Category: Research

Case study: leading coffee brand sales impact with NCS

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Background

A leading coffee brand approached Shopkick to increase awareness of its 2016 holiday seasonal flavors and drive sales of two packaged products in grocery and mass stores nationwide. To reach consumers in the planning phase, the brand wished to leverage video content to build consideration and increase brand equity. In-store, the goal was to drive engagement at the crowded coffee shelf and incentivize consumers to pick up the products. The team wanted to understand conversion and capture consumer insights throughout the purchase journey. Finally, the brand was looking to preserve margin by incentivizing traffic, engagement and sales through rewards and not coupons or discounts.

Shopkick Solution

Shopkick first built pre-shop consideration with video and editorial content to drive awareness of product assortment. Shopkick then drove traffic, in-store product engagement, and purchase conversion by motivating engagement with ‘Kicks’, or rewards. 

Results

Sales impact was measured by Nielsen Catalina Solutions. The overall campaign showed positive results across all key metrics including incremental dollar sales, buy rate, purchase frequency, and share shift.

    • 66 million impressions
    • 8% total incremental sales lift
    • 42% of total incremental sales were from NEW buyers
    • 66% of K-Cup sales were NEW buyers
    • 1.07% total share shift

View the full case study here

Customer research: unfashionable, or here to stay?

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Kristy Stromberg, Chief Marketing Officer

Silicon Valley sets the pulse for trends in the tech industry. From fashion to funding, leaders in this tech hub determine what’s fleeting and what’s here to stay.

Lately, it seems to be the consensus that customer research is out of style. Tech teams are claiming that the best approach to customer research, it turns out, is no approach at all. Many tech companies are choosing to skip customer research entirely, claiming that:

“It’s not worth asking because consumers don’t know what they want.”

“It’s up to us to innovate — Steve Jobs didn’t need research.”

“If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Startup product and marketing directors are often disinterested or unwilling to invest in customer research outside of basic analytics before rolling out a new product or marketing tactic. It’s time that we stop and ask ourselves whether it’s time to rethink the importance of customer research, and whether skipping it altogether is a big mistake.

Big data solutions have allowed tech companies to concentrate on measurable behavioral data: how consumers interact with a product, how they might stumble upon a webpage or app store page, how much time they spend interacting with the page content, etc. While there is no doubt that this information is relevant, behavioral data paints an incomplete picture. It fails to help us comprehend the “why” behind these numbers. To lead with innovation and influence customer behavior, qualitative research is a must.

At Shopkick, we offer users the opportunity to earn free gift cards for the shopping behaviors they already do. While the practical, monetary advantage behind Shopkick is clear, we never predicted the emotional benefit that our app would provide to users. When sitting down and speaking with Shopkick users one-on-one, it became apparent that Shopkick means much more than simply racking up points and receiving free gift cards. For many users, Shopkick is a way to interact with family, some turning the app into a scavenger hunt for their children. Others use Shopkick as a competition game, and see shopkicking as a social event to spend time with friends and family.

Speaking with our users one-on-one brought to light an emotional benefit that we wouldn’t have discovered without qualitative research. In fact, “Bringing moments of joy to everyday shopping,” is now our official brand promise, guiding many aspects of our marketing and product efforts. Shopkick encourages users to spend more time with their friends and families. We help users treat themselves, and to treat the ones they care about.

Customer research is an essential tool for understanding how your brand or product is making a meaningful impact on users’ everyday lives. When it comes to gaining relevant consumer insights and influencing customer behavior, getting to know your audience will never go out of style.

 

Webinar: Challenger brand strategies for CPG success

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As a challenger brand in the CPG space, how can you stand out among the corporate brand portfolios and increase awareness for your products? With a limited budget, and in the face of ever increasing options, it’s critical to carefully consider where your marketing dollars will go the farthest.

