‘The days of indiscriminate special offers and generic promotions are numbered’

Personalisation has been talked about a lot in retail in recent years. Get it right and it’s the holy grail – something which should delight customers while making sure marketing spend reaches the right people.

But how can you genuinely personalise what you offer an individual customer when as a business you’re serving millions of customers every single week? It’s a challenge many retailers will have wrestled with. 

The answer lies in technology and the power of loyalty. This week we are launching a brand new way to reward customers. 

It’s called My Nectar Prices and what makes it so unlike anything else out there is that it brings customers personalised offers and great value on products that have been picked just for them.

It could be a staple they stock up on regularly or a new product that we think they’ll enjoy discovering and trying for the first time. 

As an industry, we’ve talked about price and value for a long time. Our mission at Sainsbury’s is to help everyone eat better and delivering outstanding value is a key part of that goal. 

Our mission is to help everyone eat better and delivering outstanding value is a key part of that goal

That’s why we have a strategy to bring customers consistently good value all year round, moving away from temporary promotions that typically benefit only a small number of shoppers. 

With My Nectar Prices, we have found a way to personalise loyalty and really reward customers with consistently great value in a way that works for them and on the products where it matters most.   

We’ve been able to build this revolutionary offer because Nectar brings us closer to our customers. It gives us unrivalled insights that help us understand exactly what they want. 

Tailored to taste

The ability to personalise rewards based on data means that My Nectar Prices are tailored to the tastes of each individual, and will be constantly refreshed and updated to keep up with however these might change. 

The way that we’ve launched My Nectar Prices reflects our commitment to help our customers shop in ways that suit them.

More and more of our customers are choosing to shop with us digitally, whether that’s because they want to reduce contact in store or they’ve become more comfortable ordering online. So we’ve chosen to start by launching the scheme on SmartShop. 

SmartShop sales were up 173% in the last financial year and in stores with handsets 30% of all sales were through the app – more than double last year. 

The technology is available in all of our supermarkets and ahead of launching My Nectar Prices we’ve been busy bringing it to almost all of our convenience stores as well, so it’s really accessible for lots of our customers. 

By making the Nectar programme more digital, we’re making things simpler and more rewarding for customers. Offers will all be in one place and we can quickly and easily update them to make sure they are really relevant to each customer and bringing them great value. 

What underpins the entire programme is giving customers access to personalised value

As this is a whole new way to reward shoppers, we’ll be listening and learning as we go along – another benefit of the relationship Nectar gives us with our customers. 

What underpins the entire programme is giving customers access to personalised value, and that means making sure what we offer works for them. 

The days of indiscriminate special offers, generic promotions and one-off events that only benefit certain groups of customers are numbered. 

What we are focused on now is using the power of Nectar to unlock new ways to give each customer every day, year-round value that is personalised to them.