Loblaw Goes Offline to Drive Sales, Customer Loyalty
Canadian retail conglomerate Loblaw Cos. Ltd. is making strides in digital media through an unlikely source – in-store print receipts. Rohit Dua, VP of loyalty portfolio management at Loblaw, and Mike Grimes, president of Ecrebo, Inc., shared how the company is making it happen at Path to Purchase Institute’s Retail Media Summit in Rosemont, Ill., last week.
In recent years, Dua explained, Loblaw has put a focus on growing its digital database and driving membership in an effort to gather more loyalty and first-party data, which essentially drives retail media. “With digitally engaged members and more members engaged in the program as a whole, you drive more retail media inventory that you can sell to customers,” he said.
Gaining a better understanding of their customers through that data also allows companies to optimize their campaigns and drive an increased return on ad spend with those customers. Through a partnership with Ecrebo that transforms paper receipts into a personalized marketing channel, Loblaw has begun doing just that.
“The receipt is essentially a mini billboard in the palm of your customer's hand,” Dua explained. “It's not just utilized to look at the totals and the itemized products that you bought on the day. It's actually a vehicle to communicate with your customers.”
While Loblaw knew it had a massive opportunity with receipt marketing, especially considering 50% of its loyalty members track their points on paper receipts and 33% of its shoppers read those receipts top to bottom, the tactic can be difficult to execute. According to Grimes, however, Ecrebo's software-only solution doesn’t require hardware or any integration with point-of-sale systems.
“We use the existing printers to make everything work with whatever the retailer has,” Grimes explained. “There is no pain at all for it. It's designed to be owned and operated by business users. So the operational pain for it goes away as well.”
The program has been so successful for Loblaw that it was rolled out to the company’s entire grocery network in just one year. That popularity, Dua said, is thanks to an easily adoptable platform for both customers and operators, as well as the ability to customize receipt messaging to nearly an individual customer level.
That extremely targeted messaging came into play for Loblaw last November when music superstar Taylor Swift brought her Eras Tour to Vancouver and Toronto. The company was able to use Ecrebo’s software to get hyperlocal with its print receipt campaign, which included an image of Taylor Swift along with an offer of 3,000 loyalty points for buying cheesecake – reportedly Swift’s favorite food.
According to Dua, that campaign saw an astonishing 10% redemption rate.
Loblaw also used print receipts to encourage its customers in Nova Scotia to buy more locally made products amid financial pressure from tariffs.
[RELATED: Loblaw Sticking to Canadian-1st Approach]
“That government launched a new campaign around buying local,” Dua said. “It was very recent to the market and they partnered with us on it, and we thought, ‘Hey, with all the patriotism that's out there right now and people really encouraged to buy Canadian or prepared in Canada, there is no better time to put this on a receipt.’”
The grocer was able to get the messaging onto its print receipts almost instantaneously as the program was rolling out, and received encouraging feedback from both its operators and shoppers. “It gives you another example of how you deepen your relationships with the customers and brands,” Dua shared. “So we're very, very thrilled with the performance and what we saw.”
At the end of the day, Loblaw’s receipt marketing capability is now one-tenth of the cost of a traditional paid campaign that it would have run in the past, if not more. For many of its new campaigns, Dua said, there is little to no cost at all since the company is simply alerting customers that they’re missing out and offering them an incentive to participate.
“To us, this is a very worthy investment just given the cost and the cost of retargeting what we spend to acquire customers on a daily basis,” Dua shared. “This is a fraction of that cost to us and a very effective tool that way.”
