Competition for household shopper grocery spend is intense. Amidst this fiercely competitive landscape Countdown leverages the Onecard Loyalty programme, engaging with customers one to one in a bid to capture incremental spend. The active Onecard base is in the millions so email is a vital channel for engagement.

In 2013 Countdown embarked on an overhaul of its email marketing programmes. The objectives were simple: increase engagement, sell more, cover the cost of development quickly and do it all efficiently with no increase in human resource requirements.

Three strategic drivers were the foundations:
1. Programme rationalisation – a number of individual email messaging streams were pulled together into the newly developed myCountdown email programme
2. Hyper-personalisation/relevancy – the myCountdown programme combined six relevancy algorithms to take personalisation to levels not seen before in this country
3. Efficiency drive – we had to create a production and delivery system which minimised HR input while maximising relevancy.

The supercharged programme required significant technical challenges to be overcome and  organisation-wide buy in achieved.

The myCountdown email programme achieves hyper-personalisation at a level unseen in NZ. With six relevancy algorithms working together harmoniously and quickly, over three million emails were deployed in just three months alone, with each email completely unique.

All the hard work was worth it. The overhauled myCountdown programme pays significant dividends.