Southeastern Grocers eyes more effective promotions

Southeastern Grocers is building on efforts to personalize customer engagement by making its promotions more effective.

The parent of Winn-Dixie, Bi-Lo, Harveys and Fresco y Más supermarkets, Southeastern Grocers in June implemented the Eagle Eye Solutions AIR Platform to create a central hub for continuously capturing customer data and interactions across retail channels, with a goal of improving personalization. Now Toronto-based Eagle Eye is collaborating with consumer data science specialist dunnhumby to help the retailer gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviors and preferences.

With Eagle Eye’s AIR now in place to power the interactions and process shopper data, the next phase of Southeastern Grocers’ personalization strategy will have dunnhumby technology analyze that information to identify the offers most relevant to specific shoppers and most likely to deliver positive sales outcomes, the companies said.

“Our commitment to providing our customers value has never been greater or more important in today’s environment,” Adam Kirk, senior vice president of marketing at Jacksonville, Fla.-based Southeastern Grocers, said in a statement. “We are working hard to ensure our offers and promotions are as relevant as possible to each customer by tailoring to their spending habits and day-to-day needs.”

Related:Southeastern Grocers aims to lasso customer data for omnichannel push

Dunnhumby’s data insight will enable Southeastern Grocers to know which shoppers are likely to respond to specific deals and CPG brand offers — including item availability at specific store locations and times of day — and offer targeted promotions and rewards via its website and mobile app. That will help the grocery chain raise promotional efficacy and incremental customer spend, in turn driving sales growth and shopper loyalty, Eagle Eye and dunnhumby said. 

“Achieving personalization at the scale required for retailers to successfully compete for the hearts, minds and wallets of shoppers depends on having all customer data connected with insights available in a single place,” explained Jose Gomes, president of North America in the Chicago officer of London-based dunnhumby. “Working with Eagle Eye, we can provide SEG with intelligent analysis and recommendations to best engage with their customers to drive optimal results.”

According to Eagle Eye CEO Tim Mason, “By collaborating with dunnhumby, we can deliver offers designed to drive one more product per visit, one more item per basket, or one more visit per customer, ultimately delivering an uplift in sales.”

Related:Southeastern Grocers to sell 23 stores to Alex Lee, B&T Foods

In the first phase of its deployment with Southeastern Grocers earlier this summer, Eagle Eye worked with Chicago-based Ecrebo to enable “the coupons-at-receipt channel,” serving up relevant, personalized coupons printed on each receipt at store checkout as well as digital coupons delivered to shoppers’ mobile wallets. Eagle Eye said its software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution helped the retailer tackle the challenge of connecting customer data and establishing a digital marketing infrastructure that can process and analyze millions of transactions in real time — a critical capability amid a pandemic that’s reshaping grocery shopping habits.

“With dunnhumby, we’ve accelerated execution on Southeastern Grocers' retail vision and are on track to deliver a complete omnichannel strategy in record time,” Mason commented. “Our culture of rapid innovation and the speed of implementation to date means the retailer can get much more out of the customer data they already have. Now Southeastern Grocers can connect new channels and data to grow share of wallet by understanding customers’ preferences and habits.”

Overall, Southeastern Grocers operates about 500 grocery stores in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina.