Vinga of Sweden creates a wide collection of well-designed, functional products for its customer’s homes. Their business works in three main directions: (1) Business-to-Business (B2B) sales of products to third-party retailers, (2) Business-to-Consumer (B2C) sales of products through their webshop, and (3) B2B sales of gift cards to retailers. All these sides of the business are interconnected, with B2B sales accounting for the larger part of the company’s revenue.
However, in order for retailers to be interested in selling their products, consumers need to know the brand and create demand for it. As such, generating brand awareness has always been a priority for the company, with the latest initiative for doing so being an Instagram campaign.
A stronger social media presence results in more brand awareness, which in turn generates more demand for Vinga of Sweden’s products. Through a quantifiable metric, such as the number of social media followers, the company could more easily persuade retailers to offer their products.
Niklas Larsson, Vinga of Sweden’s E-Commerce Manager, had a clear vision for how the campaign should work. He explained that “We wanted visitors to click on the message and follow our Instagram page. It was important that after they came back, we could show them another message, thanking them and displaying the discount code we promised.”
They created a simple campaign revealing that Instagram followers got a 15% discount on their first purchase. To ensure all visitors saw this message without intruding on the user experience, Niklas cleverly combined the 10% scroll and exit intent triggers. As such, if the user was naturally browsing the page, the campaign would trigger once they scrolled down 10% of the page. However, if they wanted to leave before going down the 10%, the exit intent trigger took over and showed the campaign regardless.
This combination proved extremely effective, as 20.1% of visitors clicked through this SleekBox. After they returned from Vinga of Sweden’s Instagram page, they were presented with the following message:
“Once we started using this campaign, we’ve seen our number of Instagram followers increase rapidly.”
Aside from using Sleeknote to improve brand awareness, Vinga of Sweden also uses it as a communication channel with their B2B customers. Niklas explained that “Almost everybody goes through the website, so we can quickly send out messages through it.” They do this for both urgent messages, such as technical issues the company is facing, or simply general updates relevant to visitors. The following is an example of a message displayed when the company’s phone line was down:
Through these types of on-site messages, Vinga of Sweden established a new communication channel with their visitors and customers, enabling them to quickly broadcast short, but important messages. Before implementing Sleeknote, these messages were handled directly through their web platform, a process that Niklas told me “involved a lot of steps just to add something simple to the site. With Sleeknote, we can change it quickly, straight from the editor.”
As marketers, we tend to focus on tangible values. We convert, we sell, we measure. While these values are easy to quantify and make it easy to monitor our success, they tend to blind us to the importance of softer values. We tend to disregard social media followings as “vanity metrics” and choose to ignore their meaning, as they are hard to quantify. Any marketer would take 10 sales over 100 followers without blinking. But what if it’s not so simple? What if, sometimes, we can be wrong?
Vinga of Sweden’s case is a perfect example of soft, “vanity metrics” having a strong, albeit indirect contribution to sales. As they primarily sell to other businesses, the value of these sales is beyond what any end user would purchase. From the outside, it might seem wasteful to aim for Instagram followers instead of newsletter subscribers, but in Vinga of Sweden’s case, the demand they generated resulted in more sales than an email marketing list could have.
