UK supermarkets top the charts for marketing personalisation, with one in five (21%) UK consumers saying they offer “excellent” targeted comms, ranking them higher than any other industry.
Retailers including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda have impressed shoppers thanks to their targeted use of thousands of customer data points, gathered via loyalty schemes, online shopping platforms and in-store purchases.
The report, from Optmizely, shows that supermarkets are making the most of their unparalleled access to information about customer shopping habits, preferences and demographics, with personalising marketing driving higher customer engagement and satisfaction.
Tesco was the first of the UK’s big grocery retailers to tap into loyalty cards, introducing its Clubcard in 1995. The move quickly led to a 28% uplift in spending, leading other supermarkets to follow suit by introducing their own iterations of the scheme.
“Supermarkets benefit from having access to a huge amount of data – from purchase frequency to brand preferences. But access to data means absolutely nothing if it is not used in the right way,” said Optimizely president Shafqat Islam.
“Other industries are sitting on similar data goldmines, they are just struggling to connect the dots in the same way grocers are.”
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Entertainment gaming and sports (21%) came second in terms of data optimisation, followed by health and wellness (14%), banks and financial services (13%) and hotels and accommodation (13%).
Industries with the worst personalisation included transport (16%), utilities (15%), real estate and property (15%), automotive (13%) and charity (13%).
The survey also found that three quarters of marketers believe that experimentation is the key to creating better personalised content, and that those who fail to incorporate the strategy could fall behind.
“However, through continuous experimentation and ongoing refinement of personalisation strategies, every industry can use first-party data to create meaningful digital experiences that resonate with every single consumer,” Islam added.
