Shopper Loyalty Makes Personalization Possible in Grocery with SAP, Emarsys and Annex Cloud

4 minute read
Shopper Loyalty Makes Personalization Possible in Grocery with SAP, Emarsys and Annex Cloud

Loyalty solutions enable brands to incentivize valuable information exchange to create a more complete shopper profile-helping to solve common acquisition and attribution challenges in grocery.

Many grocers accelerated digital transformation as a response to the pandemic, launching mobile apps, BOPIS and online delivery in short timelines. Meeting customers where they are generated a massive amount of data from several new and existing channels. However, fragmented profiles and missed opportunities to capture individual shopper data has also created risk when forecasting and executing product promotions. With shrinking margins, marketers are hard pressed to maintain and decrease customer acquisition costs. The average household buys groceries from 4 different retailers, so retention and personalization are more important than ever to optimizing marketing spend.

Grocery has the potential to offer more omnichannel individualized experiences as brands shift from survival to strategy regarding personalization. Brands using customer data to provide the precise products a consumer needs is the most important consideration, when it comes to personal data, according to nearly a third of US shoppers. 62% want retailers to strike a better balance between collecting data and improving experiences (Emarsys). Now, with the ever-changing data privacy landscape, grocers need to learn about shoppers through zero- and first-party data to provide personalization that increases revenue and retention.

Turnkey Solutions for Enterprise Customers

Annex Cloud’s Loyalty Experience Platform creates a solution for capturing shopper data to increase product offer and marketing tactic effectiveness.


Introducing out-of-the-box functionality that empowers category and marketing managers with omnichannel progressive profiling to ensure customer-centric product offers hit the mark. This unified solution has the potential to feed predictive models, enable automation, identify new markets, and facilitate basket analysis to optimize category assortment. This partnership for grocers enriches shopper data for robust personalization required to deliver on customer expectations.

The SAP Customer Activity Repository with PMR

  • Enables consistent calculation of consumer prices and promotional offers for each basket at any touchpoint
  • Designs promotions and offers in-line with customer preferences and financial objectives
  • Creates what-if simulations to predict financial performance and leverage vendor funding to maximize margins from trade funds
  • Provides real-time inventory visibility and on-shelf availability

When paired with the SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement Platform, grocers can:

  • Bring product intelligence together with customer marketing data to execute omnichannel campaigns
  • Understand customer lifecycle stages and lifetime value for improved segmentation
  • Analyze engagement to drive personalization of tailored content and offers with AI
  • Execute marketing automation at scale to increase efficacy

Integrating the Annex Cloud Loyalty Engagement Platform unlocks:

  • Compliant zero/first party data collection across channels
  • Mapping of customer behaviors to customer profiles in both systems
  • Incentivizing and rewarding loyalty activities, such as completing a survey or uploading a receipt to discover individual and household preferences to feed predictive models
  • Ingesting real-time events to trigger automation of tactics to pre-defined segments based on demographics, behaviors or preferences

SAP and Emarsys customers access shopper data in-platform, creating an uninterrupted user experience that empowers respective teams with relevant information required to meet and exceed goals.
“Our customers need their marketing solutions to be flexible and agile to keep up with changing market conditions. By giving marketers the ability to work with market-leading providers, like our partner Annex Cloud, we are opening the power of omnichannel personalization; so we can continue to empower marketers to unlock value, scale and innovation for omnichannel customer engagement” said Sara Richter, CMO at SAP Emarsys.

Erin Raese, SVP GTM at Annex Cloud, believes “it is imperative in today’s landscape for brands to responsibly use customer data for a symbiotic relationship that motivates behaviors and drives results. SAP and Emarsys have an incredible platform for category and marketing management in grocery. With Annex Cloud focused on providing best-in-class loyalty management, grocers will be on the forefront of personalization, delivering true value to shoppers.”

This seamless solution by SAP, Emarsys, and Annex Cloud for category managers, marketing managers, customer experiences teams and beyond to capture shopper data and create personalized experiences is now available for current and future SAP customers.

About Annex Cloud

For more than 10 years, Annex Cloud has been the worldwide leader in technology that transforms customer loyalty experiences for global enterprises. Powered by the comprehensive, agile and scalable Loyalty Experience Platform™ solution suite, Annex Cloud customers can capture and act on zero- and first-party data to seamlessly engage, recognize, reward and add value across the entire customer journey—from awareness to purchase to retention, loyalty and advocacy. More than 125 integrations with market-leading technologies enable consistent, personalized, omnichannel experiences. The platform is SaaS-based and highly configurable, eliminating the need for costly, time-consuming development. For more information regarding the SAP, Emarsys and Annex Cloud solution for grocers, please visit https://go.annexcloud.com/resource/sap-grocery-overview.

About Emarsys, an SAP company

Emarsys, an SAP company, is the omnichannel customer engagement platform that empowers marketers to build, launch, and scale personalized, cross-channel campaigns that drive business outcomes.

We partner with more than 1,500 companies from global enterprises to fast-moving mid-market brands across industries.

To learn more about SAP Emarsys, visit www.emarsys.com.

About SAP

SAP’s strategy is to help every business run as an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. As a market leader in enterprise application software, we help companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: SAP customers generate 87% of total global commerce. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers’ businesses into intelligent enterprises. SAP helps give people and organizations deep business insight and fosters collaboration that helps them stay ahead of their competition. We simplify technology for companies so they can consume our software the way they want – without disruption. Our end-to-end suite of applications and services enables business and public customers across 25 industries globally to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, SAP helps the world run better and improve people’s lives. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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