IGALink Best Practices Perspectives

Kirby Foods Highlights Shopper Tools with IGALink Brochure

A message to the Alliance from...
Jerry Reynolds
President
Kirby Foods
Champaign, IL
LDC: SUPERVALU, INC. - Champaign Division

IGALink, IGA's new digital marketing program, provides unique full-featured grocery websites and mobile web apps to all IGA USA retailers. Today, Jerry Reynolds, president of Kirby Foods, shares how IGALink has benefitted his 14 store group, and how he is promoting his new site to shoppers.

We've had a Kirby Foods IGA store web presence for about three years now, and in that time we've done a lot of different things to try to make it work, including giving each of our 14 stores their own site. You can imagine how much of a hassle it was to stay up-to-date with that many sites, so when IGALink came along, we were definitely interested. Then when IGA told us that we could manage all of our stores on one website-and still give each of our stores their own digital weekly ad-we were sold. We switched over immediately and we haven't been sorry for a second.

Our IGALink site is more professional and more sophisticated than what we had-and there's no doubt that it's been a whole lot easier. Before IGALink we had a person in each store who was responsible for keeping that store's site up. Now we have one person from our head office, Earl Hixson, running one site for all our stores, and it takes him very little time to do it.

Now we that we have a great site the next step is to let our shoppers know about it. We started out by putting up the www.iga.com POP, and then we also created some POP of our own that take shoppers directly to our site. That got people interested, but we figured we needed something a little more specific to get the attention we need for this program. We wanted to let our shoppers know that this isn't just a website, it's a website that will make their lives easier with shopper tools like a digital ad, recipes, shopping list and the mobile app. We looked at all the resources on the Alliance site to get ideas, and then sat down and made a brochure that we can hand out in our stores.

Now we're printing and distributing copies to each of our stores so they can be passed out to shoppers. Up to this point we haven't had a lot of questions, but in our mind it made more sense to come out of the gate running and give shoppers what they need before they ask. We believe in this program, and we're going to do everything we can to make sure our shoppers believe in it too.

Thanks,
Jerry Reynolds

Editor's Note: The Independent View will not publish Monday, Sept. 5. Publication will resume Tuesday, Sept. 6.

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