Case Study: Colruyt Group increases customer spending and slashes 665 million pages of mail with SAS Enterprise Miner

Belgium grocer Colruyt uses predictive analytics to tailor promotions, boost customer spending

Colruyt, a Belgian grocer with 217 stores and 1.6 million loyalty cardholders, faced declining attention to its biweekly promotional mailings amid crowded mailboxes. With 11,000 products and about 400 items on promotion every two weeks, the challenge was to stop wasting customers’ time with irrelevant offers and instead deliver highly relevant, individualized coupons that would keep shoppers opening their mail.

Using SAS Enterprise Miner to calculate purchase probabilities from past behavior and household demographics, Colruyt now sends four pages of tailored coupons per household (down from 32), with business rules to limit category overlap. The targeted approach increased coupon usage, lifted average spending and customer loyalty, and saved an estimated 665 million pages of paper a year plus associated printing and mailing costs.

Colruyt Group

Bart Van Roost

Department Head of Strategic Marketing and BI