One of the most remarkable shifts we have witnessed in retail recently has to be the unprecedented growth in the grocery segment. According to a recent report from IGD, grocery is set to grow by 24% and generate an incremental $2.2 trillion in sales by 2024.

The key drivers for growth across both mature and emerging markets in North America/Europe and Asia respectively will still be online and convenience. As grocers race to grab a share of the increase in consumer spending, they must be mindful of the changes in consumer behavior, the importance of catering to a whole new set of first-time customers, and adapting quickly to evolving needs. This means grocers need a fresh and nimble AI-driven approach to delivering exceptional customer experiences. This alone will separate the winners from the also-rans.

For starters, this means grocers must look beyond traditional marketing methods that involve segmentation which is essentially grouping individuals into buckets called ‘segments’ based on a certain set of common predetermined criteria including interests, geographies, and demographics.

In the past, marketers would typically define segments such as ‘shoppers over the age of 45 who spend 40 GBP monthly in-store’ or ‘households that buy more than 10 organic items monthly’. This helped marketers better organize large amounts of consumer data and personalize communications to some extent. Clearly, it has its drawbacks – since every consumer is unique, no two shoppers have the same buying habits, tastes, or preferences and naturally, you end up with sub-optimal results.

Bottom line, it isn’t true Individualization or what we now call hyper-personalization – where every customer is delivered unique, tailored experiences. Make no mistake, consumers today expect grocers to deeply understand their needs, preferences, brand affinities, and purchase behavior in real-time and to engage them via their preferred channel.

In other words, consumers are looking for contextual relevance, and hyper-personalization delivers on that promise by creating a real-time behavioral profile for every visitor that is extensible to their household. This is achieved by a deep learning framework, a real-time customer data platform (CDP), a full suite of experience personalization, and personalized marketing orchestration capabilities that afford retail grocers the benefits of precision marketing and scale.

Clearly, hyper-personalization is the way forward, but let’s look at what this means from a consumer’s standpoint. In a nutshell, it translates into three things – Recognize Me, Understand Me, and Inspire Me in real-time.

Recognize Me: Know your shoppers. What if you knew your customer shops for a family with two children during the first week of every month, and 30% of his spend is on frozen food. A small portion of purchases includes vegan products, indicating a family member is a vegan. Legumes, dairy products, and dark chocolate bars are regular buys. The customer also buys vitamin supplements, fabric softeners, and disposable plates every alternate month. With this knowledge, you will be able to surface personalized product recommendations that drive better conversions.

Understand Me: Another important ingredient of hyper-personalization is knowing the Why behind the purchase. It can provide surprising insights into the shopper’s context and enable you to tailor the shopping experience. If you know that a customer often purchases avocados and is into healthy foods, you could recommend products that complement it (Mexican salsa for example).

A change in buying patterns or habits may be indicative of moving to a certain variety of food (gluten-free) or an addition of a pet. You may also discover that this customer engages with gamification content and often redeems points to get discounts or you may encounter a customer that constantly compares prices for select staples online and buys in-store. This level of deeper understanding allows you to adapt instantly to changes in customer behavior and extend the best, most relevant offers.

Inspire Me: The more you know your customers, the better your ability to personalize and drive conversions. When you understand affinities, preferences, and behaviors deeply, you can surprise and delight them with the best in-the-moment recommendations that drive higher engagement and top-class digital experiences. These can range from recipes to one-click ingredient purchases or recommendations based on the weather, unique bundled offers, or surprise customers with new product alternatives. You can bring insights from your in-store purchases to influence the online shopping experience.

In summary, massive opportunity beckons grocers. So why not look beyond the mundane automated replenishment to deliver a rich user experience that keeps customers coming back? Hyper-personalization has all the answers to convert routine buying into delightful shopping experiences. Make grocery shopping joyous again.

Check out our Guide to Omnichannel Personalization to learn how you can integrate your online and offline channels to deliver a more holistic customer experience.

