Like most companies in the product industry, IKEA Denmark has an extensive product base. Rather too extensive to take in all at once. Even with their main marketing tool – a product catalogue, less than 40% of their over 2,500, (and growing) products are included within it.
How IKEA Denmark successfully used email marketing
With 170,000 members of their customer loyalty programme, IKEA required a cost-effective solution that would increase their sales in the short term, on a minimal marketing budget.
In any sphere of marketing, this main objective presents quite a challenge. This is because the answer to this problem is dynamism (the marketing messages must be on-time, every-time) and relevance (the messages must be of great interest to the client). This combination would mean the message would be reach the client and would be of such significance that chances of them taking action immediately would be much higher than average.
Let’s weigh our options as the theoretical marketing manager:
Regular offline (TV/Billboards / Newspaper / Flyers / Catalogs / Radio / Events) methods would have been too expensive and wouldn’t have achieved any of our key objectives: dynamism and relevance. Telemarketing could achieve highly targeted messages but it would still take far too long.
Ah, and then there was email marketing. So back to the narrative…
So obviously, IKEA Denmark through Talefod approached Epsilon International. “A customer-driven dynamic messaging system based on personalized e-newsletters” was chosen. This email marketing campaign met the two objectives; the problem now lay on execution. It would have to be meticulously executed. This was achieved using an automated workflow of this nature:
Each month, a client would receive an email that would allow them to select the types of products and sales promotions they wanted to receive information about. The mix of products was based on the availability of the products instore and promotions being run. This newsletter could produce up to 25 million variations.
Quite mind boggling what email can do! I am sure you are curious to read what happened, and you will next week, when Email Magic returns!
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