In this webinar on demand, Shopkick brand expert Michael Reda talks about how challenger brands can create efficient, measurable and meaningful results.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Increase brand awareness without eroding your profit margin by offering rewards
  • Reach new customers before they even enter the store
  • Gamify the shopping experience to keep customers coming back
  • Effectively track an omnichannel campaign for deeper consumer insights

 

Online to offline attribution with Visa

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Consumers seamlessly traverse channels throughout the shopping journey, demanding highly personalized, mobile-enabled, and frictionless shopping experiences. In delivering these omnichannel experiences, retailers can struggle to attribute the impact of digital marketing on physical shopping experiences.

In 2016, Deloitte reported that digital’s influence on in-store sales surpassed 50%, influencing 56% of all in-store retail sales.  Yet understanding this influence on a shopper-level is still a challenge for most retailers.  In fact, 67% of retail executives said their greatest obstacle in offering an omnichannel experience is tracking customer analytics across channels.

Despite roughly 90% of retail transactions still happening in stores, stores lack the real-time data and attribution that retailers are accustomed to online. Beyond just verifying store visits, retailers want to know what customers did inside their stores. Key metrics include product engagement, dwell time in-store, purchase conversion, and whether or not the sale was incremental.

Shopkick’s partnership with Visa Decision Sciences connects the dots across the entire in-store data funnel to enable true online to offline attribution analysis.  Visa measures incremental sales impact through a  “twinning” methodology whereby a control group of unenrolled accounts is created from the Visa cardholder base to match spend behavior of the enrolled Shopkick population.

Shopkick Visa Data Partnership

Analysis from January 2017 shows significant and sustained incremental sales across Shopkick’s merchant partners — sales that would not have happened without Shopkick. On average, 57% of overall sales driven by Shopkick were incremental. Of that 57%, 73% of incremental sales was driven by new customer acquisition, and 23% was driven by increased spend of existing customers.

This ability to measure not just store visits, but also sales and incrementality will unlock the potential of omnichannel marketing, and drive growth for brick & mortar retail.

Webinar: CPG’s new endless aisle

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Until now, CPG brand marketing has largely been dictated by the physical structure of an in-store aisle. Now, as customers expect to locate products anywhere and buy them at any time, grocers and brand marketers need to step up to deliver what today’s shoppers want and what tomorrow’s shoppers will demand.

In this webinar on demand, Shopkick RVP William Gonzales talks about how CPG marketers can succeed with the new Endless Aisle. He covers how to deliver highly personalized, mobile-enabled, and frictionless shopping experiences.

You’ll hear:

  • Research on how today’s consumers shop, and how marketers can engage them along the entire path to purchase
  • A success story from Barilla’s Pronto Pasta
  • A look at future trends in anytime, anywhere commerce

 

Infographic: Create fun grocery shopping experiences

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Many grocers and CPG companies are struggling to keep up with changing consumer preferences in the shopping and consumption of food. In the past, grocers didn’t have to prioritize driving traffic because shoppers didn’t have many other options. Yet with the explosion of new products, services and grocery entrants, it has become increasingly difficult for grocers to drive traffic to stores, to drive sales of higher margin center aisle products, and to build loyalty.

Our latest infographic covers struggles and opportunities in the grocery market in recent years:

  • Major CPGs are also facing stalling growth: The top 25 food & beverage companies in the US drove only 3% of category growth in 2015.
  • Trips to and spend at traditional super markets is decreasing: In the past 5 years, shoppers made 27% less trips per week and spent 33% less.
  • Traditional engagement drivers aren’t working like they used to: Retailers saw a 13% annual decrease in 2016 in coupon redemption.

Trips to and spend at traditional supermarkets decreasing

Get the facts about the changing grocery environment, and how fun and engaging shopping experiences can drive store visits, product sales and loyalty in our latest infographic.

View the full infographic.

The next generation of retail experiences

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Is your brand prepared for the CPG shopping experience of the future? Is your retail store equipped? New, innovative technologies are powering the next generation of in-store experiences and beyond. These three tips will help you create an efficient, effective endless aisle strategy.

1. Reach Consumers Pre-Store During Micro-Moments

Busy schedules and long to-do lists have fragmented the average shopper’s attention span. Dedicated ‘shopping trips’ are becoming a thing of the past. Shopping now happens during small windows throughout the day, such as 20 minutes while waiting to pick up a child from school or arrive at an appointment.

