Woolworths Rewards

Case Study
Members over
Data records
Trillion
Email open rate
% Increase
NPS
% Increase
Client
With over 200,000 people and $59 Billion in revenue, the Woolworths Group is made up of some of the most recognisable and trusted brands in retailing, serving millions of customers every day.

Woolworths Rewards is Australia’s largest retail loyalty program with more than ten million members. In 2015 the program was relaunched using data to deliver a more personalised shopping experience via Woolworths 1:1 sales platform.

Website
www.woolworths.com.au
Industry
Retail
Challenge
Woolworths-commissioned research suggested around one third of supermarket loyalty members actively linked to points programs had never redeemed points; not for flights, holidays, coffee makers, nothing at all.

There are now more programs than ever and trying to work out their value is often impossible. This has lead to ‘points fatigue’ with many customers signed up to points programs confessing to not using them. Woolworth’s research found 68% of customers preferred money off their normal supermarket shopping with only nine per cent preferring a points-based scheme.

Solution
Based on customer feedback, a rebranded program was designed to give customers money off their shopping, quickly and automatically. Customers would earn Woolworths Rewards in the course of their regular shop, and once their balance reaches $10, that amount would be taken off their next shop.

When Woolworths decided to revitalise its customer loyalty program, MAXEMUS Director Celina Farrell helped architect what the new program would look like – putting Woolworth’s customers first.

With Woolworths investing in Salesforce capability the team were able to automate more personalised loyalty offers. Customers want choice, and range is a key driver of the decision on where to shop. But many are drowning in a sea of irrelevant choices.

“For years as marketers we’ve been led to believe we were personalising our experience because we were sending communications to segments of customers that looked the same. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter whether your demographics look the same, ultimately (they) are still very different people.”
Ingrid Maes
Director of Loyalty, Data and Digital Media
Woolworths

The new approach allowed a much more sophisticated understanding of the individual needs of Woolworth’s customers. Using one of the most advanced algorithms in the world, Woolworths send customers a weekly catalogue of hyper-personalised offers.

Woolworths, with the help of Quantium, created a personalisation engine to fuel the supermarket’s email marketing efforts. The team began with 20 trillion data records and put them through a Gradient Boosted Machine learning model, with the end goal being highly targeted offers. In order to do this, the model crunched the data for every customer looking at the products they did and didn’t buy at every price point in history.

Scan rates have increased as more customers swipe their card at the checkout. There has also been a 16% increase in email open rates while opt outs have gone down significantly. The number of members has also increased while Net Promoter Scores are on the rise.

Working with the Woolworths Loyalty team (now WooliesX) Celina helped achieve two core objectives; growing the database of 10+ million customers and improving the value of customers within the program.