Rethinking Customer Behavior With John Giaquinto of Hannaford Supermarkets

John Giaquinto is the Senior Director of Customer Loyalty and Digital Marketing at Hannaford Supermarkets. With 20 years of experience in marketing and communications, John’s specialties include strategy and planning, CRM strategy and execution, customer satisfaction research, primary and secondary consumer market research, and creative execution, including design, writing, and production. During his career, he created web-based marketing programs that doubled a manufacturer's qualified sales leads over a market downturn. He also managed the strategy and execution of nine ongoing CRM direct marketing programs that delivered over $81 million in incremental sales annually. What you’ll learn in this episode: Do loyalty programs at grocery stores really keep customers coming back? What is the key to a worthwhile loyalty program? Are grocery store loyalty programs simply quid pro quo, or are they actually benefiting the customer? At Hannaford Supermarkets, its loyalty program has paid off in a big way — they’ve had two million enrollments. The key to Hannaford’s robust customer loyalty program is that they give customers discounts on things they would buy anyway. Those loyalty program discounts, combined with a Covid-influenced shift to more cooking at home and increased digital engagement, motivate Hannaford customers to use their app, receive emails, respond to campaigns, and clip coupons. That engagement gives Hannaford the data they need to personalize the shopping experience and target its marketing efforts. On this episode of From Persona to Personal, Roger Hurni is joined by John Giaquinto, Senior Director of Customer Loyalty and Digital Marketing at Hannaford Supermarkets, for a conversation about successful grocery store customer loyalty programs. John talks about why customers’ digital engagement is higher than before Covid started, how it’s changed how people shop, and how the resulting data has allowed Hannaford to know individual customer purchases to personalize discounts through their loyalty program.