The Shelby Report recently visited with Swiftly, a Seattle-based retail technology platform, to learn more about its new Audience Optimizer, a tool designed to help brick-and-mortar retailers transition their marketing efforts from traditional print circulars to targeted digital campaigns.
Sean Turner, co-founder and chief technology officer of Swiftly, said the platform provides retailers with digital tools to engage customers across multiple channels while building retail media capabilities. 
“We are a retail tools and technology company, and we empower brick-and-mortar retailers with the digital tools to be able to attract their customers – into their stores, to their mobile app, to their website – and to be able to serve really high quality, personalized digital advertising to those customers,” Turner said.
According to the company’s website, Swiftly partners with retailers and advertisers to deliver the same tools leveraged by retail and e-commerce giants, enabling retailers of all sizes to benefit from enterprise-grade retail technology.
The platform unifies first-party shopper data across point-of-sale systems, loyalty programs, e-commerce and mobile to deliver identity resolution, audience targeting and closed-loop attribution.
Turner said retail media represents just one component of a larger strategy that begins with customer acquisition and digital engagement.
“We do help a lot of retailers with retail media, but a lot of times, when you think about what you need to do retail media really well, that’s just one component of it. That’s like the last step in a longer journey. You first have to have customers. You have to get those customers to come to your mobile app and website, and then you can monetize those eyeballs,” Turner said. “But if you don’t have a destination for the shoppers to go to, and if you don’t have the digital attention of those shoppers in the first place, then you can’t really do retail media in an effective way.”
The Audience Optimizer platform addresses what Turner described as a generational shift away from traditional print marketing.
“We hear a lot of challenges that for many years, retailers really relied on the paper circular,” Turner said. “… But you think about your Gen Z customer or your Millennial customer, they’re not looking at paper. Many of them, they don’t even know how to get to their mailbox. Email they could do but snail mail, not so much.”
Audience Optimizer uses artificial intelligence to match promotional items with individual shopper preferences, addressing what Turner called a targeting challenge unique to digital marketing.
“The nice thing about the paper circular is when I open that up, I could see all these different products that might capture my attention, but with digital you don’t have that much real estate. You have to be a lot more targeted about exactly what product am I showing this shopper,” Turner said.
The platform analyzes sale items and presents shoppers with personalized product recommendations.
“I can use those 4,000 SKUs that you’ve got on sale and show the shopper the five SKUs that they’re going to care most about, that’s going to be most likely to get them to go to your website or go to your store and make a purchase,” Turner said. “And we’ve just been seeing phenomenal results with that.”
Swiftly serves retailers ranging from national chains to independent operators. Turner listed clients including Save A Lot, Homeland, Lucky, Save Mart, McKay’s, Food Depot, PJP Stores, Cub Foods, Shoppers and Shop and Save, along with enterprise clients such as Circle K and Target.
While the company initially focused on enterprise retailers, Turner said Audience Optimizer has particular appeal for independent and regional chains.
“We really started servicing the enterprises,” Turner said. “But as we’ve really gone to market with Audience Optimizer, we’re finding that’s something that many of the independents and the regionals, they just don’t have the technology infrastructure to compete with the big guys. In a lot of ways, they need that help a little bit more.”
He said the platform serves retailers with store counts ranging from one to 100 locations.
According to Turner, early results show significant impact on retailer performance.
“With Audience Optimizer, what we’ve seen is, on average per shopping trip, they can drive the shopper to spend about $2.90 more,” Turner said. “When you look at that, if you kind of aggregate that up, that’s single digit percentage increases in comp store sales, which is super meaningful for a retailer, and you can do that at a fraction of the cost that you spend on print.”
Swiftly was founded in 2018 by Henry Kim, Turner and Karen Ho, who began developing their technology in a small room above Zion Market, a family-owned Korean grocery store.
The company has since raised more than $200 million in funding, achieving unicorn status in 2022 with a $1 billion valuation following a Series C funding round.
The platform serves more than 15,000 retail locations across the United States, representing about 12 percent of grocery and convenience store locations nationwide. Major consumer brands including PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Hershey use Swiftly’s platform to drive in-store sales.
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