Boots has clinched the top spot in Retail Week Indicator’s marketing metric on the strength of its loyalty scheme, the Boots Advantage Card.
Since it was launched in 1997, the loyalty card has become a firm favourite among female shoppers – today, over 85% of women in the UK over 15 are active users of the card, with 14.4 million active users overall.
Speaking at Retail Week Live in March, Boots UK boss Seb James said the retailer’s loyalty scheme offered it “an extraordinary capacity to understand our customer base”.
The retailer already uses this data to understand the shopper and give them tailored information and offers; however, James has big plans to turn Boots into a personalisation pioneer.
“We can infer pretty much everything about you, including what you worry about, from your purchase behaviour, but we don’t do that at the moment. If we did it well we could actually end up building a bag for you that was really suited to your needs,” he said.
Understanding its customers
Boots already uses its Advantage Card information to improve customer experience and make business operations more efficient.
Boots head of personalisation and loyalty Dave Robinson says it uses the data to “track and understand customers’ purchasing and shopping behaviour in stores and online” and offer users “value on the brands and categories we know are relevant to them and avoid talking about offers which are not”.
“We are currently able to see what our customers look at on boots.com and connect that to the purchasing insight from Advantage Card, helping us create more relevant offers and information for the individual,” he says.
Boots also uses its Advantage Card data to influence wider business decisions, such as “where to stock certain brands or which ranges to increase or decrease in distribution.”
Creating a personalisation pioneer
Boots has bold plans to get the most out of its data.
Google UK director of retail and technology Martijn Bertisen says data is at the core of marketing success.
“The race right now is how to leapfrog the competition by getting your data – online and offline data, marketing insight, CRM data, onsite analytics – into one place where you can get insights that will enable retailers to make real-time decisions and undertake real-time storytelling to consumers based on information they’ve shared,” he says.
“Retailers that are doing marketing sophistication really well are seeing revenue growth of up to 20% and are building efficiencies of up to 30%,” he says, referring to a study carried out by Boston Consulting Group commissioned by Google.
James says Boots’ level of knowledge on its customers has the potential to set it apart from its rivals.
“We know what [our shoppers] think about themselves and we can use that information to find the newest product and exciting services which can really solve whatever problem they think they have,” he says.
“If you are a regular shopper with us, we know your hair colour, skin tone, what you feel works well for you and that allows us to make some predictions about new products that are coming out which might really suit you.”
James wants to find out even more about its customers, such as their health goals, skincare concerns and trends that they follow, which he says will “help us make Boots an even better place to shop for them”.
He plans to use this information to predict what shoppers want and what they will like.
“By understanding a customer’s shopping pattern over time, there’s an opportunity for us to predict what they are likely to need, and what they are likely to be interested in.
“This creates some intriguing possibilities to make the shopping journey much quicker and simpler, but we’d also be able to help our customers discover new brands or products by presenting items we can be fairly confident they’ll be interested in.”
