Leading the field in 1:1 communications for over a decade

Staying relevant

Keeping it personal

To keep customers engaged and making the most of their email savings, we needed to deliver hyper-personalised, relevant messages. To do this we built six relevancy algorithms to target products, recipes and content – three product algorithms, category reactivation algorithm, message and scoring algorithm and recipe algorithms. In concert, these quickly and accurately target content for hundreds of thousands of customers at once.

Giving customer control

Looking at spending patterns revealed marked differences in the categories shoppers preferred – fresh, grocery and alcohol. To give customers more control over the type of products in myCountdown and improve category relevance, functionality was built for customers to dial up or down the proportion of products from each category.

A big limitation with algorithms is the 'like-factor' – just because someone buys paper towels doesn't mean they always want to hear about them. To help solve this, we built a feature that lets customers choose their favourite fresh, grocery and alcohol product, ensuring they're notified each time it's on special rather than at pre-defined intervals.

Right time and right place

We discovered timing was everything when it came to making the most of myCountdown. Analysis suggested myCountdown was most effective when it arrived just before a customer's regular shopping day from the store they frequently shop at, ensuring their favourite specials were top-of-mind.

However, getting customers to update details, such as their preferred day, can be a barrier to having accurate data so we use the data we have instead.

To realign a customer's email and shopping day, we built a programme that runs quarterly. When we found a mismatch we forced the switch for low-engaged customers and recommended a better day/store choice for high-engaged customers with benefit-led messaging and a simple 'one-click-to-switch' method.

Discovering missed opportunities

Every relationship has room to improve and myCountdown is no different. After looking at the customer journey, we identified key opportunities to deepen the relationship. When matched with customer survey data, it was clear some customers were unsure about myCountdown programme benefits. Based on these insights, our creative team and customer behaviour experts created a suite of communications educating customers about knowledge gaps and a tailored journey of onboarding messages to create a habit of interaction with myCountdown.

Over time, we also educated customers on other aspects of the programme which they can further opt-in to such as feedback or specific product category mailers-so that education and communication exposure is incremental.