Card-Linked Offers Go a Long Way Toward Driving Grocery Loyalty

As grocers look to boost loyalty and drive adoption, card-linked offers can help them reach half of all shoppers.

By the Numbers

For the new report “Leveraging Item-Level Receipt Data: How Card-Linked Offers Drive Customer Loyalty,” PYMNTS Intelligence surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. consumers in July to understand how they engage with card-linked offers, among other matters.

The results revealed that roughly 6 in 10 of those who are likely to use a product-specific card-linked offer program in the next three months — or about half of consumers overall — are very or extremely likely to use card-linked offers for grocery purchases in that same period.

The Data in Context

Throughout this period of economic challenges, securing grocery shoppers’ loyalty has been no easy feat. PYMNTS Intelligence found that 44% of grocery shoppers are deal chasers, willing to go wherever they will get the best price, while only 17% consider themselves loyal customers of specific brands.

Kroger, the United States’ leading pure-play grocer, has been leveraging digital offers through its app and website to keep customers coming back.

“We are creating more engagement with customers through personalization, offering more targeted and effective promotions, and our seamless ecosystem is resonating with customer needs and allows us to derive increased loyalty,” Chairman and CEO Rodney McMullen told analysts on an earnings call last week.

Many grocery brands are primarily leveraging their own loyalty programs to bring customers back, although card-linked offers can also prove a valuable tool to have in the toolbelt, even if they have their drawbacks.

“I think card-linked offers have been a rather blunt instrument in a retailer’s marketing toolkit,” Jehan Luth, CEO of the FinTech Banyan, said in a PYMNTS interview posted in December 2022. “One of the biggest reasons it’s a blunt instrument is because as a retailer, I cannot drive traffic to certain items. Instead of traditional loyalty offerings that may not be consumer-personalized, the overlaying of SKU-level data or item-level data in rewards and offers makes card-linked offers a much more versatile and powerful tool in the toolkit for retailers. Now I can drive traffic to certain categories within the store, or certain items within a store.”