Business Cases

Meals.com

Overview
Meals.com was searching for a business model that would allow them to connect grocery stores to their recipe focused website. They found the solution using PredictionWorks Engine solutions, which won the Peppers & Rogers TM Customer Loyalty Award.
The first step to becoming the leading provider of web-to-store analytics for Grocery chains was to collect the entire picture of the customer: store-shopping behavior, web clicks, recipes viewed, advice columns, etc. Using PredictionWorks System, Meals.com is able to target customers with recipes based on what they purchased at the supermarket earlier in the day.
This complete 360-degree view of the customer was priceless to the retailers and opened a new revenue stream for Meals.com.

Actionable
PredictionWorks' Actionable Interface means that clients can go directly from analysis to action through emails, web content, banners, wireless, and kiosks. This allowed Meals.com to add another touchpoint for increasing customer loyalty. Meals.com placed Kiosks at the supermarket entrances which allowed the customers to:

• Receive targeted offers
• Print their shopping list that was entered on the website
• Check their Club Card Points
• Play supermarket contests
• Supply e-mail addresses for the Mailing lists
• Browse targeted recipes

E-Flyer is another example of how Meals.com reaches its customers. For most customers, only a small percentage of the items within a weekly supermarket circular are of interest to them. A perfect opportunity for personalization. Instead of expensive mail-out circulars, customers received an email with information on only the products that pertained to them. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies such as Kraft, General Mills, and Nabisco were extremely impressed with the ability to accurately target these customers.

Having all of these programs increased overall customer spending by 8.9%. These kiosks made their customer's lives simpler which in turn kept them showing up at the stores more often. The kiosks even forecasted when a customer was running low on cooking oil or sugar and reminded the customers on their downloaded shopping lists that they picked up when they entered the stores.

Advanced Analytics
Meals.com created a program using PredictionWorks System that rewards and retains their best customers. Top-tier customers were analyzed to find key products that mid-tier customers were not buying. Category killers (categories such as laundry detergent that are not purchased that are indicative of the consumer purchasing at a competitor store) were also identified through analytics. Using targeted offers on these key products to mid-tier customers, Meals.com made these once average customers into top shoppers by increasing their wallet share and ultimately decreasing customer spending at their competitor's stores.

Other analytics performed:

• Seasonality
• Regionality
• Competitive boundary analysis
• Missing categories
• Market basket analysis
• Consumer store path analysis
• Price elasticity
• Price sensitivity
• Demand forecasting

PredictionWorks and Meals.com created a complete Personalization system that changes the way people shop. If you have a similar vision, contact us.