EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Dollar General unifies data to help target CPG ads
A major discount chain is enhancing the quality and quantity of customer data it provides CPG advertising partners.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Paul Bucalo, senior director of digital & marketing engineering at Dollar General, about how the discount giant leverages a unified data platform to deliver more personalized, relevant and timely ads to customers via its retail media network.
What made Dollar General decide to launch a retail media network?
We launched Dollar General Media Network (DGMN) to challenge traditional digital media methods and better serve our markets and customers, particularly those in rural areas, with the brands and products they desire.
With DGMN, Dollar General provides access to real-time data with trusted brands to help them serve our unique customer base across more than 20,000 stores in 48 states.
[READ MORE: Dollar General expands advertiser access to shopper data]
And with approximately 80% of Dollar General stores serving markets of 20,000 or fewer residents, DGMN provides access to hard-to-reach customers who might be overlooked with traditional marketing tactics, creating more meaningful connections between partners and customers.
Typically, digital platforms focus their delivery on high volume efficiency plays, which skew to more densely populated markets, while Dollar General’s first-party data addresses the gap in less populated markets, allowing brands to tap into our unduplicated, extensive and accelerating reach.
Why did you implement a unified data platform?
Dollar General leverages a unified data platform to streamline the process of extracting, transforming and loading data into our environment. Being able to easily move the data opens more partnership opportunities with advertisers, ad tech providers and analysis tools.
Our current unified data platform through Snowflake sits on multiple clouds, so we don't feel locked into one platform service provider, and it scales to meet demand. The ecosystem of our unified data platform also allows us to plug in additional tools on demand.
Finally, we're able to put models directly into the platform, which otherwise may require moving data between multiple tools.
How does Dollar General provide real-time personalization across the enterprise on a daily basis?
We prioritize first-party data to offer more personalized and tailored customer experiences that increase value while serving customer needs. Instead of amassing large quantities of data, we focus on acquiring quality data that provides a contextual understanding of our customers that we can adapt to predict trends and future behaviors.
This strategic data infrastructure offers a deeper understanding of DG’s unique customer base that sharpens the accuracy of its marketing efforts, translates online engagement to offline connection and maximizes customer value.
Our robust data infrastructure consists of two zones: a data warehouse and a customer data platform. This configuration supports the management of 'slow' data for in-depth analytics and segmentation, while 'fast' data is used for real-time personalization during customer interactions.
Leveraging capabilities like custom machine learning models alongside best-in-class marketing technology, we can dynamically adjust customers’ shopping experiences.
These models allow us to contextualize a shopper’s rich history with the company throughout their experience to significantly enhance customer engagement and satisfaction.
How are you processing and leveraging customer data both internally and for advertisers?
DGMN is focused on reaching the Dollar General customer wherever they are within the customer journey in a way that best fits their needs. Currently, that means leveraging digital media platforms to serve them tailored, targeted content and ads often before they have entered the store.
DGMN can reach more than 90 percent of active Dollar General customers through paid media, enabling advertisers to both digitally and physically build awareness, drive purchase consideration and position Dollar General as the retailer of choice for consumers seeking many of America’s most trusted brands.
Dollar General has also crafted an omnichannel experience to engage customers with digital offers, like coupons and cash back, that they can redeem in store or online. Engaging customers with offers online is DGMN’s primary loyalty strategy and creates a vector of customer data that acts as the foundation for the personalized experience.
Dollar General leverages unique and privacy-centric first party customer data, which consists of more than 90 million active and marketable customer profiles with more than 1,400 attributes and tender level purchase history.
Many of these customer profiles are from traditionally hard-to-reach and hard-to-measure consumers, which helps brands tap into the significant buying power to better serve customers who might potentially be overlooked with traditional digital marketing tactics.
Are there any future plans for your media network or data platform you can discuss?
Last year, we launched self-serve data visualization tools, so clients can see a near-real time dashboard of campaign performance. We continue to add new capabilities and refine how the data is shared. Some CPGs are sophisticated enough to pull in a complete data feed for their own analysis.
Others can use the dashboards to observe success metrics and manipulate the data through the tool. Dollar General is also creating machine learning-driven tools to mine for effective client campaign tactics.
Editor’s Note: Paul Bucalo is participating in a session at the NRF Big Show on Tuesday, Jan. 14 titled Elevate your Data Strategy in an Ever-Evolving Market.