New World is a New Zealand supermarket brand owned by Foodstuffs with 138 owner-operated supermarkets across three geographic regions: Upper North Island, Lower North Island and South Island. Fly Buys is New World’s primary loyalty programme and a strong point of difference in the extremely competitive supermarket industry. Part of New World’s brand positioning is that each store is truly local and operated in the way that fits with their community.

New World and Fly Buys wanted to reward loyal customers and entice prospects by holding a major event at each store across the country – the New World Quad Points Christmas Night. The event would include 4 x Fly Buys points, huge price specials and festive and fun in-store activities.

While all regions had agreed to participate in a nationwide campaign, each store needed to personalise their DM invitation to their event, but the campaign had to have a consistent look and feel to connect to the New World brand overall. Effectively 138 individual store-level campaigns had to be run with multiple versions per store – but managed all as one deployment. Mailed during Christmas, this was easily the most challenging time of the year to achieve marketing cut-though.

Calculating who the most loyal Fly Buys customers were within each New World region via RFM segmentation was the first step. Then dynamic and exciting DM and eDM invitations sent to the top 4 segments, led to huge numbers of customers coming to their local in-store Christmas event and shopping much more than usual. And it gets better – not only did they spend more at the in-store events; they carried on spending more for the days and weeks after! This campaign made New World’s most loyal customers even more loyal.

The results are nothing short of exceptional. Having aimed for an 18% response rate of targeted customers attending in-store events, their socks were blown off by an overall achievement uplift versus control of 30.7% with one region achieving a 33.9% response rate. A massive incremental spend was achieved, delivering a phenomenal 545% return on investment.