As household budgets are squeezed tighter, Australians are changing retailers and brands for better value, convenience and availability.

Shopper loyalty is being tested more than ever. Reeling from a tsunami of interest rate hikes as the cost-of-living bites hard, we’re focusing more on what we fill our trolleys with – and when. Three-quarters of Australians are worried about the cost of food and groceries and now always compare prices while four in five are stocking up on sale items.

Seven in 10 are brand switching for new benefits and two-thirds say retailer/own-label products are a good alternative. 

Retailers and marketers are responding by shifting budgets to digital channels but are challenged with:

• Reaching the right audience.
• An increasingly fragmented media landscape.
• Pressures media spend returns.
• The imminent deprecation of cookies.

So how can you identify where to spend in a fragmented and soon-to-be cookie-less digital ecosystem? You must be broad targeting to retain existing buyers and acquire new ones, so accessing smarter data that identifies and reaches high-propensity shoppers is a game-changer.

But many brands and retailers don’t have the purchase data needed to target shoppers or attract new customers at scale, while others rely on outdated demographic or contextual targeting tactics. Those with loyalty programs have first-party data useful for targeting existing shoppers but are challenged to reach relevant audiences at scale, and target prospects who can but don’t currently shop at the banner/segment.

Get smarter with sales-based data to identify your high-propensity digital audience 

A sales-based digital audience comprises potential customers who’ve already shown some level of interest in your product either through previous brand/product purchase/interactions or modelled propensity to purchase (a statistical technique used to predict the likelihood of an individual to engage in a specific behaviour, such as purchasing a certain product). A high-propensity audience (like Circana ProScores) is very effective at digital promotion, increasing conversions, improving engagement and gaining valuable customer insights.

Purchase-based targeting delivers precision audience figures based on actual purchases, improves your media spend with effective targeting and uncovers your brand’s next best buyers. For example, an FMCG brand wanted to understand how first and third-party, contextual and purchase-based audiences drove offline sales. Outside their first-party matched data (+13 per cent lift), Circana ProScores audiences drove a 9.9 per cent sales lift. Targeting audiences powered by both data panels reached higher-quality spending households. Circana audiences were 1.5 to six times more effective than other purchased-based data sources delivering US$3.8 million in incremental sales and 11 per cent incremental ROI. 

The opportunity is ripe to build and activate audiences by using household purchase behaviour

This is the most efficient means to drive return on media spend. We worked with a premium coffee brand wanting to grow packaged coffee through an email campaign. Its large CRM database lacked precision purchase behaviour data of both its customers and of the overall category, but it needed to reach coffee lovers with a higher propensity to buy its products to:

• Drive a higher return on advertising and achieve greater precision in marketing execution while eliminating inefficient ‘spray and pray’ media spend.
• Increase reach and relevance across a wide range of media channels and demand-side platforms.
• Pre-optimise campaigns to empower media buyers and planners to activate channels, format and other buying tactics with confidence.

To determine each household’s predicted spend, Circana ProScores forecast heavy and light buyers of the product and category offering 2.1 million coffee buyers additional loyalty rewards and a $2 discount coupon. The campaign revealed the brand should continue to leverage bonus loyalty rewards for both heavy and light spenders and only direct $2 off coupons to light spenders to encourage consumption. The ability to target more effectively and deploy advertising spend with greater efficiency saw 227 per cent ROI, a 13 per cent sales lift in the light spender segment, and a 10 per cent sales lift for heavy spenders. 

Investment in valuable data is not a cost, but a powerful solution to deliver ROI

Identifying high-propensity shoppers is key to growth and loyalty through this cost-of-living crisis. Can you afford to be targeting browsers, not people? Your most loyal customer still shops elsewhere, but propensity scores can help you find additional shoppers who will value your product or offer – even if they haven’t been heavy purchasers from you in the past.

Drawing on the Circana Shopper Panel – Australia’s largest shopper panel of nearly 14,000 households, combined with nationwide demographic, psychographic behavioural data dimensions and linear modelling across categories, sub-categories and brands – Circana ProScores builds discrete scores for product categories enabling businesses to better target shoppers with a propensity to buy. This is based on a broad range of detailed and complex factors identifying those consumers most likely to purchase a brand’s products. These unique audiences are packaged up and available for activation via several publishers and DSPs. Circana has partnered with leading industry providers and is supported by reputable media platforms to reach most consumers across Australia directly in an efficient, rapid and scalable way.