Shopper marketing blog

If you have been working in eCommerce for an FMCG company for any length of time, then you will already know how important ratings and reviews are to shoppers. In this blog article, we talk about how important it is not only to have product reviews on all the online supermarket websites but also that they need to be kept fresh.

Shoppers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their approach to ratings and reviews and have adapted their use of them over time. Today, to be influenced into buying a product shoppers not only need to see a good number of reviews (at least 30) but critically those reviews need to be recent (certainly less than 1 year, ideally less than 6 months old). To do this you need to ensure you continuously add reviews to your products ensuring the latest ones are constantly fresh.

The top reasons for keeping your reviews fresh are*:

• 97% of shoppers consider review recency as relevant when considering a purchase
• 86% of shoppers feel that review recency is more important when considering a product or brand they haven’t purchased before
• 62% would not purchase a product if the only reviews available were published a year or more ago.
• The number of reviews displayed by retailers has been growing, for example, the average number of reviews on ASDA.com has grown from 6 to 29 in 2 years
• As most shoppers only read between 1 and 10 reviews, recent unfavourable reviews can unfairly impact shoppers' perception of your brand or product

Join Andrew Pearl VP Strategy and Insight EMEA at eCommerce performance analytics company Profitero and Paul Lees our Group Managing Director at CheckoutSmart, as they discuss fascinating original research on grocery ratings and reviews.

This study was specifically undertaken in the UK amongst over 3,700 online grocery shoppers to support the understanding of FMCG leaders and eCommerce teams, by answering their questions:

As a leading digital shopper marketing agency, we are always looking to extend our understanding of the ever-changing grocery shopping environment. Recently we undertook a survey of regular grocery shoppers to understand how they shop on Tesco online and what they think about their experience.

The feedback tells us that there is opportunity for Tesco.com to grow faster but also some significant threats in the wings. Everything we asked has been collated into a comprehensive 20-page report which is available to download. We have pulled the highlights together into a summary SWOT analysis below, together with a few examples of the charts in the download.

If you would like the full report it is available to download here.

We surveyed members of CheckoutSmart to understand their experiences of shopping during Covid-19 and their views on how their behaviour will change when things "more or less return to normal". In total 4,324 members responded, over 3,100 of whom are also online grocery shoppers. 

The survey focused on how their grocery shopping experience had changed pre and during Covid-19 restrictions and their personal expectations on how their behaviour will change going forward. This blog article contains a summary of the most relevant results. More detail on specific topics may be available, please contact us to hear more.

The most significant finding is that online shopping could still grow even faster post Covid if retailers can address the two major concerns shoppers have of slot availability (which is surely just a matter of time) and the cost of delivery which must surely come down with scale and the the recent move by Amazon. 

With all the pressure from retailers and the fact that many brands have postponed their FMCG NPD launches until the second half of the year, we thought it would be helpful to review the shopper marketing options available to support NPD in supermarkets.

For those new to working with the major supermarket retailers in the UK, navigating your way through the variety of shopper marketing options can seem like the proverbial minefield. We've spent the best many years working for FMCG suppliers and supporting them as an agency. With our collective experience, we have broken down the pros and cons of each option in the hopes it will help you identify the best course for your product's unique marketing challenge.

We've grouped our thoughts under the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself when you are planning a shopper marketing campaign:

As part of our work on delivering Ratings and Reviews for FMCG clients we are often asked “What is a Good Rating?”. To answer this we decided to look at the data on the Sainsbury’s website. What we found surprised us.

We have undertaken an exclusive analysis of the product level shopper Ratings & Reviews on the Sainsburys.co.uk website and found that a few suppliers have led the way with gathering reviews whilst most have done very little. As a result, some categories and brands have thousands of reviews and others just a handful.

What emerges from our analysis is a clear opportunity for nearly all grocery FMCG manufacturers to gain a competitive advantage in their category by giving online grocery shoppers a perspective from their existing consumers.

If you believe in the products you sell, why wouldn't you want your consumers to tell others how great they are?

The 3Ps of Supermarket Shopper Marketing

When launching your long-planned and lovingly-developed grocery NPD into supermarkets, it’s critical that it appeals to and is tried by the target consumers. Getting it into the hands, baskets and homes of the right grocery shoppers can be a daunting task, but here’s what you need to remember and how to go about it.

Supermarket shoppers are the key to NPD success as they are the ones who actually pick the product off the shelves and take it home, regardless of whether they, or someone else in their household is the end consumer. This is the crux of  Shopper Marketing and understanding the art  of getting shoppers to Pause, Pick up & Pay for your product is known as the 3 Ps of shopper marketing.

After analysing the shopping basket data from than 500,000 grocery receipts uploaded by our members in the Decembers of 2013 - 2017, we can see that on average there is a steady rise in sales in the four days leading up to 23^rd December.

The team at leading Shopper Marketing Agency CheckoutSmart have produced their Christmas sales forecast for 2018. With Christmas Day falling on a Tuesday in 2018, it is predicted that many shoppers will leave their Christmas grocery shop until the weekend before, with an expected surge on Saturday 22^nd and Sunday 23^rd December. This will allow shoppers to take advantage of final Christmas promotional activity and stock up on perishables and fresh produce before the big day. Christmas Eve, will then see a dramatic fall-off in predicted sales at just 5.6% of the week, as everyone settles down at home or heads to friends and family for the festive period. 

In 2018 we conducted research that showed 65% of our members look at our app when they are planning their food shopping, and 35% while they shop in the supermarket*. It is clear that grocery cashback apps are an excellent route to deliver shopper marketing goals (we have more on the whole Shopper Marketing approach here)

For example, we can use Geo targeting to serve brand advertising right onto consumers mobile devices at the first moment of truth, but the power of these apps goes a lot further than simply helping to raise brand awareness.

Based on our experience as Europe's No.1 grocery cashback organisation, here are the top 10 ways you can start using these apps to your advantage today:

Online Grocery Reviews

Shopper Marketing agency CheckoutSmart’s new offering taps into the known online and in-store sales benefit from increasing an items rating and reviews. A report from PowerReviews says the threshold for securing shopper trust at the product level is to collect up to 50 reviews.