As Denmark’s largest retailer, The Salling Group serves over 11 million customers per week and operates more than 1,400 retail locations including restaurants, discount, grocery stores and coffee shops.
In this week’s episode, Tom reviews the interview between Paula and Andras Szocs, Head of Customer Programs and Center of Excellence for The Salling Group (at the time of original publication in February 2022)
Hear how they arrived at taking the less traditional route with this company-wide, fully-integrated digital marketing program, while keeping the program unique to the brands.
Weaving in digital payments, coupons and gamification into the individual brand apps, The Salling Group apps have more than 1.2 million users in just over one year.
Hosted by Tom Peace.
2) Andras Szocs
3) #183: Denmark’s Salling Group Customer Program’s Highly Successful Launch
Paula: Welcome to Lets Talk Loyalty, an Industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals. I’m Paula Thomas, the Founder of Let’s Talk Loyalty. Today’s episode is hosted by Tom Peace. Managing Director of The Loyalty People, a strategic consultancy with a laser focus on loyalty, CRM, and customer engagement.
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Tom: Hi, I’m Tom Peace, Managing Director of The Loyalty People and Presenter of Let’s Talk A Little Loyalty. Welcome to this week’s five minute summary show, on behalf of Let’s Talk Loyalty, this week, my Let’s Talk a little loyalty podcast showcases Paula’s interview with, and Andras Szocs, Head of Customer Programs and Center of Excellence for the Salling Group.
Andras is no longer with the Salling Group, but this does not diminish the fact that as an amazing program, digitally integrated across restaurants, grocery discount stores, and coffee shops. From launch Salling Group grew membership to 1.2 million members in just the first year. Listen on to find out how.
Firstly, Salling needed to move away from a paper-based advertising format to a more personalized and omnichannel communication tool. They needed to innovate. Andras didn’t want a traditional point based program that would quickly turn into a hygiene factor and create financial liability on the group’s PnL, Andras needed to think differently.
As Andras says in the interview that margins in grocery are not generous and therefore the value to the customer in terms of points or discounts can’t be too great. Andras wanted to give back to the customer by creating personalized offers, great experiences, fun games, and targeted communication that really engage the customer directly.
Andras also goes on to talk about how Salling Group is not a consumer brand, the customers in the individual brands to not identify with the group business, so they needed individual brand program. However, a most vital priority was the collection of the data at a group level. Not an easy task, but Salling and their partner, Cheetah Digital, set out to achieve this and achieve it, they did.
The customer data is vitally important in the success of a program like this, and, and Andras understands that using the data across different formats to structure highly personalized and relevant offers is absolutely key to success. Solving these challenges is tough. You can’t have individual programs sharing data, and you also want to make the solution simple for the customer.
So the solution, a customer app with all the individual brand programs and a cardlink solution where all transaction made with a registered card across all the brand formats are collected into a central database. From this central database Salling Group can build a strong overall picture of the customer.
And provide an enriched and personalized experience. Well done Andras and the Salling Group on an excellent and truly innovative solution. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed this summary. I’d really recommend listening to the main show. All the best, and speak soon. Tom.
Paula: This show is sponsored by The Wise Marketer, the world’s most popular source of loyalty marketing, news, insights, and research. The Wise Marketer also offers loyalty marketing training through its loyalty academy, which is already certified, over 500 executives in 38 countries as certified loyalty marketing professionals. For more information check out thewisemarketer.com and loyaltyacademy.org.
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