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
Retail chains and consumer brands with loyalty programmes built on generic offers. This case is most useful if:
- your loyalty programme still runs on paper coupons or blanket discounts
- you hold purchase history but do not use it to personalise offers
- you have no owned digital channel that recognises individual customers
- you want loyalty to make shopping easier, not only cheaper
The Challenge
The client wanted to deepen loyalty among its most frequent, highest-value shoppers. But its loyalty programme ran on generic paper coupons and undifferentiated offers.
There was no owned digital channel that could recognise a customer's actual purchase history and make shopping genuinely easier, rather than just cheaper.
Our Approach
The team now behind ECM.DEV managed the Making Waves consultants who designed and delivered the client's loyalty app, built around three priorities.
- Useful services: a smarter shopping list combining recipes and offers, with personalised purchase suggestions drawn from each member's household purchase history.
- Attractive benefits: personalised digital coupons replacing paper ones, with offers moving from quarterly to every two weeks and an algorithm selecting the most relevant products from a pool of around 300.
- Relevant dialogue: offers and notifications targeted to each customer's real purchase history rather than generic marketing blasts.
Impact
10% more turnover. App users increased their store visits and turnover by 10% in the first 12 months, against 5% for a comparable segment without the app.
Better coupon performance. Digital coupon redemption ran 5 to 10 percentage points higher than paper coupons.
Strong adoption. 190,000 downloads, third place in the App Store and a Top 10 position for weeks, with daily active users growing roughly fivefold.
Industry recognition. The work was submitted as a case study for Gulltaggen, Norway's leading digital marketing awards.
Personalisation paid off here because it made shopping easier first. The discounts followed the shopping list, not the other way round.
Managed by the team lead at Making Waves (later NoA Ignite); the app's design and build was carried out by that consultant team, not personally. Any public information referenced here is used for identification and does not imply endorsement.
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