How Brandsdal Group Grew Their Customer Database by 80% in 5 Years [Video]

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Brandsdal Group is a Norwegian online beauty retailer that also does business in Sweden, Austria, Germany, Denmark, and Finland.

Jonas Jahnsson, Marketing Specialist, and Elina Sheikh, Digital Marketer, spoke about the company’s tremendous growth – spurred, in part, by the marketing team’s tight-knit chemistry and commitment to personalization at scale – since its inception in 2007 during their Revolution presentation.

Watch Brandsdal’s full-length 29-minute presentation:

Recap: Brandsdal’s Business, Digital Marketing Strategy, & Results

The brand’s (BliVakker) database growth began slow for the first few years, but started to pick up significantly around 2015. In 2012, it began measuring international efforts – with a second brand, Cocopanda – and shortly after, began to see tremendous spikes in growth, especially at the international level.

Brandsdal Group grew their #database by 458k in 5 yrs w/ #personalization, better #lifecyclemarketing, & #automation CLICK TO TWEET

Pushing for Product Reviews

Reviews are a major feedback engine for the company. The brand’s products speak for themselves – they can boast a 5-star average review via a partnership with Trustpilot.

How They Grew So Fast – Traffic, Lifecycle Marketing, Web Personalization, Automation

Traffic generation. The email newsletter (37% of all traffic) has been huge for Brandsdal, along with paid – Snapchat, Instagram, Google, and Facebook – efforts (17%), direct marketing (17%), and retargeting work (13%).
Understanding the life cycle. The customer comes to the website, shares their data, usually will leave, and then gets retargeted via a newsletter or other win back techniques.

Personalization via the website. Tailored content based on who a customer is.
They use standard automated campaigns including welcome, anniversary, and birthday emails.

Test Everything

Freedom of speech and the ability to respectfully disagree with others is critical for creativity at Brandsdal. Everything can and should be tested, especially creative elements within your content. For example, who’d have known that creative without a beautiful model would perform better than a display without one?

Jonas was tasked with ensuring GDPR compliance last year – and the “registration” and “check out” touchpoints were two of the biggest areas of focus both for compliance and lead collection. After testing two variations of forms, he found a 19% increase in newsletter signups with a more robust form that forced the customer to indicate their communications preferences.

“Even when faced with challenges like GDPR and stuff that could be troublesome or boring as a marketer, try to see the opportunity in it – to test new stuff. We’re actually quite happy with this now, with GDPR, and have seen some good results.” – Jonas Jahnsson

The People Aspect

Brandsdal shares a common goal – to expand. Everyone at the company shares this same ideal… to drive international expansion, step-by-step and organically, throughout Europe.

Teamwork and leadership all provide growth opportunities for the team, and this is not an aspect that Jahnsson believes should be overlooked! The marketing team runs smoothly with 22 people, and self-sufficiency is the norm.

“Companies don’t have ideas, only people do, so make sure you value the employees who work for you because it makes a huge different…. We have a lot of team-building activities – like going on ski trips in the south of Norway! We notice that a lot of creative ideas happen when we let our guards down, and just slow down the pace.” – Elina Sheikh

Team bonding builds trust and bonds that will translate to the workplace. Everything the company does is brought together by one common thread: teamwork and togetherness. ◾

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