How Does a 100-Year-Old Grocer Love Its Customers?

We looked closely at Stop & Shop’s CRM marketing strategy. Can you guess how Stop & Shop scores against other grocery stores when it comes to CRM?

Adebisi Adewusi

May 25, 2022

Stop & Shop is a chain of supermarkets located in the United States.

Transparency 10/10

We saw a news story about Stop & Shop opening its remodeled Clifton store. The press release shared detailed updates about the new store expanding ethnic product assortments, dairy, and frozen food departments. Stop & Shop is committed to transparency in its supply chain. For instance, the brand uses transparent GMO labeling to make it easy for customers to understand what is included in the products they buy. Sharing expansion plans helps customers appreciate the work performed behind the scenes. This builds trust and encourages customers loyalty to a brand.

Stop & Shop gets a 10 for keeping their customers in-the-know.

Incentives and Perks 10/10

Stop & Shop offers customers many ways to save money. Here’s what we found on the website.

Stop & Shop GO Rewards give customers more ways to earn points and to use points. Points can be redeemed for gas savings, discounts at checkout, or surprise deals.
Stop & Shop has a refer-a-friend program that gives customers $25 off when a friend places their first order.

$50 off and free delivery for new customers.

A sale on bulk item purchases.

Stop & Shop does a great job of helping customers to save money and get exclusive perks.

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Be Relevant 10/10

Relevant brands set out to make the lives of their customers easier. Let’s see how Stop & Shop does for this commandment.

Stop & Shop lets us know Memorial Day is around the corner and dedicates a section of its website to grilling and barbecuing.

They also offer a free webinar hosted by Stop & Shop Nutrition Partners to teach customers how to make healthy food choices.

Savory Magazine brings customers fast, fresh, and easy recipes designed to save time and money. We also found cook-along videos to teach customers how to make the recipes.

Stop & Shop catering services make entertaining easy for customers. The brand offers party trays, prepared dinners, desserts, and more.

For giving customers the resources to make healthy choices, save money, and shop conveniently, Stop & Shop gets 10/10.

Be Helpful

Today’s customers expect charitable initiatives from the brands they buy from. For this commandment, we check to see whether a brand has been giving back to its community. Let’s see how Stop & Shop gives back.

A $7,500 donation to open an in-school food pantry at The Groden Center to support Rhode Island students with autism and their families.
A $100,000 donation to the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system to aid in the creation and expansion of on-campus school food pantries.
Stop & Shop today runs an annual ‘Help Cure Childhood Cancer’ campaign to make significant advancements in pediatric cancer research and care. Stop & Shop has contributed more than $100 million to this cause.

Stop & Shop scores top marks for its commitment to giving back and making a difference in the world.

Realtime Personalization 4/10

Does Stop & Shop treat its customers like royalty? Let’s find out.

To test Stop & Shop’s realtime personalization abilities, we spent a lot of time browsing the chocolate section and added a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar to our cart. Stop & Shop didn’t offer us any form of real-time personalization. Our HP wasn’t adjusted in realtime to reflect our behavior and as we navigated through the website.

We found the product suggestions on our home page to be somewhat relevant. However, we felt the recommendations could have been more personalized if Stop & Shop used customer data strategically.

We noticed some relevant upselling and cross-selling on the product page. No ads tailed us on social media or online.

Stop & Shop missed several opportunities to deliver realtime personalization. For instance, by simply using our browsing data, Stop & Shop could have presented us with relevant offers on our home page and at each point of the customer journey.

In all, Stop & Shop gave us a decent shopping experience. But the brand’s CRM strategy takes a hit for not delivering realtime personalized experiences to customers.

Master UX 8/10

Stop & Shop’s website is easy to navigate. The homepage user interface experience is properly categorized and the main navigation drop-down menu is user-friendly.

The filtering criteria were specific for product selection, which made finding products easy. We liked that we could change the orientation of the search results to suit our preferences.

The product page was functional with descriptions, nutritional facts, user reviews, and ratings.

Stop & Shop has a FAQ page that covers a broad range of issues. In all, Stop & Shop’s website is well-designed website but we chop off some points for not finding any innovation.

Leverage Social Media 5/10

Stop & Shop has a presence on social media with nearly 25k followers on Instagram, over 350k followers on Facebook, and nearly 30k followers on Twitter.

On Facebook, Stop & Shop posts promotional and educational content as well as event-related posts, and announcements. We like how Stop & Shop tries to engage its audience with entertaining posts.

Stop & Shop frequently posts on Twitter, but we found the content to be the identical to that on Facebook.

On Instagram, Stop & Shop posts educational, promotional, and event-themed content.

Stop & Shop makes use of influencers and we love how the brand uses creative photos and videos to bring its Instagram posts to life.

In all, Stop & Shop does a decent job of connecting with its audience through social media. We love how the brand uses videos and pictures to promote its content and drive engagement. However, we noticed some cross-posting :(. We think having a visibly different content strategy for each social media platform could help Stop & Shop leverage the capabilities of each social media platform to build a stronger relationship with customers.

It’s time to measure Shop & Stop’s love for its customers.

Overall, Shop & Stop is getting 57/70 (81%) – ranking them high our list at #15. While we agree the brand does love its customers, the relationship could be stronger. The brand falls short on realtime personalization and its social media content could improve.

We recommend Shop & Stop creates a realtime personalized website experience for each customer by using relevant customer data. This will help Shop & Stop offer tailored product recommendations and personalized customer communication in line with its customer’s contextual data. Find out more about how to unlock realtime personalization at scale here.

We hope Shop & Stop adopts our realtime personalized marketing recommendations and gives customers the shopping experience they deserve.