Case Study: SELGROS Cash & Carry reduces advertising distribution costs while maintaining revenue with Blue Yonder Customer Targeting

SELGROS Saves Distribution Costs for Advertising Materials

SELGROS Cash & Carry, a German wholesale chain, faced high distribution costs and resource strain from mailing up to one million brochures every two weeks. Customer selection was done manually with segmentation and decision trees, so marketing budget efficiency suffered and the company lacked capacity to account for all factors affecting customer spend. SELGROS engaged Blue Yonder to explore automating and optimizing the catalog mail‑out process.

Blue Yonder analyzed five years of individual purchase history and used algorithms and a causality model to forecast purchase probability and basket size with and without advertising, delivering automated customer‑level recommendations so only shoppers positively influenced by brochures receive them. An A/B test across 13 biweekly cycles returned substantial advertising cost savings while keeping revenues steady, produced ROI within a month, and led SELGROS to expand the automated selection in spring 2016.

SELGROS Cash & Carry

Holger Penndorf

COO