eGrowcery platform to meet those needs as well. [It creates a] unified experience for a shopper of your coffee shop and your grocery and your pharmacy, and saying “How can we make and merge these experiences just like we do in-store?”
You can walk the store and you can go to all these different departments to make sure that this is mirrored up as closely as possible in the e-commerce platform.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
