Members of Boots’ loyalty scheme – the Advantage Card – expect it to use their data to target them with personalised messages across all channels, according to the retailer’s director of customer loyalty, Ruth Spencer.
Spencer, who was speaking at IBM’s Smarter Commerce Global Summit held in Madrid this week, said high-street retailers had to change to keep up with these new consumer expectations.
“Customers now believe [the company] uses its insight. They think ‘you’ve got my data, I expect you use it’,” she said.
Boots uses Unica’s marketing software solution – owned by IBM – for quarterly loyalty programme statements and in-store kiosk marketing programmes. Agency Lida handles marketing for the scheme.
The solution helps the retailer to determine how best to contact a customer and the frequency of doing so by analysing a consumer’s preferences and balancing this with the business’ marketing goals.
Spencer said that Boots’ Advantage Card scheme, which has 17.8 million members, allows the company to know what a customer is buying and to detect trends from their buying history.
“We can see if someone went to Boots to buy a few everyday products and then bought a sandwich [just because they were in the store] or vice versa,” she said.
Another big shift for retailers is the ability to use social media and mobile.
“With social media we read through things that are written about Boots and if we find something of interest then we do an analysis on it.
“Retailers should not be afraid to adapt their websites for mobile. However, they have to focus on what consumers are really going to use the website for, such as store locations – not a big basket shop,” she added.
