LONDON: Sainsbury’s, the UK supermarket, is seeing “sustained sales uplift” as a result of in-store messaging offers based on micro-location data.

James Moir, Managing Director of the Nectar loyalty scheme which partners with Sainsbury’s, outlined to the Festival of Marketing a recent trial in a London store which had set out to validate a number of hypotheses. (For more details, read WARC’s report: What Sainsbury’s knows about location marketing .)

One was whether consumers could be accurately tracked and located in-store. A combination of in-store beacons and Bluetooth on smartphones had enabled location to within one square metre, he reported.

A second was whether such data could be turned into meaningful, valuable insights that Sainsbury's could use. Using a heat map dashboard, for example, enabled the retailer to better understand things like dwell time at fixtures.

“You can start to understand aisle-to-aisle flow, the impact of seasonal changes, the true pattern of major merchandise changes," Moir added.

The third, however, was the potential game changer, as the research sought to establish whether such location data could influence shopper behaviour through delivery of personalised and contextual messages.

It was rapidly clear that relevant offers pushed to customers in specific aisles had higher redemption rates and satisfaction rates, but a strong enough offer could also persuade shoppers to retrace their steps from one end of the store to the other.

“The implications of being able to deliver a message in real time and genuinely influence customer behaviour in an offline fashion is really, really interesting,” said Moir.

The early results – a sales uplift of 7% and spend up 7% – have been sufficiently encouraging for Sainsbury’s to roll the technology out to another 20 stores and thousands of customers.

“We're seeing sustained sales uplift,” Moir reported.

“Our hypothesis is were stealing share from competitors,” he said. “Were stealing visits from competitors because of the ability to see personalised, in-the-moment offers.”

Sourced from WARC