Over the past 24 months or so, eCommerce across online grocery, consumer electronics, home appliances, fashion, beauty and wellness to home entertainment purchases including streaming services and beverages like wine, beer, and liquor has seen sharp growth. An eMarketer report predicts that the global retail eCommerce sales will reach a value of $6.17 trillion by 2023, accounting for 22.3% of the total retail sales, up from 13.8% in 2019.

ADA Global has been observing sharp spikes in traffic that resemble days around Thanksgiving. In other words, almost every other day seems to be a Black Friday.

So, is your real-time personalization provider equipped to handle this?

In the recent past, there have been many new personalization providers that claim to offer personalization. Their offers include simplistic recommendation engines, A/B testing tools, and even search engines that tout the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ functionality. One of the things that is easily overlooked is their ability to smoothly manage these spikes in traffic, for which they are wholly dependent on third-party cloud service providers.

With consumers expecting top-notch real-time personalized experiences, the associated workload is difficult to predict and has a direct impact on variable costs. Companies that are ill-equipped to handle this at times could compromise ecommerce personalization solutions techniques to limit their exposure.

To cite an example, one of our leading competitors was so bogged down with the cost spikes from their cloud provider, they decided to switch off some of the personalization features for more than 50% of their customers! Just think about the repercussions of that step.

Imagine a scenario where you are relying on the personalization provider to drive more conversions by leveraging the full extent of their expertise, especially when you are experiencing a big influx of traffic. What if at precisely this time, your shoppers start seeing non-relevant or generic recommendations at the time when you need to display products that best match their preferences and balance them with popular new products or present the best-bundled offers. In other words, you end up losing precious sales and worse still not have those shoppers return, even though you pay a premium for it.

The only way for these software companies to meet their operating costs is by passing on these costs to their clients on a monthly recurring basis. If you are an ecommerce personalization platform in an intensely competitive environment, the last thing you need is escalating costs that eat into your margins.

The advantage of working with a provider like ADA Global is that the foundational platform sits on 13 geographically discrete and spread-out data centers and offers you a response time that is the best in the industry.

Furthermore, ADA Global’s IT and Ops teams closely monitor the Internet and shopping traffic, and can smoothly scale capacity on-demand, whether it is up or down. This has allowed ADA Global to consistently provide 100% uptime during festive and high-traffic periods with a great response time and perfectly adapt to seasonal changes for the past 14 years.

So, before you sign your next contract or even renew it, we’d urge you to pay special attention to the fine print on variable costs. Importantly, choose a personalization provider that has proven credentials in supporting companies operating in high-growth environments and understands the nuances well.

With more than 400 top retailers and brands on the ADA Global platform, we know a thing or two about delivering the best real time customer engagement no matter what the conditions. You can

Learn more on how we help retailers deliver personalization at scale.

Spend some time on any media channel—be it a newspaper, radio, social media, or any other Internet-based channel—and it won’t be long before you’re bombarded with ads trying to sell you a myriad of products. Brands spend a ton in such marketing efforts in a bid to get your attention and influence you into engaging with them. But how much of an impact are they making on you, the individual consumer, with these spray-and-pray tactics? Perhaps none at all. In fact, you may find such brand messages rather annoying.

Now, imagine receiving a highly personalized message on your mobile. The message not only recognizes you as an individual but also addresses your current shopping need. The brand, through this message, gives you an attractive offer on a product or category you’re interested in, and that too while you’re in a store pondering what to buy.

Which of the above two scenarios are you more likely to respond to? Obviously the latter. An Accenture study revealed that 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations.

Online stores tend to enjoy greater success when it comes to personalizing shoppers’ experiences. With customer data at their fingertips, they can access granular insights related to every customer’s behavior, needs, preferences, and purchase pattern. This intel enables e-tailers to predict what a customer wants and make relevant offers and recommendations accordingly. This results in higher customer engagement and sales. And customers get the instant gratification that they seek.

