Carrefour, a European grocery and convenience store chain, enhanced its loyalty program's ability to attract and serve members with a smart investment in data technology.
Objective
Carrefour set out to achieve several goals:
Context
Consumer promotions occupy much of the space in media for all players in the distribution business. They generate considerable noise and saturate channels with constant discounts throughout the year.
If you want to be relevant in this category, you must put the customer at the center of all decisions, focusing on the needs and necessities that exist within Spanish households and building relationships.
Carrefour did so by launching ''Club Carrefour'' in 2005, and for more than 10 years, the program focused on functional benefits, such as swiping the card and getting rewards. At that time, investment in technology was aimed at efficient and effective data management.
Target Audience
Carrefour's target audience was Club Carrefour's members and app users.
Digital transformation changed everything, and Club Carrefour's millions of members were now a strategic asset. The millions of transactions were a direct source of customer knowledge. Data became the most powerful asset; it opened new possibilities for retention, new customer acquisition, and identification of high-value customers to encourage recurrence and increase sales, profitability, and brand value.
Creative and Media Strategy
Carrefour used data to turn Club Carrefour into a meeting point for the brand and its consumers: a place where the advantages of belonging to the club materialized, a place where the brand could be in touch with an audience that participated in the conversation.
Data helped Carrefour know its customers well and allowed the company to adapt communications seamlessly to their behavior and interests and to personalize their experience with the brand, both at the physical point of sale and in e-commerce. The company prioritized relevancy at every touchpoint.
This richness in data allowed Carrefour to go beyond the functional advantages of belonging to Club Carrefour to create a bespoke space, crafted to the needs of its customers, with personalized attention and initiatives that changed according to the needs of customers, allowing the organization to increase commitment and a sense of belonging.
This approach allowed Carrefour to integrate and maximize e-commerce sales. It also made the organization's omnichannel strategy and multiformat businesses such as Hyper, Market, Express, and e-commerce more relevant for its customers since they could choose where to benefit from the club's promotions.
Carrefour also created sub-communities, each with its own brand ambassador.
Additionally, Carrefour used zero- and first-party data and implemented a data management platform to send personalized communications that connected end-to-end to the brand's CRM and owned and paid media platforms. Carrefour created its own audiences to define personalized impacts for products and promotions in food and non-food categories, responding to qualification criteria by sales history in terms of consumption type and media behavior. Another tactic that Carrefour used was data-driven incentives to increase purchase frequency and average tickets.
Brands that were sold in Carrefour's stores could also benefit from the data through customized campaigns and ad hoc promotions on the app.
Club Carrefour is now the largest community in Spain in the retail category with 9.4 million members, being in one out of every two Spanish households. In 2022 alone, Carrefour managed to grow by almost one million members.
Fifty percent of Club members are repeat users who visit the stores every two weeks. According to the NPS measurement, it is the best-valued loyalty club in the retail category.
