Personalised E-Catalogue CARREFOUR by ARISTID

ARISTID ENABLES CARREFOUR TO OFFER EACH OF ITS 14 MILLION CUSTOMERS A PERSONALISED VERSION OF ITS PROMOTIONAL CATALOGUE

The distribution of the printed catalogue dropped in mailboxes is living its final hours. At the very moment when French shoppers are looking for the best promotional offers to protect their purchasing power…

To offer each of its customers offers that match their needs, CARREFOUR has created with ARISTID the very first “personalised E-catalogue”.

Why is it urgent for CARREFOUR to rethink its catalogue?

While the advertising catalogue is still THE preferred medium for French shoppers to spot “good deals”, its current distribution is being heavily challenged today.

• The legal framework of the Climate Law and the OUI PUB scheme, in trial since September 2023 in 11 large urban areas, significantly limits its distribution in printed form.
• Added to this is the surge in paper prices, which is increasing production and distribution costs.
• Lastly, the social perception of print media, considered far more polluting than its digital counterpart, and the limited appeal of mailboxes for younger generations, who prefer digital platforms.

At the same time, the digital version of the catalogue — the well-known digitised e-catalogue — has already become familiar, and the addition of digital functions for sorting, adding to basket and creating favourite lists has already won over many CARREFOUR customers.

However, one feature was missing from this tool: PRODUCT RECOMMENDATION.

For many years, CARREFOUR has built up a deep understanding of its customers: their product preferences, the promotions that drive purchase, and much more. Until now, the brand had not been directly connected to commercial personalisation. Promotional offers were mainly distributed via mass media — powerful, but uniform and untargeted.

Today, this digital behaviour, now a must-have on marketplaces and in e-commerce, has become commonplace in the customer journey.

It was therefore crucial for CARREFOUR to be able to offer all its customers a unique and personalised promotional experience that takes the best of the catalogue, in terms of how the offer is presented, and combines it with the ultra-precise customer knowledge of the brand with the most stores in France.

Thanks to the technological approach driven by ARISTID, we are now able to redeploy our commercial creativity. This will allow us to leave the era of the paper catalogue without losing the bond with our customers. We are going to create new promotional stories which, I'm sure, will be appreciated and will help generate more traffic in our stores.

— Frédéric PRESLOT, Operational MKG Director CARREFOUR

Offering a personalised offer to millions of customers is a real challenge

To take on this challenge, Carrefour relied on its technology partner ARISTID. ARISTID Retail Technology is a French company, publisher of software solutions dedicated to mass retail. ARISTID has been supporting CARREFOUR for 5 years on the digital transition of all its communication processes.

Thanks to all the technological architecture put in place by ARISTID, it is possible for CARREFOUR, for the first time, to cross-reference the full richness of its “Big customer data” with its “Offer data lake”. This allows it to produce, at very large scale, an unlimited number of fully personalised commercial offers.

This feat is all the more impressive in that it is also enriched by store data, giving France's leading retailer the ability to offer each of its 14 million customers the right product, presented with the right promotion, at the right moment, via the channel of their choice, and at the price of their preferred store.

This “data-centric” revolution completely repositions the way commercial communication is built — until now very static and entirely centred on the print catalogue and its physical distribution.

The personalised e-catalogue, a first step towards individualised promotion

Thanks to these developments, Carrefour and ARISTID envision a multitude of creative uses for this ultra-personalisation.

Customer scenarios can be much more precise, more qualitative, more relational; every form of expression is possible and every distribution channel can be used. This technological feat makes commercial proposals far more relevant and helps reduce advertising overload.

The CARREFOUR personalised catalogue, launched in September 2022 with a portion of the retailer's customers, foreshadows the future of commercial advertising.

The first results of this experiment also show strong public adoption: 6.53% interaction rate vs 2.78% for non-personalised, and +17 points of NPS score from the very first wave in September 2022.

We are very proud to support CARREFOUR in the constant evolution of its processes. The personalised e-catalogue project is a great example of complementarity between the offer data we help CARREFOUR structure and the customer data, which is retailers' real treasure!

— Rodolphe Bonnasse, CEO ARISTID Retail Technology

The personalised e-catalogue in figures — May 2023

The Carrefour x ARISTID collaboration

• 30K catalogue pages created per year
• 300K in-store product displays
• 100% automatically digitised
• 4,000+ stores connected

According to Frédéric Preslot, several factors justify the shift to the digital leaflet. “When we stopped distributing paper catalogues in mailboxes during the first tests we ran in 2021, we immediately felt that the catalogue landing page and our reader would be a key topic, because that was where we were naturally redirecting all our customers.”

The personalised e-catalogue concerns 3 million people

The figure of 3 million is an average; some weeks reach 4 million and others 2.5 million. If no relevant offer exists, the customer's catalogue is not personalised: there is no fake personalisation. Each week, Carrefour customers find out by email whether the e-catalogue is personalised or not.

ARISTID's technological setup really makes it possible to produce, in a 100% automated way, with no friction, with no manual or human action from the Carrefour teams.

— Rodolphe Bonnasse, CEO ARISTID Retail Technology

The scale of the technological challenge

On one side, between 500 and 800 promotional offers; on the other, 14 million customers and more than 4,000 stores able to host different prices. The number of available options is enormous. It is impossible to imagine the personalised e-catalogue without a heavily industrialised technological foundation.

