Online branch activation with AZ Direct

Pay attention chain store operators: Postal mailing goes digital

Chain store operators are usually very knowledgeable about the catchment areas around their locations, distribution plans have been developed and proven over decades. However, the good old brochure – established, experienced and still effective – no longer receives as much attention as it used to. Mr and Mrs Consumer prefer to look at their screens and not at brochures: The average Internet usage time per day in 2018 was 3 hours and 16 minutes in Germany, and this usage time is increasingly rapidly.*

*Source: ARD/ZDF online survey

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to address these potential customers online via Facebook, Amazon, GMX and various other channels in the catchment areas that can be simply booked and reached by mail shot?

This is precisely the innovative product developed by AZ Direct, part of the Bertelsmann Printing Group. WIGeoGIS provides the necessary geomarketing solutions for this product.

Expanding regional media planning online

Regional media planning is one of the classic applications in geomarketing in addition to location analysis: With WebGIS (or other GIS systems), you can locate those households located within e.g. a range of 20 minutes by car or 5 minutes on foot from your location. To reduce scatter loss, you can merge this geographic selection with sociodemographic attributes: Just select the buildings or households in which your target group lives, e.g. affluent males that live in detached houses with gardens.

So far, so good. You need good market data for your analysis, AZ Direct is a reliable partner for this purpose: Anonymized characteristic data with up to 600 characteristics for over 41 million households, 70 million people and 21 million buildings are available for Germany with the audience targeting system AZ DIAS.

The direct marketing specialist offers multi-channel marketing across numerous offline and online channels with this unique range of data for Germany*. 68 million people can thus be addressed by post, via e-mail or via digital advertising (display/mobile/video/social advertising) on their computers or smartphones.

*Data also available for Austria and Switzerland

Geoselection combined with online channels is the innovation here: In the campaign, the affluent male garden owner living up to 20 minutes away from the chain store will see, instead of or in addition to the brochure in his postbox, an advertising newsletter from GMX or web.de, a display ad on the website of a large daily newspaper and/or advertising when surfing on Facebook, buying on Amazon or watching an online video.

Target group selection in catchment area: Geoselection combined with characteristics finds areas with a high proportion of gardens (green areas). 8057 male detached house owners with gardens can be reached via various online channels.

Online branch activation: Flexible, economic, measurable, interactive

“What we are doing is as yet unique in the German market”, said Marco Kersch, Head of Product Management & Operations at AZ Direct, with some pride. Previous methods of online marketing work with so-called IP-geotargeting, i.e. attempting to localize the customer via their Internet provider. This leads to scatter loss as the customer may not even be anywhere near where the Internet provider says he is.

“Scatter loss is near zero with our online branch activation and we reach the people where they actually are, i.e. on the Internet”, said Kersch. “Classic mail shots are effective, but expensive and also inflexible because once in print you can no longer change anything and yet product lines are often very short-lived. It also makes sense to test two variants and then to carry on with the one that functions best – this is far too time-consuming for printed matter.” 

But this is easy to do within the framework of online branch automation, as AZ Direct online advertising media is fully customizable. Display advertising for 200 branches can be set up with very little outlay in 200 different versions: Where necessary, branch photos, products, prices, etc. are automated and can therefore be economically customized for each branch.

Online branch activation is the logical, modern supplement to an existing product, as Kersch explained: “Media or scatter planning functions as usual, however, the customer in the catchment area no longer receives advertising in his postbox but on his smart phone, tablet or PC.”

What about data protection legislation?

This question is often put to Peter Kothe, Head of Sales Data & Analytics at AZ Direct. His reply is relaxed: “We had already developed our Data Secure^TTP method back in 2010, long before GDPR. This software we developed separates addresses from sensitive data so that the data would not be useful even in the case of unauthorized access. Our clients can be sure that their advertising is compliant with data privacy.”

A complex system of anonymization and encryption makes this possible. TÜV Rheinland acts here as a “Trusted Third Party” (TTP), providing marketing process monitoring and data privacy compliancy control.

An example

This is a possible scenario:

Geoselection has located 8057 male garden owners within a 20-minute radius around your branch store. 

During your campaign, your advertising will reach:

Who exactly these people are is unknown, but they are all male garden owners who live near your branch store.