Safeway Inc. has undertaken a new marketing push of its online grocery business in San Francisco, aggressively promoting the image that Safeway.com offers the same shopping convenience, and more, that customers are accustomed to in its supermarkets. "We're communicating that Safeway.com exists and offers great service that's easy to use and reliable," Mitchell Rhodes, president of Safeway's online operations, tells Internet Retailer. "We've never had advertising that was this focused before."
Safeway kicked off a multi-media advertising campaign in the San Francisco Bay Area last week, including TV, radio, direct-mail and e-mail promotions. The campaign offers promotions such as $5 off an order for trying the online service. His goal is to reach $1 billion or more in annual online sales.
Key to the campaign's success, he says, will be convincing more consumers of the convenience of online grocery shopping. Rhodes, who is president of GroceryWorks, a Safeway subsidiary that runs its online grocery business, notes that of the 20,000 to 30,000 SKUs in a supermarket, the average customer shops for only 200 to 300. But GroceryWorks has designed its web sites to make it easy for shoppers to organize and find the products they typically buy, providing for a fast online shopping trip. "We've heard from many moms who said they spent hours in a store, now spend 20 minutes shopping online--tops," he says.
Safeway's advertising will get that message across, but also include targeted messages that promote particular products known to drive sales among customers shopping in stores. "Wine, gourmet cheese or baby products--they can all be very salient e-mail messages to customers," says Rhodes, a former Gap Inc. online marketing executive who took over the top GroceryWorks spot last month.
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