Developed hyper-personalisation at scale
Brand: Woolworths Rewards
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.
- Digital and engagement strategy
- Marketing automation (Salesforce)
- AI & data-driven personalisation
- Member journey architecture
- Media buying (Meta and Google Ads)
11,900,000
Retained members
16
Increase in email open rate, driven by hyper-personalisation
10
Increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The challenge
Woolworths faced a massive engagement challenge across its multi-entity ecosystem. Despite having millions of members, internal research revealed severe “engagement fatigue.” Customers were drowning in a sea of irrelevant choices and generic, segment-based marketing communications.
The objective was to completely revitalise the engagement program. Woolworths needed to shift away from broad segmentation and find a way to deliver immediate, hyper-personalised value at scale, ensuring every individual received the right message, at the right time.
The solution
Based on customer feedback, a rebranded program was designed to give customers money off their shopping, quickly and automatically.
Working alongside the Woolworths Loyalty team (now WooliesX), Celina helped architect a revitalised, member-first engagement program driven by data and automation.
Pillar 1: Transitioning to Salesforce Automation With Woolworths investing heavily in Salesforce capability, we overhauled the communication architecture. We moved away from traditional “batch and blast” segment emails and built automated, dynamic marketing workflows designed to deliver hyper-personalised offers directly to members based on their unique lifecycles.
Pillar 2: AI & Predictive Analytics To fuel this new personalisation engine, Woolworths partnered with Quantium to leverage one of the most advanced algorithms in the world. By putting 20 trillion data records through a Gradient Boosted Machine learning model, we were able to crunch individual behavioural data at an unprecedented scale. This AI-driven approach allowed the platform to predict exactly what content would drive individual action.
Pillar 3: Dynamic ‘Right Message, Right Time’ Content As Ingrid Maes, Director of Loyalty and Data at Woolworths, noted: “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… [they] are still very different people.” We solved this by generating dynamic weekly email communications. Instead of sending one email to a million people, the Salesforce and AI integration allowed us to send one million unique, hyper-personalised emails—each dynamically populated with content tailored to the individual’s specific history and preferences.
The outcome
The shift to automated, AI-driven personalisation successfully cut through the noise, yielding massive engagement and retention results for the Woolworths Group.
By putting the individual’s experience first, we achieved two core objectives: growing the active database to over 10.9 million members, and significantly improving the lifetime value of those members. Scan rates at the checkout increased, while digital engagement saw a 16% increase in email open rates. Crucially, email opt-outs went down significantly, and the brand achieved a 10% increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS).
