Kirkland’s Case Study:

A (well-decorated) place to connect.

Problem

What to do with a scattered, but extremely loyal customer base who love to share ideas and seek decorating advice?  That’s the problem (a pretty good problem to have, we think) Kirkland’s brought to redpepper in April 2009.  Kirkland’s knew that they needed to have an online presence, but had no idea where to begin.  Research determined that we needed to engage the Kirkland’s customers – instead of just marketing to them.

Ah-Ha! Moment

Give Kirkland’s customers a place to connect.

Creative Strategy

Activate Kirkland’s fan base by creating a community site where they can connect around a shared love of decorating and for Kirkland’s products. Thanks to this brand new integrated platform, there is a whole lot of sharing and connecting taking place:

• Community Site MyKirklands.com is a place where community members can engage with each other and Kirkland’s designers through discussions, comments, quick tips, product reviews, photo uploads and more. Visitors can share their feedback and participate in promotions.  MyKirklands.com is promoted through email, online advertising, in-store digital signage, bag stuffers and via Kirkland’s in-store associates.

• Training DVD Developed to teach associates how to use and explain the community site to customers.

• Facebook Serves as a medium for promoting store sales, designer seminars, the community site, online promotions and sweepstakes. All posted content – including questions, discussions, and photo galleries – drive users back and forth, to and from MyKirklands.com.

• Email Campaign Used to jumpstart the MyKirkland’s community by driving traffic to interact within the community (discussions, photos, reviews), participate in the contests, and send coupons and promote sales.

• Online Promotion: Designer Vote Over 100 designers from a pre-existing designer program applied to be official MyKirkland’s designers.  After narrowing the pool via phone interviews, 10 were chosen to be voted on by the MyKirkland’s community.

• Online Promotion: MyKirkland’s Designers The MyKirkand’s Designers serve as the voice of Kirkland’s on the community site – sharing quick tips, reviewing Kirkland’s products and starting discussions.

• Sweepstakes: Décor for Four Designed to secure new customer emails and activate word-of-mouth by getting existing customers to sign up with three of their friends. Each team was eligible to win $10K in Kirkland’s merchandise and a designer to help them makeover a room in their house.

• Online Promotion: Décor for Four Reveal New features show glamour shots of the winners’ rooms with call outs to specific Kirkland’s products and also feature designer quick tips (in written or video format), plus links to reviews or similar Kirkland’s product.  Discussions from the MyKirklands designers who completed the transformations plus the four winners are also available as video clips, candid photos, before-and-after room shots, and other mediums.

• Online Promotion: Holiday Dazzle Offers users the opportunity to win a $200 gift card to Kirkland’s for sharing photos of their holiday décor on the site.  Winners are chosen by the vote of community members.  This contest runs for five weeks and awarded one winner per week.

• In-Store Promotion: Gift Genius Runs in-stores throughout the holiday season – the designated Gift Genius is available to help customers find gifts based on price point, recipient, and other factors.  Online, the community site featured a devoted landing page, gifting-centric discussions, and product reviews to further help customers with their gifting needs.

• Bag Stuffers Used in-store to promote community site, online promotions, and sweepstakes opportunities.

• MyVoice Channel MyVoice allowed members the opportunity to change and improve the site based on feedback, making MyKirklands a true living, breathing, constantly changing community site.  Some customer generated site enhancements include Super Search, which makes the site searchable by category or keyword, and Photo Viewer, allowing users to view all photos and search by hearts (“likes”), date, etc., while still searching by ro0m type.

Metrics & Results

During the eight week campaign, over 4.8 million member interactions were logged on the community site including loves, product reviews, photo uploads, photo views, discussions and comments.

Between the community members, Decor for Four Sweepstakes and Designer Vote we captured over 615,000 email addresses. Around 43,000 were new email subscribers which Kirkland’s equates to an annual customer value of $860,000 in revenue which more than paid for the campaign.

The Decor for Four Sweepstakes received over 120,000 total entries, 5200 of which were completed teams. The Designer Vote received over 93,000 votes counted.

The email campaign was considered a huge success and exceeded expectations, garnering over 10,000 community members.  As a result of this two month email campaign, the online community continues to grow and thrive with more than 13,000 members and more joining every day.

As redpepper partner Tim said, “Kirkland’s consumers want to connect with each other – they just needed someone else to provide the introduction.”