Sainsbury’s: recipes for social success
Food is at the heart of Sainsbury’s social media conversations with its shoppers. Its website features a wide range of recipes, themed from Change4life healthy eating recipes through to vegan and family favourites.
Website users can see information ranging from how popular those recipes are – the number of people that have saved the recipe is displayed – through to how much the recipes cost per portion, and whether there are any current offers on ingredients. Users can then click to add the ingredients directly to their grocery shopping baskets.
By adding their dietary preferences to the website, shoppers can also be alerted if they choose any items that do not conform to their preferences – a useful piece of personalisation. Shoppers can then go on to share the recipes they have found on the website to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or via email, while saving them for future reference.
The conversation continues across social channels. The retailer’s YouTube channel features a range of ‘how to’ cookery videos, as well as recipe demonstrations while its Twitter channel engages with shoppers predominantly via food-related discussions and by sharing recipes.
Other content, at the time of writing, included an introduction to an in-store lanyard that helps to alert store staff to individual shoppers’ hidden disabilities, and a video featuring a 103-year-old customer in the Isle of Wight who has a section in her local store dedicated to the products that she prefers.
Overall, it’s highly practical content that shows why Sainsbury’s stands out in IRUK Top500 research for a high friend count on Twitter and for the number of times that shoppers visit its website in a year. The retailer is also rated highly in RetailX research for the way it enables customers to share their opinions and contribute to the brand conversation whether by rating and reviewing products or by sharing products with friends via social media.
This approach fits with the supermarket’s multichannel strategy of “being there for our customers whenever and wherever” they want to buy. It has invested in making it easier for shoppers to buy from the point that is most convenient for them, whether that’s from a convenience store or online, from a mobile phone or from a larger supermarket.
It has also made it simple to order general merchandise products from Argos – part of the Sainsbury’s group since 2016 – for shoppers to collect when they come into a supermarket. In half-year results to September 22 2018, Sainsbury’s said that it had 251 Argos stores in its branches, as well as 233 order collection points where customers can pick up their online orders.
