Personalized digital goodie bags

This article was previously published on LinkedIn

On April 1st Göteborgsvarvet launched Varvetdeals. What is that, one might ask? I’ll use this article to try to explain that to all that wants to know and also to explain the process.

It all became very clear when we got a new retail partner in Boozt.com that only operates online. Their objective is to be seen in our digital communication because that’s where our runners are as close as possible to becoming their customers. And when we though about it, this becomes more and more true for many of our partners. Many of us live our lives as much online as IRL and especially shopping, signing up for subscriptions etc. is often done online. We needed to think this through, not just create some specialized marketing for our online retail partner.

A bunch of us sat down and managed to come up with an idea that we chose to call Varvetdeals, deals of some sort that you are offered through Göteborgsvarvet. A bit simplified the plan was to create a platform within our registration system where we could add deals (or campaigns, offers, ads, whatever you want to call them, but I’ll keep referring to them as deals). Below are some of the must haves that we signed off on.

• You should be able to set date and time for when the deal should become active and also for when the deal should become inactive again. This would enable us to have interesting deals for our runners all year long, not just during a short period around race day.
• There should be (at least) three levels of deals and the level decides how the deal is displayed. A premium deal is displayed/presented much larger than a standard deal or a small deal. Our thought was that main partners should get premium deals while event partners or minor partners get the other levels of deals.
• The system must be able to serve personalized deals to users. Women are likely not responding in the same way as men on the same images, texts etc. If presenting images with women on to women the deal should get more clicks making the partner more satisfied. In addition to gender a deal can be personalized on age, country, previous results, which races the runner is registered to etc. The list could be very long.
• Since we’re online the two possible actions of clicking on a deal should be a redirect to the partner’s web page of choice or a pop up showing where the partner’s text of choice is displayed.
• Tracking is vital. The partners are interested in knowing, for example, how many times their deals have been displayed, how many unique users and how many clicks/interactions have been made.
• A deal should also be configurable to be displayed at the end of some of the automated emails that are sent out as part of the registration process.

This was really fun to start working on. The needs were clear and I knew that this would make a great contribution to what the sales team have to offer digitally to both existing partners and also to prospects.

In close collaboration with my wonderful colleagues we managed to get this thing ready in time for launch on April 1st and so far I’ve only heard positive things about Varvetdeals.

Apart from being something good for our partners this is also something that fits very good with our sustainability work. Göteborgsvarvet is certified according to ISO 20121 (Sustainable events) and to get this as a goodie bag for our runners instead of a plastic bag with samples and a bunch of papers referring to websites where the runners can buy something with a discount or sign up for a advantageous subscription is a big leap forward. We’ve all seen how our oceans look and I guess it’s consensus over the bigger part of the planet that we need to reduce the use of plastic. This Varvetdeals solution only needs some extra power for our web servers and our hosting partner uses mainly wind power and have a very good plan for both ecological, economical and social sustainability.

To say that Varvetdeals is done would be a lie. There are thing that could be made better of optimized for performance. More personalization is going to be added as we go along and see what type of needs there is. But hey, what we’ve launched is a really good start.