French retail group Carrefour has launched a new, integrated shopper data, personalisation and media platform aimed at improving customer relations and enabling suppliers to align their offers with customer expectations.
Digital acceleration
The new digital platform, Carrefour Links, aims to provide customers with a more relevant shopper experience, both in physical stores and online. The retailer can draw upon what is the largest data lake in Europe with 65 billion transactions, according to group director of data, e-commerce and digital transformation Elodie Perthuisot. In recent years, Carrefour has developed many of its own solutions in the field of data and digital. The group is now making these available to its trading partners. The platform will be rolled out internationally.
“In 2020, we have seen an acceleration of our digital solutions. Carrefour.fr is now the most visited food website in France, with 15 million unique visitors per month. Based on data, brands will be able to propose better offers, for example, or address our customers’ irritations in real time, and improve the performance of all our commercial actions.” According to Carrefour, the new solution meets the expectations of customers – 80% of them desire more personalisation – but also of brands, which want to reach their buyers in a more efficient way. “Our websites and our apps have become powerful media, our customers are omnichannel, our loyalty programmes are already highly digitised,” she says. Of course, this is also an additional source of revenue for the retailer. According to Carrefour, the retail media market is worth around 30 billion euros worldwide and is estimated to grow by 30% this year.
Like Netflix
Carrefour is digitising its marketing with innovative concepts, such as the leaflets that can now also be viewed on YouTube. “We can measure that 20% of our store sales are already influenced by our digital marketing. 23% of the products that end up in the shopping basket on our e-commerce sites are the result of recommendations by our algorithms,” Perthuisot said. Carrefour has also developed an algorithm that provides franchise and proximity stores with weekly assortment recommendations. “We compare those stores with other stores that have the same profile and customer base. It works like Netflix‘s recommendations.” Brands are given the tools to personalise their promotions and discount vouchers.
Concretely, Carrefour Links offers its partners four types of solutions: Capture (which allows a brand to find new customers and prospects); Convert (to improve conversion throughout the buying journey with the right offer at the right time); Converse (to develop lasting relationships with Carrefour customers) and Comprehend (to drive the business based on a 360-degree view of the customer’s buying journey). The retailer set up the new platform in collaboration with three partners: Google, Criteo (world leader in retail media) and LiveRamp (data connectivity platform).
