2024 Gold Retail and E-commerce

Agency: RAPP

Client: IKEA

Entry Title: Nudging up Loyalty for IKEA

Executive Summary

IKEA Family Loyalty Programme customers spend twice as much - but only 1 in 5 customers swipe their card, limiting a key source of crucial data. Behavioural nudges were applied to customers, but also IKEA co-workers.

Strategy

Family Loyalty Programme is crucial to IKEA’s success. The data it provides helps the store really know who their customers are, what they buy and what they like. So IKEA needed more customers to swipe, providing a long-term strategy to drive sustainable business growth.

Several years ago, RAPP proved that educating and engaging co-workers, and encouraging them to promote the benefits of IKEA Family on the shop floor boosted membership and store performance. Stores that trained more than 50% of their staff performed significantly better in Family performance, which led to more swipes, more transactions and more revenue.

Creativity

The creative output was supported by four behavioural nudges. Each focussed on achieving a different business objective that laddered up to getting more customers to swipe:

1. Confirmation bias - reinforced co-workers’ existing knowledge of IKEA Family with data and reports that showed the influence each employee could have on their store’s performance. The % of Family sales climbed from 31% to 46%.
2. Social motivation - friendly competition between stores, showing live leaderboards of those with the most swipes. This almost doubled the amount of customers who swiped their Family card
3. Participative decisioning - empowered co-workers to do things even the latest digital targeting would struggle to achieve; like identifying customers looking at IKEA Family items and signing them up, or reminding them to swipe at the checkout to get their exclusive member price. Since launch, the number of monthly sign-ups has doubled.
4. Reciprocity - engaging, motivating and rewarding high-performing co-workers and stores. These rewards included trophies, gift cards and store of the month recognition.

Results

A little nudge goes a long way.

When the campaign started, only 1 in 5 shoppers that walked through the doors swiped their card. Afterwards it was 1 in 3 . More swipes means more Family transactions, which means more data which to use to re-engage and increase shopping frequency.

All nudges have attracted twice as many customers to sign up to IKEA Family every month: enough to fill Wembley Stadium for a Taylor Swift gig, or almost a million new Family members each year.

The Team

RAPP - Chris Kilgariff, Group Account Director - Millie Agnew, Project Manager - Holly Ramsey-Smith, Senior Project Manager - Russ Groombridge, VP Data Analytics - Jacob Lovewell, Senior Strategist - Nic Howell, Strategy Director - Narinder Kainth, Account Director - Ian Cochran, Senior Creative - Jay Packham, Senior Creative - Durrelle Gregory, Senior Designer - Pawel Rowinski, Designer - Stephanie Bryan-Kinns, Senior Designer - Georgia Lamb, Junior Creative - Will Rodgers, Junior Creative - Marine Escande, Data Analytics Director - Willem Kerr, Data Analyst - William Voong, Senior Data Analyst - Nicole Waller, Senior Copywriter - Jack Mochine, Junior Copywriter - Al Mackie, CCO - Jason Cascarina, Deputy Executive Creative Director - Hiten Bhatt, Head of Design