Overview
A personalized shopping and loyalty app for a Nordic grocery chain's most valuable customers, combining smart shopping lists, algorithm-driven digital coupons and purchase-history-based recommendations.
Who This Is For
Online retailers, subscription businesses, book clubs, consumer platforms, or B2C organisations with 50,000-2,000,000+ customers and transaction data spanning multiple years. Investing in email, content, and digital advertising but relying on broad audience targeting rather than data-driven segmentation.
The Challenge
The client wanted to deepen loyalty among its most frequent, highest-value shoppers, but its existing loyalty programme ran through generic paper coupons and undifferentiated offers. There was no owned digital channel that could recognise an individual customer's actual purchase history and make shopping genuinely easier, rather than just cheaper.
What We Propose
Russell managed the team of Making Waves consultants who designed and delivered the client's loyalty app, built around three reinforcing priorities: useful services, a smarter shopping list combining recipes and offers, with personalised purchase suggestions drawn from each loyalty member's household purchase history; attractive benefits, personalised digital discount coupons replacing paper coupons and increasing offer frequency from quarterly to every two weeks, with an algorithm selecting the most relevant products from a pool of around 300; and relevant dialogue, offers and notifications targeted to each customer's real purchase history rather than generic marketing blasts.
Why It Matters
Real, measured results - 190,000 downloads, third place in the App Store and a Top 10 position for weeks; daily active users grew roughly fivefold. Measurable commercial impact - app users increased their store visits and turnover by 10% in the first 12 months, against 5% for a comparable customer segment without the app, and digital coupon redemption ran 5-10 percentage points higher than paper coupons. Recognised by the industry - the work was submitted as a case study for Gulltaggen, Norway's leading digital marketing awards.
Russell managed the team of Making Waves consultants delivering this engagement. The app's design and build was carried out by that team, not by Russell personally. Any public information referenced here is used for identification and does not imply endorsement.
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