Meijer is pushing the envelope again (Wal-Mart watch out). Instead of being content to only show it’s online visitors the 300 or so circular advertised sale items, they are now exposing nearly every price markdown (both permanent and temporary) within their online weekly ad site. This equates to for the store I am looking at currently an additional 5,045 items. Wow. That’s a serious shot of sale content for shoppers.
This additional sale content is completely store centric (so single store level versioning) and gets refreshed on a daily basis. All of this content is currently only available by either keyword search or browse by categories. The presentation of this content is not ideal, but has continued to steadily improve over the last month on a regular basis. The biggest three issues that the teams at both companies continue to work through are missing images, no browse by brand inclusion and how to adjust the site navigation and browse tools to better help users sift through this large chunk of content.
However even with these short term improvement areas, this IS the future of internet distributed, store based promotions. Let me say it another way. Meijer is thinking long term when there may not be a weekly circular. They are looking to change the game of not being print circular reliant as the only advertising vehicle that can promote what is on sale at a local store. Or at very least, this approach breaks a few major issues of being tied to print only promotions such as:
- Being able to make price changes at any time
- Being able to add or remove promoted items based upon local store inventory changes
- Being able to promote a much deeper and wider set of products than the typical 24 page, 200 item weekly ad contains
- Being able to update any part of a specific deal at any point in time
All of the content that appears with the "price drop" image are the non-circular sourced items.
So what does one learn by processing of all the print ads for the top 100 or so US retailers? Quite a lot about the makeup of a circular ad. For example, during the one year period from 9/1/2008 thru 8/31/2009 ShopLocal found that the:
ShopLocal has the unique ability to measure and trend the volume, depth and frequency of retail newspaper print advertising.
- Number of listings per promotion was on average: 137 (median = 99)
- Number of listings per promotional page was on average: 11.6 (median = 10)
- Number of overall pages per promotion was on average: 15.3 (median = 9 & mode = 9.5)
- Number of versions per promotion was on average: 17.3 (median = 3 & mode = 1)
- By converting a decent chunk of non-versioned content (e.g., catalogs), this is why the mode is 1
- Number of promotions per year per retailer was on average: 88.5 (median = 49 & mode = 9)
- By processing some catalogs, this is why the mode was 9 as some retailers that use catalogs only put out a few larger books per year
- Number of days that a promotion is live was on average: 30.3 (median = 9 & mode = 7)
- For most typical Sunday newspaper type circulars, the typical sale spans 7 days – Sunday thru Saturday
- English language promotions make up about 93%, Spanish contributes 6% and French contributes 2%
- Circular type promotions make up 84% of the overall ad volume and the rest is split between catalogs (7%), guides (1%) mailers (1%), ROP ads (1%) and other (6%)
I’m looking forward on doing some more analysis with the awesome heavy lifting that our in-house analytics team provides to help trend these stats against historical data going back to 1999 so as to gauge the level of print promotion decline that seems to be discussed frequently in the media lately. My hypothesis is that the decline will be very minimal at best and limited to certain retail industry segments.
Posted on 31 August 2009 by Loch Rose
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ShopLocal continues to track the in-store deals offered by many top retailers, and our data shows unusual levels of activity. Consumer sentiment remains cautious but improving, so the retailers are working hard to offer them exceptional value, with the weighted average number of offers up 16% year-over-year in recent months.
After the post-holiday sales ended, deals returned to normal levels in March and April, but picked up significantly in late spring and summer. The retailers have given their customers some great deals heading into the important Back to School season, the question now is whether the customers have responded.
From a recent post, I have already established that the most sought after type of coupons are those from the Sunday newspaper / circulars. So this is a quick overview of how a retailer would go about posting these in-store focused coupons within the online circular site, the most logical place to expose such information. To begin, there are two main methods that retailers have gone about posting coupons online.
- Image based
- Adobe PDF based
Clipping coupons is a red hot trend in retail and is a very viable way of driving in-store sales that are measurable.
This post will focus in on the highly recommended approach of using PDF versions of coupons over the problematic image based solution. So let’s begin by examining the strengths and weaknesses of a PDF based couponing solution.
Strengths Of Using A PDF Driven Couponing Solutions:
- Best available readability so that data points such as the fine print / legal terms of a coupon can easily be read.
- By far and away, ensures the highest possible rate of in-store POS scanability. Since there are so many different combinations of end user printers and print settings, PDFs are the industry standard at achieving the highest level of consistency across the billions of potential printing options.