Most offline retailers, who still rely on traditional marketing methods, aren’t as successful in delivering the same level of experience to shoppers. However, real-time in-store personalization can help them compete on an equal footing and craft delightful experiences for customers.

Understanding In-store Personalization

When an offline retailer starts identifying every customer as an individual, understanding their current context, and combining these insights with their historical behavior and tastes to deliver tailored recommendations, they have essentially started delivering in-store personalization.

However, all of this needs to be done in real-time while the customers are still weighing their options in a store. That would make it possible for retailers to make timely cross-sell or upsell offers that influence buying decisions and boost revenue. Retailers usually identify a shopper after they’ve reached the POS, but by this time the window of opportunity has long been shut.

But Is It Possible to Deliver In-store Personalization in Real-time?

The answer is yes, and lies in leveraging the great enabler – technology. A customer’s mobile phone and its Bluetooth capabilities along with the store’s WiFi and RFID tools can help offline retailers to achieve personalization that is nothing short of magical. Let us understand how from a few examples.

Scenario 1

Suzanne can access the free WiFi of a store on her mobile phone. Since her mobile number is already present in the store’s registry and linked to her past purchases, a buyer profile can easily be generated in advance that indicates what she normally shops for, when, and how often. It will also include data on if she chose a particular brand due to a sale or went with another despite an offer going on. This allows the store to send messages that are relevant to her.

“Hi Suzanne, running low on coffee pods? Do not miss an offer on Brand A in aisle number 3! Get up to 30% off on select products by mentioning your mobile number when you approach the biller.” Here, the system knows which day of the week Suzanne normally drops in to buy coffee pods and sends her a notification about an offer. It could even be made specific to address a particular flavor.

Scenario 2

Upon entering a mall, Jonathan gets a push notification to accept offers via Bluetooth. The store he frequents can then easily send him a personalized message to cross-sell another product related to his usual purchases.

“Good afternoon, Jonathan. Head over to The Gent. Get a 25% off on our brand-new selection of neckties when you buy any of our formal shirts/trousers. Use the coupon code GENTREGULAR at the time of billing.”

Scenario 3

Judith receives a push notification to send an SMS to a specific number so she can get personalized offers from a store. The SMS she sends enables the system to identify her as a first-time customer. The next SMS she receives is something along these lines: “Welcome to our store. Get 30% discount on anything you purchase with the coupon code THEFIRST.”

How Technology Enables In-store Personalization

All the aforementioned situations had the customer identified and sent relevant messaging that were targeted towards them. Doing all this in real-time requires analytics and machine learning that can work with enormous volumes of data from various sources.

Often, a rules engine in the background helps in identifying business conditions on moving and stationary data. Contextual targeting becomes easier when the retailer divides their customers based on demographic and psychographic analysis. Technology not only allows the retailer to drive personalization but also helps measure its effectiveness and improve upon the messaging as more and more data is collected.

Retailers can give their personalization strategy an added boost with mobile apps. Through apps, they can stay connected with customers and send them contextual messaging whether they’re inside or outside the store.

Beacon-based positional targeting has been implemented by many large retailers, within the store. Visual Light Communication (VLC) technology-based LED lights acting as beacons can interact with mobile phones, and they have seen increased adoption around the world.

Using beacons, retailers can even personalize based on the aisle a customer is in within the store. For instance, if a customer is in the wine aisle, they could receive an offer on their favorite red wine – let’s say, Merlot. And when the customer is in the pantry section, the beacon uses context to send another message recommending what pairs well with red wine, with offers for roasted Chicken.

Embrace In-store Personalization to Build Loyalty

In a world where customers are spoiled for choice, retailers should leverage technology to deliver relevant, contextual customer engagement. This is the key to building long-term loyalty and staying relevant in the market. What retailers shouldn’t do is spam a customer who’s trusted them with their information. Hyper-personalizing experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle, across channels and touchpoints, is the way forward.

Check out our comprehensive omnichannel personalization guide to learn how to hyper-personalize customer experiences across both online and offline channels.