Today’s consumers place a premium on experiences, and these micro-moments offer an ideal opportunity to engage customers with educational videos or life hacks like timesaving recipes, money-saving offers, and product alternatives before they enter the store. Retailers, grocers and brand marketers need to build on the behavioral elements that drive purchase now and extend experiences across screens, beyond the store, and around the clock.

2. Focus on time spent, not clicks

App downloads are slowing thanks to a maturing ecosystem, dropping 20% among the top 15 US app publishers. However, a year-end analysis by App Annie found that time spent in apps is up by 25% over last year, so clearly this medium isn’t going anywhere. Apps remain an important touchpoint with consumers, indicating that engagement and frequency of use are the most accurate success metrics.

Consumer attention is the currency in marketing and advertising today. Retailers and brand marketers need to understand that it’s time spent that matters most, not click-throughs or downloads. As a result, it makes sense to focus more on immersing existing customers into the brand experience than enticing new customers.

3.    Develop Mutually-Beneficial Campaigns for Customer and Brand

The strongest argument for interactive engagement in-store is that ‘endless aisle’ solutions benefit brands, retailers, and consumers alike. Cutting-edge marketing technology finally enables CPG marketers to achieve closed-loop attribution for their efforts, while retailers see additional foot traffic, more guidance and exploration in-store, and movement from the perimeter to the center aisles. Consumers have a more entertaining shopping experience, save money, and accumulate rewards simply for doing the shopping they’d already planned to do.

Your brand or store doesn’t have to build a record-breaking mobile app to succeed. Consider the role interactive technology plays in your current customer interactions and how delivering an out-of-the-box, endless aisle solution can deliver better results for your marketing efforts.

Marketing to shoppers in a populist era

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Incredible change has taken place in the US recently. Our country is different. The world is different. We’re in a populist era, which means things are changing for retailers, grocers and brands.

Today’s American shopper

Most Americans aren’t seeking convenience-focused services such as weekly meal boxes or online ordering. In fact, last year only 3% of Americans purchased groceries online. Most households are deeply value conscious and visit their local grocery stores 1.6x per week on average.

Many marketers live and/or work in the major urban hubs, which can be dangerous for brands and retailers. It’s clearer than ever that coastal cities operate as silos that don’t represent the country at large.

It is crucial for brands and retailers to be in touch with the communities they serve.

Most of our users at Shopkick are average income mothers from middle America looking for deals and rewards for making purchases.  Therefore, it’s crucial that our Postmates and Instacart-loving employees, based in the tech and agency hubs of New York, Chicago and Silicon Valley, understand that this segment has different needs and motivations than their own. We learn from our audience’s behavior, and we deliver the most relevant incentives for each touchpoint along their shopping journey: at home, when they are out and about, when they are near the store, and as they peruse the aisles.

One way to do this is to literally stay in touch with shoppers. Ask them what they like about a product or a store and what they don’t. Usually, it will circle back to the way it makes them feel. We are all human after all, and purchasing decisions are psychological and emotional.

Another important initiative is to help shoppers feel connected to your brand. They want to be rewarded and appreciated for spending their hard-earned money to take care of their families. Businesses need to understand and respect customers by offering products, services and experiences that align with their lifestyles.

For example, by spending in-person time with our customers and closely analyzing their in-app behavior, we know Shopkick customers are engaging with branded content and video in our app from their homes. Each user spends about 2.5 hours per month in the app – browsing products, watching videos, looking for kick earning opportunities, and planning her trip.

Respecting your audience’s motivations, budgets and behaviors does not have to come at the expense of business requirements. For example, discounts and coupons may influence shopping behavior, however they also cut into margins and could negatively impact the brand. As an alternative, offering rewards creates ‘moments of joy’ for shoppers, and those feel-good associations with your brand or store can increase purchases. We’ve found that rewards will motivate shoppers to go to a different retailer to buy favorite products, or to try a different brand than they typically purchase.

Understand and appreciate the shoppers of today to remain current and hit your goals. Leverage mobile behaviors. Recognize loyalty. Create a rewarding experience. And don’t forget to make it fun.