Personal information a ‘precious gift’, says Woolworths director of loyalty and data
Customers’ personal details should be treated as a “precious gift, which Australia does not do, Woolworths’ director of loyalty and data told guests at Mumbrella’s Retail Marketing Summit.
Speaking in the session ‘Woolworths gets personal to drive customer loyalty’, Ingrid Maes said it was the “duty” of marketers to “respect” the customer relationship.
Maes: It is the duty of marketers to respect the customer relationship
When a customer gives you their personal information you must treat that information as a precious gift. We haven’t done that in Australia,” Maes said.
“As a marketer, it is our duty to respect the terms of that relationship and use it for the benefit of the customer.”
“If you put the interests of the customer first, the results will speak for themselves, and if you don’t, it’s a massive value destroyer,” she added.
The session, led by Maes and Adam Driussi, CEO at Quantium, unveiled the different ways Woolworths changed its rewards program in order to benefit the customer.
While Maes believes Australia struggles to respect personal information, she said Woolworths’ focused on customer relationships, and was no longer a loyalty program “in a traditional sense”.
“Traditionally a loyalty program is, in essence, a one size fits-all program that focuses on retaining customers,” she said.
“Our core objective is to generate a genuine one-to-one relationship with every single member in a program.”
“If you put the interests of the customer first, the results will speak for themselves, and if you don’t, it’s a massive value destroyer,” she added.
Woolworths Rewards program used 20 trillion records of data.
The program, developed by Quantium, used more than 20 trillion records of data and led to a 5% scan rate increase, and a 16% increase open rates.
While Maes admitted Woolworths had made a “mistake” with the “orange ticket” when first launching the program, she believes the new Woolworths Rewards appeals to 100% of customers.
“We don’t regret a single thing,” she said.
“We are trying to build a culture of innovation and really put the customer first, and the only way to achieve that is to actually empower yourself and your team to dare to make the change. And obviously there are consequences.”
Maes said the biggest change the brand made was giving all customers a reason to join the program and use their Woolworths card.
Maes: “Demographics are the same thing as carpet bombing”
“We are now finally in a position where we can truely start to focus on personalisation.”
However, Maes said demographics were not useful.
“We banned demographics. Why? Because in marketing, demographics is the same thing as carpet bombing,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter whether your demographics look the same, ultimately you are all different people.”
Maes went on to say the personalised offer came from looking at every product a customer bought and every particular price log in history.
While other supermarkets like Coles’ similarly have loyalty programs, Maes said Woolworths is not trying to compete with others in the market.
“We gave up trying to compare ourselves to Coles because we had the choice – did we want to race with Coles, or did we want to do a race with relationship with the customer and we chose the customer,” she said.
When asked how they would differentiate themselves when other programs focused on personalisation, Maes was not concerned.
“We are not sitting on laurels and thinking we are right. We have a three year strategy that is very clear and very focused and that is the strategy we are running for.”
