News: Brands to drive sales through website

Brands will able to incentivise their customers through the mySupermarket.co.uk website after a new agreement with online loyalty programme ipoints.

People using the independent grocery supermarket price-comparison site will be able to earn ipoints when they buy particular products. These can be exchanged online for a wide variety of rewards.

It will work in conjunction with existing supermarket reward schemes such as Tesco Clubcard and Nectar, providing brands with an opportunity to market products further and in turn steadily increase sales frequency.

Blue-chip brand owners already trialling the offer of bonus ipoints on mysupermarket.co.uk include Unilever and Premier Foods, with several more international brand manufacturers lined up for the coming months.

Brands will also be able to collect real-time information on the consumers who buy their products and monitor the effectiveness of the scheme in driving online sales of their grocery products through the four major online supermarkets Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Ocado available on mySupermarket.co.uk.

This will allow the brands to generate greater understanding and insight about existing customers and improve the future targeting of customers and potential buyers of their products.

ipoints, which is owned by online marketing services and loyalty solutions company Maximiles, has partnered with mySupermarket.co.uk to offer ipoints for users of the site since August 2007.

Johnny Stern, director at mySupermarket.co.uk, said: “The extension of our successful partnership with Maximiles’ ipoints loyalty programme offers brands an exciting new opportunity to actively promote their products on mySupermarket.co.uk to new and existing customers at the point of purchase.

“Furthermore, it’s clear that mySupermarket.co.uk customers are attracted to the idea of accumulating ipoints in addition to their supermarket loyalty points.”

Adam Maher, director of loyalty at Maximiles, added: “Brands will benefit because they will be able to effectively differentiate themselves from their competitors and offer their customers an extra incentive to purchase their products. In addition, they will be able to engender customer loyalty through a reward programme which is trackable and applies across all the UK’s major online retailers.

“Furthermore, this agreement allows grocery brands to actually make learnings from any promotions they run using ipoints in real time, and use this insight to improve future marketing campaigns targeting consumers and existing customers.”