Ocado enters social gifting with Wrapp to drive customer acquisition

The online grocer will offer its customers a chance to give friends and colleagues free £5 gift vouchers via Wrapp, through a mobile and Facebook app.

Ocado launches the 'Give And Get' campaign today (16 August) that will allow customers to send three free £5 gifts on to friends and receive a double-value Wrapp gift card as a reward.

If customers want to gift more than £5, they can have the first £5 for free and pay to top up the remainder of the gift.

Users will be notified via the app of upcoming birthdays of Facebook friends and asked if they want to give them a gift. 

Matthew Knight, head of marketing, insight and communication at Ocado, said: "We've found one of the best forms of customer acquisition for us is customer recommendation – we know that once people try our service they love it and are quite happy to tell their friends about it, and we see [social gifting] as a good way to facilitate that."

Ocado has invested in enough Wrapp cards for a trial lasting a few months and will analyse results before taking the partnership further.

More than 20% of Ocado sales are now placed on the brand's app formats and Knight added that mobile was "something we can only see getting bigger".

Knight admitted its customer base tended "to be a little older and be at the stage where they have families and do a lot of grocery shopping", and added that Wrapp's young demographic was "a potential benefit".

He said: "This is an opportunity to go out to that digitally active base and is part of a pattern of activity we've been doing over the last couple of years to make use of social media and the online advertising space."

The partnership will be promoted by Wrapp and via Ocado’' social media accounts with an emphasis on Facebook, because the gifting service is based around people's Facebook friends.

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This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk