What do Intel, Hewlett Packard, Samsung, Microsoft, LG, Dulux, Sony, Lenovo, Huawei, Dell, Mobil, Asus, Motorola have in common? The answer is they all reaped the rewards of challenging Opia to help boost their sales and lock in customer loyalty.
At Opia we are the industry experts in creating engaging consumer sales promotions, rewards and loyalty programmes, working on dynamic, innovative campaigns with FTSE 100, blue chip and small-to-medium-sized businesses in the UK and around the rest of the world. Every week we solve the challenges that organisations throw at us, using our deep expertise in redemption-based, risk-managed sales promotions.
But Opia’s creativity and skills are available to every company that is serious about increasing sales. So why don’t you challenge us to come up with innovative promotions to solve your sales problems? It will only take 30 minutes for us to explain how our bold, sometimes off-the-wall promotions increase sales, using data-driven expertise and creative thinking to ensure the biggest possible impact at lowest possible risk.
Without any cost to you, in the course of those few minutes we can reveal how we work in close consultation with our clients to ensure we gain an in-depth understanding of their precise goals and business challenges. We recognise that no two businesses are alike and that each promotional mechanism must be hand-crafted to fit the organisation’s needs.
It may be that your business feels trapped in a whirlpool of constant discounting that constantly erodes margins, with consumers waiting for the next round of reductions before snapping up a new PC, laptop, tablet, TV or smartphone. Or it may be that your current sales promotions are lacklustre and need replacement with fresher, more exciting propositions underpinned by real insight.
How Opia will meet your challenge
So how does Opia help you get ahead of the competition without inflicting yet more damage on your bottom line?
As a specialist risk-managed sales promotions agency, Opia will create a compelling end-to-end promotional solution, which will meet the client’s challenges, work within their budgets and deliver an irresistible proposition to drive sales forward.
By creating and managing the promotion end-to-end using a 100 per cent in-house team, Opia manages the risk through insurance placed with underwriters at Lloyds of London. For the brand or retailer, this means an uplift in sales, as the consumer is enticed by the promotional offer at the point of purchase, without eroding margins by reducing downward price points.
By paying a small fixed fee on all qualifying sales out, the retailer or brand avoids exposure to its P&L from an over-subscribed campaign. An experienced industry partner, like Opia will always recommend a risk-managed sales promotion which it underpins with more than 20 years’ experience, predictive analytics and specialist insurance underwriting.
Above all, we are confident enough to challenge industry norms - continually innovating to develop ground-breaking new promotional mechanics, with fixed fee costs so that businesses know precisely where they stand and what the bottom line impact will be.
It is only because our expertise and our amazing track record in meeting the challenges set us that we have continued to work with such high profile brands.
Intel
Take our success with Intel for example. In the summer of 2012, Opia was challenged by Intel and Dixons Retail to help solve low sales on the already heavily-promoted Ultrabook device which had been introduced earlier that year.
Opia researched customers’ barriers to purchase and advised clients to offer a “Trade up to Ultrabook” sales promotion that offered the customer a fixed £150 rebate for any working notebook traded in.
The proposition was advertised nationally and the response was phenomenal. The generous headline rebate offer, coupled with the straightforward customer proposition (for which Opia is known) allowed the re-launched Ultrabooks to compete with the mainstream price bracket. Sales grew rapidly.
Within six weeks, Dixons’ sales of Ultrabooks had increased by more than ten times the pre-promotion run-rate, and the participation in the promotion had reached 15 per cent, compared with Opia’s predicted 12.5 per cent, which was a manageable differential. Sales at Dixons continued at rates considerably above the market average until closure of this particular sales promotion.
The propositions devised by Opia in this case combined trading-in with trading-up, effectively offering cashback-with-conditions, featuring a time-limited, trade-in valuation on customers’ old equipment and a compelling “buy now” message.
The key is to offer a subtle cash return when consumers buy a replacement from you and you alone. The result is that your customers feel they have obtained a better deal, having released value from unwanted equipment. Yet they are also introduced into a new family of products, with long-term benefits for the manufacturer.
Samsung
Samsung threw down the gauntlet to Opia with a specific business challenge – increasing the sales of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge over the 2016 Christmas period. Of course it was no simple task. How do you drive sales without cheapening the brand image that Samsung works so hard to uphold? So the challenge for Opia was designing a promotion that was surprising enough to disrupt the market, yet “Samsung” enough to support the brand.
The devices being promoted are packed with exciting features that shout out to the younger age groups – so at Opia we knew we had to design a dynamic, lifestyle-orientated campaign.
