Carrefour was launched in the region in 1995 by UAE-based Majid Al Futtaim, which is the exclusive franchisee to operate Carrefour in over 30 countries across the Middle East, Africa,and Asia, and fully owns the operations in the region. Today, Majid Al Futtaim operates over 350 Carrefour stores in 17 countries, serving more than 750,000 customers daily and employing over 37,000 colleagues.
Carrefour actively prints new promotion leaflets for their stores across their dozen market areas. While going through a digital transformation of their business, they also wanted to bring print ads to digital media. The printed leaflets include assorted product offers on several different categories ranging from grocery to household goods to electronics. Additionally, each country has unique offers and promotions which get updated every few weeks.
Manual creative development and media buying for such a digitization process would have been laborious and complex.
Carrefour has partnered with Smartly.io for more than two years to automate and optimize their paid social activity as they scale their online business.
Carrefour used Smartly.io’s feed-based Automated Ads solution to fully automate the creation and delivery of Digital Leaflets - realizing them as Instant Experience ads, Facebook’s immersive full-screen mobile experience.
Carrefour’s design team created on-brand Image Templates in Smartly.io to reflect the seasonal promotions. The templated designs were automatically applied to the dozens of products promoted in the leaflets. Campaigns were launched for each country to deliver relevant local offers, and optimized for store traffic to achieve the lowest Cost per Store Visit.
Sonja Abdo
VP of Digital Marketing
Digital Leaflets allowed Carrefour to engage with online audiences and drive them towards visiting the stores with promotions they receive on their mobile screens. Carrefour was also able to benefit from immense time savings with Smartly.io’s Automated Ads set-up.
Carrefour is seeing a 30% reduction in execution time with Smartly. Their team saves around 50 work hours monthly and produces 30+ leaflet ads every month with Smartly.io’s automation. The saved time is used to work on strategic campaign planning. The engagement rates from the automated leaflet campaigns have been impressive, hovering at 7-8%, which is significantly higher than other ad formats.