Grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and
Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food continues to garner customers, drive top-line sales,
and bottom-line profits. Regular readers of this blog have been reading about
the continued success that Casey’s General
Stores have had ever since the first test experiment they had with
pizza. What a 15-year run it has been.
According to Steven Johnson Grocerant Guru®
at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice
Solutions®, “Casey’s has become as dynamic as their customers. Caseys was one of the first convenience store
chains to understand that their consumers were not static. They understood that if you do not evolve
with your customer’s, you will lose them.”
Linda Lisanti wrote a
piece for CSNews
that was outstanding on how the Casey’s
is moving with consumers, what they learned, that consumers is very small towns
are evolving much faster than many might believe. The team at Foodservice Solutions® thinks you
should read what Linda wrote.
Thank you, Linda for another
great article, here it is:
Art
Sebastian of Casey’s
General Stores Inc. recently got a change in job title, going from vice
president of digital experiences to vice president of omnichannel marketing.
While this may seem like a minor change, it is indicative of a much larger transformation
that's currently underway at the nation's third-largest convenience store
chain.
"If
you think about it in simple terms, we spent our first 50 years as a company in
a single channel. The guests came to our store, they turned left or right; one
way to shop us," said Sebastian, who joined the Ankeny-based chain of
2,500-plus stores in 2018.
Under
his leadership over the last four and a half years, Casey's has evolved into a multichannel
company that gives its guests multiple ways to transact with the brand,
including a proprietary mobile app, a website, and third-party delivery
services such as DoorDash and Uber Eats.
"Where
we're evolving to now moving forward is omnichannel. And omnichannel is this
seamless integration of branding and messaging across digital and physical
touchpoints, enabling a cohesive marketing experience wherever our guest
goes," Sebastian explained.
Do You Want a Larger Share of Wallet
Larger Share of Stomach
A
Chicago native, he has been pleasantly surprised by how quickly Casey's guests
have embraced technology. The chain operates in 16 states and half of its
stores are in towns with a population of 5,000 or less. "I will bust the
myth that rural America doesn't use technology. They do. And that's proven to
us statistically in the fact that 6.3 million rewards members have downloaded
our app and elected to engage with us digitally," he said.
The
retailer partners with Punchh for its industry-leading Casey's
Rewards program, which has a monthly active member base of 50 percent. For
customer relationship management, Casey's works with Salesforce to maintain its
marketing cloud through which all outbound messaging is sent, and its customer
data platform (CDP) where all customer data is unified and organized.
"Our
goal is to acquire guests through the marketing funnel. And as we move them
through the funnel, we're going to engage them and retain them and then move
them all the way to becoming a best guest, which is our rewards member that
subscribes to our marketing channels and interacts with us online, in the store
and at the pump," Sebastian said.
Through
its CDP, Casey's is able to know everything about the behavior of its rewards
members — from how they interact with an email, to what they browse
on the retailer's website and mobile app, to how and when they transact in
the stores.
The
next step in its journey to omnichannel marketing is personalization. However,
getting to the point of sending one personalized message to one consumer is a
multistep process.
"Anyone
who says they're all the way to personalization is fibbing a little bit,"
Sebastian acknowledged. "In marketing, [there's] mass marketing; one
message to all. Then, there's segmented marketing, which I would say is one to
some. And then, there's that full grail where it's one message to one consumer.
So, it's a spectrum of personalization and we're sitting in the middle in a big
way, with an early start into this one-to-one [space]."
For
instance, now when Casey's sends an email to a guest, they are addressed by
name — what Sebastian calls "the simplest form of
personalization." And the company is leveraging artificial intelligence to
understand what marketing channel each guest responds to the most.
"Maybe
you ignore emails from us, but you open up SMSs [texts] and click through. And
maybe, as we've learned and got to know you, we realized that you opened those
SMSs at 8 p.m., where a million other people open it at 7:30 a.m. And so, we
have that piece. And then, we know that Linda responds to pepperoni pizza
visuals, where the rest of the world responds to supreme [pizza]. So, we find a
way to make it tailored and relevant to you as an individual," he
explained.
In
addition, as Casey's studies its guests and learns more about their purchase
behaviors, the retailer is now able to uncover "automated triggers"
that can be used to engage each guest and entice more purchases from them. The
more data insights available, the more opportunities at hand.
"We
know that Linda has this behavior where she orders pizza every seven and a half
days. We can begin engaging you appropriately at six days to make sure we're
top of mind and you're aware of whatever the latest promotion is. And what
we're seeing by doing that level of marketing — this triggered
automation — is we're closing the days between purchase cycle,"
shared Sebastian.
Ultimately,
Casey's omnichannel journey is expected to result in more share of wallet for
the retailer, more share of stomach and more share of mind with consumers.
Foodservice Solutions® team is here to
help you drive top line sales and bottom-line profits. Are you looking
a customer ahead? Visit GrocerantGuru.com for more information or contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us Remember success does leave clues and we just may the clue
you need to propel your continued success.
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