The Co-op Group is one of the UK’s leading food retailers. In March 2019, it launched its first online delivery service for groceries. Its new digital approach required the chain to speed up its e-commerce strategy, with the goal to more than double its online sales from £70M to £200M by the end of 2020.
The challenge:
Due to the physical restrictions and changing customer needs following the pandemic, the UK saw a surge in fast-track grocery delivery services. Co-op had to overcome the challenge of competitors offering ongoing discounts and hard-to-beat delivery times. As a result, it saw an 80% drop in customers after their first delivery service.
The approach:
To combat this, and ensure Co-op achieved its financial targets for 2020, MiQ was selected as a strategic partner to help boost online sales and presence by running advanced performance campaigns. With the aim to increase the number of new online delivery customers, MiQ rolled out effective audience targeting and promoted Co-op’s campaign message.
To increase share of voice in the competitive food delivery landscape, using advanced competitor conquesting strategies with its proprietary Google Sync (G-Sync) solution, MiQ was able to leverage Co-op’s Google trends API and combine the data with real-time activation to sync against selected keyword sets. Included in this sync were traditional Co-op competitors and new delivery competitors.
MiQ then leveraged new-to-market anonymised mobile data through its partnership with Skyrise Intelligence. The mobile data included locations, interests, demography, and app usage of over 20m UK handsets. Using this data, MiQ was able to identify audience clusters of users of Co-op’s competitor mobile apps.
It then built out highly targeted audience segments at postcode level before layering on its existing datasets and expertise, to create high converting audience segments. MiQ’s expertise and compatibility in performance-led to campaign success across both competitor strategies with 10% conversion rate higher than baseline using G-Sync strategy.
The results:
Co-op saw a 1.9% increase compared to average conversion rate after mid-campaign refresh to sync against the most recent/trending keywords.
With support from Skyrise Intelligence and data it provided, it was possible to achieve a 1.5% higher than average conversion rate across the competitor audience.
“Our programmatic strategy with MiQ has evolved significantly over the last two years and has been a shining star of audience identity innovation within our media strategy. The results speak for themselves and give us a great platform from which to build as we continue to explore alternatives to cookie-based targeting solutions.” Kirsty Stewart, Digital Client Account Director, Dentsu.
We always love hearing from companies that have been able to leverage the powers of performance marketing – we’ll be celebrating more of these efforts at the 2022 Performance Marketing Awards, so make sure you sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date.