idio in the Direct Marketing Association Awards

We aren’t ones to chase awards at all. In fact, we’d much rather pursue performance than positioning, but it’s great to hear that a client project of ours won a Bronze at the last Direct Marketing Association Awards, for Best Data Strategy! We are probably a few months late in spotting this, but hey – as I said, we don’t chase these things much.

TMW (a generally awesome digital agency, and the award winners) use idio Platform in the below project to assist in the structuring and personalising of relevant content for a very interesting eCRM campaign, as well as customer data profiling and insight generation.

From DMA’s website:

Client: Unilever/Slim.Fast

The Team: Daren Kay, Amy Bryson, Rachel Spong, Sam Cottrel, Jasmine McCorry, Dawn Jenner, Kate Stockdill, Tariq Khan, Rolff Kruger, Murdo MacLean. Other contributor: Idio

What is wonderful about this work:

We wanted to motivate yoyo dieters to create a personal dieting plan, communicated via regular emails. We got more registrants in three months than the last three years! 55,000 signed up, 90% converting instantly. eCRM achieved 32% CTR (average 23%).

Objectives:

Increase awareness of Slim.Fast vs competitor diets. Specifically target yoyo dieters with short-term, weight-loss goals. Educate women about the benefits of the new 3.2.1 plan, including improved product range. Deliver personalised, relevant plan and comms. Increase consumption by 1.5 packs p/a and keep consumers on the diet for longer. Build towards long-term engagement strategy with less reliance on ATL spend and maintain ongoing 121 conversations.

Strategy and Targeting:

The Slim.Fast 3.2.1. plan targets those who find it hard to stick to a diet. Their weight fluctuates and they’re likely to diet 23 times a year. We know they’ll be more motivated to lose weight for a specific event or date: they don’t want to change their lifestyle or embrace any long-term changes. They want a quick, cheap and convenient diet that’s guaranteed to deliver results. Most work part-time and feel more motivated in the morning – they need constant reminders to achieve their weight-loss goal. We ensured key messages of simplicity, convenience and proven results. We overlaid triggers for losing weight (e.g. a wedding or holiday) to ensure relevance and keep them motivated. In contrast to previous years, we had a single-minded acquisition strategy – to target short term yoyo dieters – allowing for focused and personalised messaging throughout. A digital solution was required, for the personalised subject matter for a one-stop shop for dieting info. The audience are info-hungry when online, so providing answers would keep them reading.

Database

From the data we can better profile our audience by age, gender, location, reasons for losing weight, weight-loss goals, food preferences, length of diet, burning topics when on a diet, etc. This will feed into future strategies. Lapsed dieters will be reactivated onto the diet three times a year.

Results

In three months, we’ve almost doubled the number of registrants from the last three years. We’ve engaged the audience to return again and again to the site (for 8 minutes at a time!), read the magazine and sign up to the plan. Length of diet (consumption) is on a steady increase. And most importantly, through our data capture we understand more about our consumers than ever before.