Franprix customer success story

How relevanC’s promotions personalisation technology enabled franprix to increase sales and create a loyal customer base.

Founded in 1958, Franprix is a subsidiary of the Casino Group. Initially based mainly in Paris and the Île-de-France region, the company gradually expanded into other regions of France and now boasts a network of 900 stores. In 2021, it achieved a revenue of €1.5 billion.

Increasing promotional campaign ROI

Franprix is a key player in localised distribution and continues to develop in a very competitive sector. In order to create a loyal customer base and help customers discover new products, Franprix provides promotional offers on different products in its range.
Beyond increasing revenues, these promotional campaigns are part of the chain's strategy. They allow the store to provide its customers with a different kind of experience, promote its image, differentiate itself from the competition, and increase customer spend or how regularly they visit. They are all the more crucial to Franprix's commercial activity as they also help to establish advantageous relationships with suppliers upstream. By offering them better visibility in store, Franprix helps suppliers promote their brands or revitalise sales of a product.

Arnaud Thorel, Omnichannel Client Marketing Director at Franprix, estimates that these promotional campaigns impact the company's overall revenue by 5–10%. "Without being a determining factor of our commercial activity, offers remain one of the biggest levers in our strategy," he explains. "We're not necessarily looking to increase the percentage of our revenue that they represent, but to increase the percentage of personalised offers, as they provide a better ROI."

"The campaigns are more dynamic with much stronger customer engagement. We provide them with offers on products that they are genuinely interested in”

Deepening supplier engagement

"By providing personalised offers, we maximise the possibility of our customers being interested in our loyalty program, meaning they will come back to the store or shop online with us more regularly," adds Arnaud Thorel. "At the same time, we wanted to modernise our relationship with our suppliers by letting them decide on their own goals for the campaigns, whether that be maintaining a loyal customer base for a particular brand or attracting new customers. Incidentally, we also wanted to offer them more visibility on their own return on investment."

In order to achieve its goals, Franprix enlisted the services of relevanC. This digital marketing company analyses customer transaction data anonymously in order to help retailers provide more relevant marketing content to their customers. "Our goal is to make personalisation easier and more accessible," explains Augustin de Narp, Head of Customer Success at relevanC. "Thanks to our platform, retailers can not only optimise their impact, but also involve their suppliers in campaign planning and ROI monitoring."

Capitalising on relevanC’s expertise and Google Cloud technology

Operational since January 2019, the relevanC platform is supported by Google Cloud Platform technology so it can handle significant volumes of data and personalise campaigns depending on customer profiles and supplier goals. The latter effectively have direct access to the platform and can manage the offers they want to launch in agreement with Franprix. All the characteristics that define these offers, such as duration of the deal, the budget, and KPIs, are entered on Cloud SQL. relevanC relies on BigQuery to store the transactional data by using Cloud Composer to connect to retailers' IT systems in real time.
"BigQuery's power plays a fundamental role in our solution, as we collect transactional data on tens of millions of products," explains Florence Le Heron, Head of Data, Tech & Product. "It's also essential for the calculations that generate offers based on AI algorithms that we have developed. They allow us to create targeted offers and were developed by the relevanC data science research teams in Paris. Thanks to Google Cloud technology, these algorithms are simple to test and deploy, and can be very easily scaled up to large volumes of data." Already pretty flexible, the platform also benefits from the elasticity of Google Kubernetes Engine with automatic VM start and stop on Compute Engine, based on calculation requirements at any given time.

In other words, thanks to Google Cloud technology, relevanC has been able to develop a high-performing solution that is open and very easy to access. The result: just a few weeks of integration was all it took to let Franprix and its suppliers start reaping the first rewards of the platform.

Tempted customers, delighted suppliers, and rising revenues

"While staying in control of our own goals, thanks to the alignment of promotional campaigns previously entered on the platform, we now offer more freedom to our suppliers," explains Arnaud Thorel.

In practice, suppliers set a budget for their annual activity, and then indicate when and how they wish to use it directly on the platform. The algorithm developed by relevanC then issues personalised coupons, taking into account customer profiles, Franprix's loyalty goals, and the specific goals of each supplier, all at the same time. "The campaigns are more dynamic with much stronger customer engagement," adds Arnaud Thorel. "We provide them with offers on products that they are genuinely interested in. We also provide little surprises each time, based on the area emphasised by the supplier at any given time."

As for profitability, where Franprix was sometimes seeing a negative ROI for certain national promotional campaigns, the company now receives €8–11 in additional revenue for every €1 invested in its personalised campaigns. In other words, every €1 invested generates €8–11 in incremental revenue.

As far as its customers are concerned, Franprix has also achieved its goals. During the latest surveys carried out by the company, its customers made it very clear that these personalised offers were one of the best advantages of the loyalty program. "To sum it up, this new approach has not only allowed us to encourage an increase in customer spend in our stores, as well as create a loyal customer base over time, it's also allowed us to promote offers in a more qualitative way, which our suppliers really appreciate. We are currently reworking our loyalty program and intend to make the most of relevanC's capabilities to take our approach even further," concludes Arnaud Thorel.