PERSONALIZED DIGITAL FLYERS CARREFOUR X ARISTID
personalized digital flyers
To provide offers to each customer based on their needs and wants, Carrefour has created a personalized digital flyer. Deep dive.
“We want to say yes to all our customers,” says Frédéric Preslot, Carrefour’s operational marketing director.
That is to say, “yes” to those customers who no longer want to receive flyers in their mailbox and “yes” to those who still want promotions but are looking for alternatives to paper and “yes” to those who still need paper, even if it means sending them the flyer by mail. “We will not leave anyone by the side of the road”. Our approach to gradually reduce printed flyers, which launched more than 18 months ago was not aimed at paper, but at reducing waste. Our objective is to reduce the number of paper catalogues by 40% in 2023 and then 80% by 2024!”
Today, the retailer distributes approximately 20 million copies every week in France. So how will this be achieved?
“The basis for all of our communication action plan is based on an equation (number of people exposed x %awareness x %relevance x %persuasive intensity) of the effectiveness of promotional communication. This is the number of people exposed to the flyer multiplied by the number of people who will perceive it multiplied by the number of people who find it relevant multiplied by the persuasive intensity,” explains Frédéric Preslot. Before continuing: “To maximize the effectiveness of our promotional communications, we must expose the most people, maximize the number of those who see the message, and ensure that they find the offer relevant and powerful enough to be attractive. In summary, if one factor of this equation falls to zero, it is the efficiency of the entire chain that falls to zero.”
Of course, the paper flyer carries advantages driving the calculation of this strategic formula, since everyone only opens their traditional mailbox. When Carrefour started the “switch to digital first” it had to recognize that the number of shoppers exposed to digital was lower than those receiving print. Especially since Carrefour did not have the emails of all its customers (and even less of its prospective shoppers) and that the open rates were 30%, with click through rates that were rather low at 3%.
“So we decided to tackle the other variables of the equation. And digital has more dynamic capabilities to drive the “relevance” variable”, observes Frédéric Preslot.
Carrefour therefore worked with ARISTID, a retail technology company in the digital transformation of their promotional planning, offer management and creative production processes, to closely tie their promotional data and creative rendering and messaging capabilities with those of the Carrefour CRM platforms.
PERSONALIZED DIGITAL FLYERS “We already had recommendation capabilities for our digital promotions that we delivered via email. But we told ourselves that we would update the flyer according to customers preferences,” says Frédéric Preslot.
The initial idea is relatively simple: go back to the first pages of the flyer and identify the eight products most frequently purchased by each customer. To guarantee the customer experience, if the recommendation engine does not find at least four products specific to each customer from the pool of weekly offers, there is no personalization. Today, nearly 1.1 million customers are sent the personalized e-flyers by e-mail every week. The click-through rate has doubled and reached 6% since the flyer was personalized.
“Thanks to the technological structure put in place, Carrefour can combine all the richness of its customer data with its “Offer Data Lake” powered by ARISTID in order to produce an infinite number of fully personalized offers in an industrial way,” says Rodolphe Bonnasse, President of ARISTID Retail Technology.
Carrefour also sought to improve a number of viewing challenges on its own flyer e-reader. For example, by putting a summary, installing a search engine and sorting features, lists of favorites, a basket layout and ensuring a smoother navigation for facilitating zooms … Even if, today, the personalized flyer is still based on the simple replica of the classic flyer with its 60 to 80 pages, and when flipping flyer pages, shoppers rarely go past page 24! PERSONALIZED DIGITAL FLYERS
“In a traditional printed flyer, the best exposure typically comes from the first and last pages. But in the same digital flyer, the last cover doesn’ t create the same level of exposure,” warns Rodolphe Bonnasse.
This also raises challenges for visibility of non-food promotions which is often at the end of the flyer…