With a track record dating back more than half a century, BD myShopi is the undisputed leader in the Belgian market for consumer direct mail solutions. Working with some 3,000 distributors, the company sends out more than 4.3 billion advertising leaflets, catalogues, newspapers and product samples to mailboxes throughout Belgium. In recent years the company has evolved into an omnichannel business, operating a website and the myShopi app, which recently won the Most Performing App Campaign Award. Toon Coppens, Strategy & Innovation Manager at BD myShopi, explains why.
We would like to start out by congratulating you on this award, one of the leading accolades in the Belgian digital industry. What were the judging panel’s criteria in presenting you with this award?
‘Our mission is to inform consumers about all possible offers and promotions of a large number of popular food and non-food retailers in the market. For many decades now, we’ve been doing this by distributing packs of advertising leaflets, which are delivered to around 4.3 million Belgian households. We began using digital channels several years ago: a website and an app which are compatible with tablets and smartphones. An earlier version of the app only allowed users to create digital shopping lists, but soon enough consumers were also able to browse digital advertising leaflets, store customer loyalty cards electronically, and redeem coupons.
In each of these cases, consumers would go to an actual physical sales outlet to make their purchases. However, we developed a concept last year whereby consumers who are browsing through an advertising leaflet can click directly on the products displayed and are immediately directed to the appropriate section of the online store of the retailer in question. Once they’ve placed their order and paid for it, they’re all set. It’s basically an interactive version of the traditional advertising leaflet.’
In what sense is this innovation groundbreaking?
‘What makes the app so innovative is that it’s linked directly to the retailer’s product feed. This is basically a list, updated daily, of all the products offered by a specific retailer, including a product description, images, and the price. This means the app is linked to the actual e-commerce systems of around 100 different retailers, all of which are very different. If a manufacturer decides overnight to change the price of a product, you will see the new price displayed the next day when you click on the product in the myShopi leaflet. That’s pretty challenging from a technical point of view.’
Aren’t you competing directly with the websites and apps of the retailers themselves?
‘You have to look at it this way: consumers are not going to keep track of 200 websites run by 200 companies, nor are they going to download 200 apps to their phone. What makes our proposition so strong is that it’s an aggregation app, meaning that it eliminates the need for any other apps. Consumers obviously like our product, as the number of active users of the app has increased from 100,000 to more than 500,000 in just two years.
By the end of December 2016, more than one million people had downloaded the app. I would say it’s a combination of elements that won us the Most Performing App Campaign Award: our app makes a wide variety of online stores directly accessible through advertising leaflets by providing a link to the retailer’s back-end system.’
This technology enables BD myShopi to collect a massive amount of data. Do you use this data?
‘Of course: we can offer member retailers access to a variety of key statistics, including the number of clicks, sales, click-to-sales ratio, leaflet views, page views and user profiles. This data is extremely valuable to marketers. Retailers actually differ in terms of how they would like to receive this data. Another interesting new feature is that we can now also provide marketers with information on view-through conversion, also known in our business as “offline attribution.” Retailers had no way of tracking that data until recently: they had no idea of the relationship between online views and the number of purchases someone made in their store based on these views.
By cleverly linking online views on the myShopi app to the use of customer loyalty cards in the app, we can establish far more accurately the extent to which an online campaign increases the number of offline purchases. We also use the geo-tracking feature to assist us: who is checking out an advertising leaflet within an x-kilometre radius of the shop, and who actually goes on to visit that shop afterwards? Needless to say, all the data we use is fully anonymised.’
Advertising leaflets are far more popular in the Netherlands and Belgium than in other European countries. Does this limit the potential to expand your business model?
‘It’s true that the popularity of advertising leaflets is to some extent culturally determined. But since the technology we developed is so innovative, other countries have shown great interest in it as well.
We currently serve as a white-label technology partner for local marketing companies in France, Spain, Portugal and Romania, which are rolling out a similar concept. There’s no doubt that we’ve got a bright future ahead of us.’