What results?

We had asked our customers to rate their experience on the traditional reader with the classic catalogue. Then we asked them the same question when they received the personalised catalogue, and we gained 17 points of NPS (Net Promoter Score). We even doubled the click-through rate.

— Frédéric Preslot, Operational Marketing Director CARREFOUR FRANCE

The email click-through rate is doubled when the leaflet is personalised

The paper leaflet forced us to have a single national price. But this kind of system allows us to consider commercial agility both in terms of performance with customers and in terms of negotiation or even margin calculation and steering across your network.

— Rodolphe Bonnasse, CEO ARISTID Retail Technology

And what comes next? The personalised e-catalogues also allow Carrefour to be more agile in pricing, negotiation and margin control, which could make it possible to have different promotions and promotional prices according to location: Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lille or Strasbourg.

LSA report — How does Carrefour personalise its digital leaflets? / Yves Puget, 19 January 2023

The battle has only just begun…

To offer each of its customers offers that match their needs, Carrefour has created a personalised e-catalogue. Decoding.

“We want to say yes to all our customers”, hammers Frédéric Preslot, Operational Marketing Director at Carrefour.

That is, yes to those who no longer want to receive leaflets in their mailbox and aren't looking for promotions. Yes to those who still want promos but are looking for alternatives to paper. And yes to those who still need paper, even if it means sending the catalogue by post. “We won't leave anyone by the side of the road. Our progressive reduction of catalogues in mailboxes, launched more than 18 months ago, did not target paper but its waste. Our goals are clear: to cut the number of paper catalogues by 40% in 2023 and by 80% by 2024!”

Working on relevance

Of course, the paper catalogue has advantages at the start of this equation, since everyone ends up opening their mailbox. And when Carrefour started to digitise its communication, it had to acknowledge that the number of people exposed to digital was lower than those owning a mailbox.

The idea is fairly simple: bring up to the front pages of the catalogue and make stars of the eight products most frequently bought by each customer. To safeguard the customer experience, if the recommendation engine cannot find at least four customer-specific products in the catalogue, there is no personalisation. Today, almost 1.1 million customers receive an email this way every week. The click rate doubles and reaches 6% as soon as the catalogue is personalised.

Email is the favourite

The movement is well and truly under way, with a first personalised catalogue sent in September 2022. More than 180 stores have already stopped distributing leaflets, particularly in Paris and Lyon, and many more have joined since the beginning of January.

Two catalogues raise questions: the toy catalogue and the wine fair. In September 2022, catalogues were therefore slipped into postal invitations to the wine fair evenings. For toys, the brand is considering distributing them at the till, with email notifications letting customers know that the catalogue has arrived.

Local business in the spotlight

And tomorrow, it is conceivable to go even further in personalisation. With more targeted units of need (UN), but also with targeted promotions.

“We are only at the start of catalogue personalisation. But it can only be done with an industrial model”, warns Rodolphe Bonnasse.

Retailers' customer data has more value than the algorithms of the major GAFA. To know one tenth of what retailers know about their customers, these digital giants have to invest billions of euros. “We are the keepers of the temple of this promotional data.”

Five tips for digitising your catalogue, by Rodolphe Bonnasse, President of ARISTID Retail Technology

1. Make sure your promotional data is robust. Otherwise, at every exposure (app, web, mailing, leaflet, store…), you will have to spend money and time bringing it up to standard.
2. Have data that is accessible, i.e. in a single place. If it is the result of a co-built effort drawing from different units in the company, it will quickly become a nightmare to manage and keep up to date.
3. Make sure that the entire creation system for materials (PDF, JPEG, video files…) is built on an industrial automated generation setup.
4. Have a solid customer database with an appropriate recommendation engine. So a good CRM system.
5. Have a technological setup that is open and compatible with this digital ecosystem to avoid managing conversions and format-specific adjustments for every medium.

Olivier Dauvers — Carrefour, one step ahead on promo personalisation / 15 May 2023

“Don't lose a single customer or a single euro of revenue”. Carrefour's mantra in its approach to promo digitisation has the merit of being simple and clear. Committed to an 80% reduction in paper volume by the end of 2024, the group is also progressing on the personalisation of digital leaflets since autumn 2022 to encourage its customers to make the switch.

On this front, Carrefour clearly has a step ahead, with the help of ARISTID, its provider for leaflet solutions, both paper and digital. The two lifted the lid during a morning dedicated to promo digitisation organised by Meta on Thursday.

Out of Carrefour's 14 million loyalty cardholders, around a quarter already receive a personalised email highlighting the 8 — even 12 — most relevant offers from the week's leaflet based on their consumption habits. If fewer than 8 products are relevant, the email then directs to the standard e-catalogue. This is to avoid undermining the personalisation promise, which addresses a strong customer expectation: “personalised” emails are clicked twice as often as those pushing the “omnibus” leaflet. And the optimised reading experience scores 17 points of NPS more than the non-personalised reader.

In parallel, Carrefour is following its plan for the progressive end of leaflets: by the end of June, 35 Carrefour stores and 290 Markets will have completely stopped distributing leaflets. That's roughly 15% and 30% of the two networks. Compared with the 200 Leclerc stores already at zero leaflets (270 in July), before the major leap on 1 September.

Thanks to Olivier Dauvers for this article on our collaboration with Carrefour. Read the original article