- Enables a user to actual download and save to their local machine a copy of the coupon PDF. Great for enabling sharing / re-posting of a coupon.
- Near universal support exists at this point in time of the Adobe PDF format. Having the free Adobe Acrobat reader installed on one’s machine is basically table stakes for using the Internet these days.
- Unlike some other online couponing solutions out there (um, Coupons.com), there is nothing additional to install to view and/or print the coupon (other than a PDF reader which nearly all users already have in place)
- Multiple coupons can be combined as a multi-page PDF document which can actual enable a user to browse and/or print all available coupons vs. having to print each individual coupon one at a time.
- All of the artwork and text is saved and viewed using vectors which enables insane levels of zooming in with zero degradation. This is how the great levels of scanability and readability are achieved.
Weaknesses Of Using A PDF Driven Couponing Solutions:
- There are very limited metrics available from the point where a user jumps off the SmartCircular site and into the downloaded Adobe PDF coupon. This means that ShopLocal can NOT track the number of coupons viewed, downloaded, shared (via email) or printed.
- No security or fraud protection controls. It’s pretty wide open unless the PDF that contains the coupon(s) make use of some of the built in Adobe security controls.
- No way to control the number of coupon downloads or prints. This type of solution is great for coupons that a retailer wants to allow to be spread, but not so great for the coupons that a retailer wants to limit the number of prints and/or downloads. This is where solutions like Zavers, Zing and Coupons.com come in as they have lots of controls to offer the manufacture and/or retailer. But by far and away, most coupons (like save $10 of your next $50 or more in-store purchase) that retailers put out are designed for and are hoping for maximum distribution. In this economy, what retailer doesn’t want to increase in-store foot traffic and/or purchases?
- No framing information can be inserted in and/or around the coupon image. This would include data points such as expiration dates, store address, retailer logo and/or branding. If this information is needed, it needs to be pre-inserted into the PDF coupon document (see PDF coupon examples below that illustrate this point).
Live examples are always best to prove a point. Here are some of SmartCircular retail clients that are using a PDF based couponing solution (with more on the way very shortly):
Here are some SmartCircular clients that are using an image based couponing solution:
Here are some examples of a PDF based coupons solution that are live across some of the SmartCircular sites:
Bon-Ton browse by circular view with some coupons showing up on the left hand side.
If a user was to click any of the three coupons that appeared in the circular page, then this simple PDF document would be immediately either opened or downloaded by the user.
For Macy*s, the user experience is very similar. From a circular page, a user sees the coupon image inline with the rest of the circular content.
From there, if the user chooses to click to view / download / print the coupon, a nicely formatted and branded PDF is opened.
Yet another example of essentially the same exact user experience of click to download / open / print a coupon from right within an online circular page view.
Here is the what the result of a user opening the PDF coupons would look like.
And here are some image based coupon solutions that are live within a few various client SmartCircular sites:
From either the circular page view....
...Or from a coupon aggregation page / layer....
In either case, both user interactions lead to an image based coupon that is presented on a very simple HTML page that includes a "print" button.
For Walgreens, a user can get to item level coupons from either a browse by circular page view...
...Or from an aggregated category results page that contains all coupon enabled offers.
Both lead a user to a dedicated item detail page that includes a button that enables a printable version of the coupon to appear.
If a user was to click the print this coupon, a large image-based coupon is displayed within a simple HTML page that includes a "PRINT" button.
This never ending debate is all the rage once again. Coupon usage is up, especially from a digital and mobile perspective. Most of the press coverage in this debate has firmly centered around couponing. There is however some new research that SheSpeaks has released. The first conclusion that it reaches is that coupons and flyers/ads/circulars are the two most effective types of incentives to drive people into local stores. So basically this race between coupons and discounts is a dead heat still.
If the goal is to activate shoppers to the point where they leave their home and go into a local store, coupons and circulars/flyers are about as effective. Clearly the best two tactics to use.
The next interesting insight that this research offers is what types of incentives make shoppers think that they got a good deal while shopping. Again, this race remains deadlocked as both coupons and sales/discounts are the most effective at creating the consumer perception that an item is a good deal. I guess this debate will have to die another day.
Both coupons and sales/discounts are the best are helping consumers think / feel / perceive that what they are buying is a good value
About this research survey:
- Study was conducted online in October 2008
- 2,000 SheSpeaks members completed the survey
- 90% of Respondents were between the ages of 24-65
- No incentive was provided for participating
- SheSpeaks is the leading women’s insights and word-of-mouth marketing network enabling brands to directly engage to build insight and brand buzz.
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