Appetite for attribution: Grocer's hunger for direct mail grows

By Canada Post

Founded in 2014, Goodfood Market is a Montreal-based online meal kit and grocery company. It is among the biggest subscription delivery services in Canada with more than one million meals delivered each month.

In reaction to evolving consumer behaviours, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the growing prominence of the at-home consumer, Goodfood management made a strategic decision to expand into the online grocery market.

Now, the company looks to build on that decision and scale its on-demand delivery operation with a focus on orders arriving at customers' doors in under 30 minutes.

A woman wears an apron. She uses a tablet computer that sits on a table surrounded by fresh vegetables.

The challenge: Customer acquisition

A high-growth company competing in a dynamic industry, Goodfood focuses on customer acquisition as its primary key performance indicator.

"We just need to get people through the door — the quality of our products will speak for itself once they do. That's why our marketing efforts and budget focus mainly on acquiring customers at the most efficient cost possible."

— Marc-Alain Guilbert, former VP of Growth Marketing and Customer Experience

In our home-first world, the company knew it needed a diverse channel mix to feed acquisition goals and support expansion in a saturated direct-to-consumer category. The company's integrated media approach includes direct mail, digital, TV, radio and out-of-home. That diversity, however, can make it difficult to gauge the relative contribution of each channel to meeting objectives, especially if you are using a last-touch attribution model.

A lack of analytical support meant Goodfood's last-touch measurement approach was failing to capture the cross-channel influence of its media channels. Particularly, the marketing team knew direct mail was delivering more than brand awareness, but they couldn't get a clear picture of the full influence of the channel on conversion.

Marketers need to understand what role different channels play in an integrated mix, and how they contribute to achieving goals, in order to make more effective decisions about the future. Historically, there has been a tendency to give credit for customer conversion entirely to the final digital touchpoint. But this overly simplistic (and out-of-date) approach offers a skewed view; it fails to account for the influence of all channels in an integrated mix in generating the conversion – particularly now, when the customer journey is anything but linear.

Additionally, more robust channel attribution modelling allows companies to maximize segmentation and create responsive targeting identifiers – an important step for a company like Goodfood competing in the highly saturated and competitive grocery delivery market.