So Mayne ceded the cherry pickers to Kroger and Meijer, his chain-store rivals. Some of his talk about ditching fair-weather shoppers ruffled feathers. But once people saw the results of this new strategy, their worries dissipated. Brinkmoeller, who's in charge of the loyalty program, sends out a monthly newsletter to the company's top 9,000 customers. But not every newsletter is alike.
Different versions contain coupons pegged to different spending levels.
And, since DLM tracks purchases so closely, it can also send highly targeted offers to its customers. The loyalty program has allowed Mayne to focus more on his customers and less on the competition. I don't even look at its ads now. We knew that one way to go broke was to lose 71 cents on an item that people buy 200 times a year. So, for good customers, we printed coupons that let them buy milk for 49 cents a gallon, limit five.