The grocery market is changing

The landscape of the grocery market is changing rapidly, away from a reliance on large supermarkets offering in-store shopping experiences towards more and more online purchases in various forms. Due to this increasing trend towards online experiences, digital receipt validation and other such promotions have become an incredibly important and useful part of shopper marketing.

A recent report from Cardlytics – ‘How is Grocery Spend Changing Across Meal Kits, Specialty, Delivery, Traditional & Discount’ – notes that less traditional methods of grocery shopping have grown consistently in the last few years, and taken a chunk out of the market for traditional in-store grocery shopping.

Firstly, discount grocery has grown between 8 and 10% each year from 2015-2017. With a rapid rise in the number and variety of stores offering discount grocery, customers have become increasingly attracted to the opportunity to do their grocery shopping at a cheaper rate. Naturally, this has affected the market shares of the larger, more mainstream stores. For example, traditional grocery spend and number of unique shoppers has decreased by nearly 3%, beginning in autumn 2017. It is here then that stores have the opportunity to use promotions such as digital receipt validation to lure and entice shoppers into their premises. Shopper marketing, while always having been important, has now become a vital and indispensable tool for attracting new customers.

SwiftReceipt offers an efficient and easy service to help customers receive their rewards instantly, and to help brands market to prospective customers.

With the increase in popularity of online grocery and food services, the traditional methods of grocery shopping have faced a new threat. While only 4.6% of consumers use convenience channels such as delivery or meal kits, grocery delivery has taken a sizeable and immediate bite out of in-store sales. Online grocery delivery has seen constant and consistent customer acquisition growth.

The report shows that traditional grocery customers gained in the first two months of the new year are retained the most in the following year. Therefore, January and February become critical to the acquisition of new customers. Using SwiftReceipt to lure in customers, stores can make up for the post-Christmas dip in customers and spending.