This is where Opia’s creativity was put to good use. Samsung’s telecoms partner is O2, which is known for major music events – so we capitalized on this to design a promotion for music-lovers. Participants who purchased a qualifying Samsung device from O2 could claim a free Samsung Level Box Mini Speaker, to enjoy fantastic sound quality from their new phone.
All they needed to do was go online to the Opia redemption website and follow seven easy steps. There were almost no perceived barriers to redemption, which further appealed to the target fast-paced, click-and-go demographic. Providing an end-to-end solution, Opia controlled claim management, validation, fulfilment and customer-service support, meaning Samsung could sit back and watch the sales roll in.
Fully managed by Opia, this free reward campaign was a huge success, surpassing Samsung’s expectations and forecasted redemptions. Over three busy Christmas weeks it achieved nationwide coverage, receiving thousands of claims, proving highly popular across the UK. As well as smashing concrete purchase targets, Opia successfully boosted brand perception by maintaining Samsung and O2’s alignment with a sense of fun and music-sharing.
The promotion also ensured that a new set of consumers was introduced to Samsung technology and predisposed to broaden their use of the company’s devices in future. In this way it was not simply about increasing sales in the short-term, but providing a longer-term benefit.
These are two examples of Opia promotions that combine predictive analytics and a data-driven understanding of consumer behaviour to come up with eye-catching offers that dovetail perfectly with a business’s unique requirements.
With each promotion covered by insurance at Lloyds of London, businesses have a solid basis on which to build exciting, irresistible offers for everything from consumer electronics to DIY supplies.
Rather than habitually defaulting to price-drops, these risk-free deals are ideally suited to underpin attention-grabbing, creative campaigns because they offer built-in protection against the risk of over-redemption. For the consumer this opens access to a great deal, while giving brands a profitable outcome based on pre-determined fixed costs.
Risk-managed promotions are more profitable than discounts
Like any successful sales promotion, risk-managed deals are all about successfully incentivising a shopper to buy now, rather than wait until later or look elsewhere.
Built around a brand or retailer’s commercial priorities, they recognise that the major factor influencing whether a customer buys will be the deal that is available on the day. If a store or a manufacturer has a significant cashback or trade-in offer to put before shoppers browsing or comparing similar products, it will help to tip the balance and secure the sale.
Unlike a price drop, where the discount is automatically applied at the point of sale and the retailer gets no commitment from the shopper, a risk-managed sales promotion requires the consumer to engage further which might be the trading in of an old product for a discount, or applying for cashback on a product already purchased.
Dixons Carphone World Cup challenge to Opia
Cashback promotions also provide room for creativity by, for example, linking the level of cashback the customer gets to the performance of the buyer’s chosen sports team – especially when it is linked to a big event like a World Cup.
Dixons Carphone challenged Opia to help deliver increased TV sales during the run up to the last World Cup, for example.
Opia developed “Cash for Goals”, an eye-catching sales campaign that rewarded customers with cash every time England or Brazil scored a goal. Opia worked with underwriters and crafted an offer that was so creative and offered such good value to Dixons Carphone, that the company chose Opia (as opposed to its own broker) to place the risk.
Opia managed this promotional campaign end-to-end, resulting in high average unit prices and sales that doubled the run-rate. Perhaps the most important aspect was that Opia’s highly creative promotion enabled Dixons Carphone to enjoy a very high level of engagement with its customers.
Opia’s expertise is crucial
Opia’s expertise and end-to-end management ensures that brands such as Dixons Carphone never have to face a sales promotion that is over-subscribed or to fails to meet customer expectations.
Our risk-managed sales promotions are underpinned by the clinically effective combination of predictive analytics and specialist underwriting – a powerful synergy that ensures success against business objectives and guarantees the company will not be left out of pocket by a promotion that backfires.
Good customer service is also essential so that the challenge of meeting shoppers’ expectations is always met in full. Opia has invested in high-quality systems and robust security processes to ensure fulfilment to the highest quality standards.
We offer multi-lingual redemption campaigns, managing promotions in over 60 countries including EMEA, North America and APAC, which enables us to meet the challenge of launching complex multi-language websites and provide round-the-clock customer service in 22 languages. Our global network of offices means we can rapidly deliver promotions across all territories, targeting precisely the right audience.
In today’s highly competitive, global marketplace, innovative, risk-managed sales promotions should be part of every client’s marketing artillery. Opia’s campaign mechanics deliver disruptive promotions that differentiate you from your competition and compel your customers to buy. So whether you’re planning year-round activity or a tactical burst in response to a short-term challenge, our promotions will deliver quantifiable sales uplifts.
Contact us now and send us your sales challenge, no matter how tough. We are sure we can meet it and it will only take a few minutes for you to understand that we can deliver on what we promise.
Click here to contact us about your challenge.