Dollar General Fuels Growth With a High-Performing Media Network

The Challenge

More than 66 million Americans, or 20% of the US population, live in rural areas, according to the latest census. And yet, rural consumers are often overlooked and underserved by Fortune 500 companies. When it comes to digital media, platforms tend to invest in high-volume efficiency strategies, leading to a focus on audiences in more densely populated markets and leaving a gap in outreach to customers who aren’t as easy to access. 

Dollar General, one of the most valuable retailers in the world, has proudly served rural communities since it was founded in 1939, and roughly 75% of its stores currently serve communities of 20,000 or fewer people. With more than 19,000 stores, in fact, Dollar General stores are far easier to find than a Starbucks or 7-Eleven. This reach gives Dollar General and its partners an immense opportunity.  

“For nearly 85 years, Dollar General has put the customer at the center of everything we do—the better we know our customer, the better we can serve them, and the more time and money we can save them,” Chad Fox, Chief Marketing Officer at Dollar General, said. “Our first-party data offers a modern and comprehensive level of this customer centricity.” 

By building a high-performing media network, the Dollar General team had the ability to use their robust, unique data to drive meaningful business growth, deliver important customer insights, and deepen engagement and loyalty, not just for itself but for the brands it sells.

The Dollar General Media Network (DGMN) launched in 2018, but the team knew it was not maximizing the opportunity that the company’s extensive—and accelerating—reach offered. As it sought to bring network operations in-house, the retailer also looked for partners that could help it bring ambitious business goals to fruition.

The Solution

Dollar General launched an evolved DGMN in 2022, balancing capabilities it brought in-house with new strategic technology partnerships. The new DGMN leveraged the /LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform, which reconciles Dollar General customers’ online and offline identities for a deeper understanding of hard-to-reach audiences across populations, counties, and state lines, while allowing Dollar General to collaborate flexibly with its partners via advanced data clean room capabilities.

The Results

The evolved DGMN, as Dollar General shared in a press release, is “a proprietary audience-centric solution, rooted in transparency, delivering closed-loop 1:1 measurement, insights, and reporting that identify both attribution and incrementality.” This solution allows DGMN to better serve CPGs that sell products in Dollar General’s stores with a more robust and dynamic view of customers from exposure to purchase, while positioning Dollar General as the retailer and partner of choice for rural America. As a result of LiveRamp and DGMN’s partnership, advertisers have benefitted from the ability to:

• Reach nearly 100% of Dollar General’s customers, accounting for two billion annual transactions, enabling advertisers to build awareness and drive purchase consideration digitally and in-store
• Improve analytics and measurement with closed-loop reporting, self-service measurement of sales attribution and incremental lift, and audience-building from Dollar General’s extensive and unduplicated customer base
• Access real-time customer data in 47 states to gain insight into more than two billion transactions annually—consumer insights no one else has
• Engage in privacy-centric, responsible data collaboration in an enhanced clean room environment with more than 50 additional companies, including brands from Dollar General CPG partners Unilever^®, PepsiCo^®, and Hershey^®, for improved incremental return on advertising spend (iROAS)

Dollar General has more than four million monthly active app users, who use it to discover DG digital coupons, explore the weekly ad, start an order for in-store purchase, and buy online. In LiveRamp’s enhanced clean-room environment, Dollar General can use the rich first-, second-, and third-party data from these robust digital offerings to learn which audiences are addressable across the open web and ensure match rates are both consistent and accurate, resulting in stronger customer intelligence for Dollar General and brands. 

As Fox observes, “The data from DGMN is unique in that it represents a customer base that is underserved geographically and financially, but also underrepresented in the world of digital media—including audience aggregators, syndicated data sources, and measurement methodologies used to gauge effectiveness. Sharing data in a privacy-focused and respectful manner enables unique combinations of attributes for segment insights, audience creation, and targeting to drive relevancy, engagement, and conversion—a win for our customers, a win for our vendors, and a win for Dollar General.”

All of this behind-the-scenes work enables the seamless online and in-store experiences Dollar General customers have come to expect from the nationwide retailer.  

“DGMN creates natural connectivity between advertising and in-store purchases for a frictionless customer journey,” said Fox. “With the right priorities for individual retail audiences, brands and consumers gain a smoother experience and a more customized path to purchase.”  

With LiveRamp’s collaboration, Dollar General has built a high-performing media network that deepens customer engagement and protects consumer trust, offers unique and substantive value to CPG partners, and powerfully fuels its own flywheel for growth. And yet this is just the beginning. Without a doubt, DGMN will continue to pioneer retail media innovation and unlock enduring brand and business value for years to come.