How I tidied messy first-party customer data for a 100+ location retail grocer to unlock $14.5M in hidden revenue.
Project results
Annual Revenue Unlocked
Wallet-Share Gap Closed
Project Overview (The Chaos)
A multi-location retail grocer was pulling in over 30,000 new digital shoppers every single quarter, but they had a massive blind spot: 82% of those customers were completely under-engaged, logging fewer than one app session a week. While the company's tech vendors successfully built a functional mobile app, the actual backend customer data was an unorganized, chaotic mess. Leadership had big ideas for loyalty tiers on paper, but because the first-party data was untamed, they couldn't see why or where customers were dropping off and leaving millions on the table.
Project Execution (The Untangling)
I was brought in as the specialized data engine to wrangle, tidy, transform, and analyze the raw shopper behavior files. I rolled up our sleeves, dove straight into the database, and physically untangled the mess:
- Wrangled and tidied months of fragmented app session histories and transaction logs for 30,773 new shoppers.
- Transformed the messy database into clear, distinct shopper cohorts based on real-world weekly app habits.
- Analyzed the hidden revenue patterns to prove that getting an under-engaged shopper to execute just one extra action per week would drive an extra $118 a quarter in spend.
- Built the clean execution blueprints the marketing team needed to trigger automated alerts right before a new user went cold.
Project Results (The System in Practice)
The real gold wasn't the app software itself, it was buried inside the unorganized first-party data. By scrubbing and analyzing the Q1 customer database, I proved that minor shifts in user behavior could transform a standard $322 quarterly shopper into a high-value $876 loyalist.
My data transformation showed leadership exactly how to push user share-of-wallet from 14.6% to 19.9% in a single quarter by simply driving one extra digital offer clip per week. This surgical analysis gave the client a clear operational plan to secure $3.6M in immediate quarterly sales and an annualized $14.5M revenue lift, all without purchasing new software or cutting into profit margins with heavy discounts.
