Award Winners’ Spotlight: Most Effective Retail Campaign

IKEA and IMI Awards 2014The deadline for the 2015 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards is now less than four weeks away. As the deadline approaches, we are turning the spotlight on one of last year’s winners each week, looking at what gave the winning entry the edge over the competition.

This week, our focus is on the Most Effective Retail Campaign, which was won by IKEA and its partners, IMImobile and LIDA, for a campaign designed to drive footfall into IKEA’s Dublin store.

The chosen medium for the campaign was SMS, owing to its much higher engagement rate, compared to email. Typically, 90 per cent of text messages are read by the recipient, usually within a few seconds of arriving on the phone, and engagement rates are six to eight times higher than email. It may be low-tech compared to some other mobile disciplines, but the simple truth is that SMS works.

The messaging campaign targeted members of the IKEA FAMILY loyalty program in IKEA’s then-newest store, in Dublin, encouraging them to visit the store and check out the new garden range. The FAMILY loyalty program has over 4.8m members in the UK and Ireland, over 250,000 of whom are in Dublin.

The message copy read: “Ease into summer with our beautiful new garden range, now available at IKEA Dublin. Cant wait? Be inspired at IKEA.ie To stop, text IKEA to 51500.”
IKEA used IMImobile’s DaVinci Campaign Manager to create, deliver, track and measure the SMS campaign. The companies also created a control group of customers who did not receive the campaign, in order to gauge its performance.

IKEA’s faith in the medium was well placed. While the results of the campaign are confidential, they were shared with the judges for the purposes of judging, and were hugely impressive, driving substantial increases in footfall, customer engagement and incremental revenue for IKEA Dublin, all for a relatively modest budget. In fact, the campaign was so successful it picked up not one award but too, triumphing also in the Most Effective Messaging Campaign category.

Radhika Vyas-Shah, IKEA FAMILY manager at IKEA UK & Ireland commented: “We are extremely pleased with the results of the Dublin IKEA FAMILY campaign; SMS drove the campaign to produce exceptional results and demonstrated the importance of incorporating mobile into our marketing strategy.”

The final deadline for this year’s Awards is less than five weeks away, but to avoid a late-entry fee, you should aim to get your entries in before the Early Bird deadline of 24 July, less than two weeks away. The Awards, which are now in their sixth year, recognise excellence in mobile marketing across 36 categories, and attracted more than 200 entries each year.

This year sees several new categories added, including Most Effective Smartwatch App, Most Accessible App, and Most Effective Publisher Offering. In addition to the 36 standard categories, there’s also a Grand Prix Award for the best entry overall, and our four People’s Choice Awards, with the shortlist drawn up by a panel of industry experts and the winners chosen by a public vote. The People’s Choice categories and shortlist will be announced in the weeks to come.

The Awards Ceremony will take place on 26 November in London. For more information and details on how to enter the Awards, head for the Awards website.
For information on sponsoring the Awards, please contact john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com