New World is a New Zealand supermarket brand owned by Foodstuffs, with 138 owner-operated supermarkets across the country. The stores are positioned to deliver the best overall shopping experience to meet customers' needs, with the best range of groceries and fresh food, significant quality, excellent customer service and value for money. Fly Buys is New World’s main loyalty programme partner and a strong point of difference in the extremely competitive supermarket industry. Their partnership with the Fly Buys programme enables New World access to members’ personal address data and New World’s transactional data – the powerful combination that drives below-the-line communications such as the New World Christmas Shopper Event Invite.

New World’s Christmas Shopper Event was a through the line campaign and the direct mail element (the invite) was mailed at the start of the 2015 Christmas season. This is easily the most challenging time of the year to achieve marketing cut-through and in addition, the cost of producing and posting this extra layer of activity (on top of the other ATL channels) needed to be substantiated internally at New World. To do this, behavioural data was used to identify the best leads and, combined with complex personalisation and customisation involving 138 stores across the country, delivered a highly cost effective, personalised communication.

 The effort and expenditure was worth it – sales for the day from North Island New World shoppers alone, who received the direct mail were $3.2 million – $904,000 (or 38%) incremental spend over the control group who did not receive a mailed communication.

Receipt of this premium, customised direct mail piece resulted in incremental sales growth and stood out as a key sales channel, especially considering the total sales by all New World shoppers for the day reflected a small percentage decline over the previous year’s event.