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adplex incorporates 1-to-1 marketing with online circulars
By LaShell Stratton
The Sunday circular has been an advertising mainstay for decades, but innovative companies have taken this traditional print medium to the web. Instead of searching for sales in newspaper inserts, customers simply search their favorite retail stores’ websites.
But Galen Walters, CEO of adplex, a Houston-based marketing, print and prepress service provider, says last year his company took the concept of online circulars one step further. adplex’s proprietary software program, VirtualStore, gathers customers’ purchasing preferences and loyalty program data and uses it to create highly focused, online 1-to-1 circulars.
“If you can build 1-to-1 relationships with customers online, you’re starting to build a very value-based relationship with your customers that can’t be reproduced through a print circular distributed in any channel,” Walter says. “We’re one of the only companies in the country that are capable of tracking this back to the customer and merchandise data.”
For four years adplex had produced printed and online circulars for the Delhaize Group, an international retailer and parent company of Food Lion, Bloom, Hanneford Bros. Co., and other grocery store chains.
“What changed last year is that Delhaize sent out an RFP requesting an interactive online circular,” Walters says.
adplex felt it would be a good candidate for the job. Though the company’s printing services division primarily focuses on newspaper inserts for grocery store clients, its interactive marketing division had the ability to connect the client’s online circular to customer data. With the help of another proprietary software program, Promote, adplex could use the data-driven management and production engine to house customer preferences and streamline the advertising production process. adplex also could operate as an ASP provider, licensing the software to the retailer and housing the servers.
“We won the RFP,” Walter says. “Now if the customer opts in, they can tell us their preferences and we can take the data from their loyalty card and tailor products of interest to them. If we see that they buy lots of dairy products, we’ll tell them when milk is on sale. If they have babies, we’ll tell them about diapers.”
Several of Delhaize’s subsidiaries carry VirtualStore. Another grocery retail chain, United Supermarkets, recently joined the list.
“Our new adplex-powered website is completely guest-focused, offering in-demand functionality and information that keeps people coming back to our site day after day,” said Dan Sanders, CEO of United Supermarkets. “Our new online circular also allows us the unparalleled ability to fully leverage our loyalty marketing efforts, and we expect to see major return on this investment.”
“If you can build 1-to-1 relationships with customers online, you’re starting to build a very value-based relationship with your customers that can’t be reproduced through a print circular distributed in any channel.”
Galen Walters, CEO
adplex, Houston
VirtualStore is constantly being enhanced. During the next phase, which Walters projects will take place in October, loyalty data will finally be incorporated into the program. In the meantime adplex has enhanced its VirtualStore sites in other ways. Many include videos, “that show everything from how to fold a napkin for the Thanksgiving table to how to prepare a certain meal,” he says. “We plan to add holiday-themed videos soon.”
Another feature is VirtualStore’s database of 5,000 recipes that have nutrition facts labels and a scaling engine that allows end users to adapt the recipe depending on the number of servings. Right now, the recipes are searchable, but Walters says in the future customer data will also influence the listed recipes. “If a customer opts in an account and he tells us he has hypertension, we’ll be able to tailor the recipes to his disease,” he says. Plans are also in the works to incorporate health advice on the site based on customer data.
Another enhancement that will be added in the future includes customer shopping lists. “We’re going to have a bar code added to the VirtualStore shopping lists so that when the customer prints it out and the list is swiped at the store, he or she can get a discount,” Walter says. He expects that this will be an even bigger incentive for customers to use the online circular more often.
So far the response to the new VirtualStores has been positive. “If you look at the online circular at Food Lion, you’ll see that the traffic to the website has gone up seven- to eight- fold since we re-engineered the circular,” he says.
The number boost may be due to some customers now logging into the new circular every day “but our biggest spike is between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Wednesday. It’s when the new specials are posted and it’s right before people go to work,” Walters says.
LaShell Stratton is assistant editor at Print Solutions magazine. Email comments to lstratton@PSDA.org.