The following content originally appeared in issue 60 of Cooler Plus, which you can subscribe to here.
Belgium’s SipWell won the Best Website and Best Marketing Campaign categories in the recent Aqua Awards at the Watercoolers Europe event in Rome. With marketing at the heart of delivering the customer satisfaction experience, Cooler Plus asked general manager Jorgen De Pelsmaeker about the development of the website, marketing and importance of social media.
SipWell won two Aqua Awards at the recent Watercoolers Europe event in Rome – for Best website and Best marketing campaign. When did you start work on the new website and when did it go live?
We started with our plans for a new website around September 2014. We worked hard to create a brand new website for our customers. The new SipWell website went online on 15 June 2015.
In terms of delivering an excellent consumer experience, what was the brief for the new site?
First of all, our former website was created for the B2B-market, with facts and figures, plus lots of information and data. This worked fine for what it needed to do, but to be able to attract residential customers, the website really needed a fresh look with fast access to clear information. Therefore we chose to split the website into a B2B and a B2C section, where the approach towards the visitors is different.
The most important step was to create a reliable webshop with real customer experience stories and a responsive design; and to make it easy to find the site with AdWords.
You are heavily promoting social media – in particular Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. How important is building the SipWell community and how are results so far?
In this case, building our brand is all about awareness. We started our campaigns not by promoting SipWell, but promoting water. This immediately created a community of people who are interested in health, lifestyle and well-being. In a few months time we gathered a community of more than 8,000 followers on Facebook and we have already had more than 150,000 likes on all our messages, pics and ads.
Is one social media platform proving more popular than the others? … And how do you measure the growth of your audience?
It’s clear that Facebook is the fastest growing community and the most easy to access. Most of our visitors come via a Facebook campaign. All platforms are easy to measure online.
The SipWell brand is well known in Belgium, but how fast is that improving using these tools.
As we see we have had more than 150,000 likes in 11 months. I think we can say awareness is growing fast. The best measurement: before this campaign we had about 150 unique visitors per day on our website, today we have more than 1,000 visitors on our website daily.
What are the specific goals of your current marketing campaign?
We are very well known in the B2B world, but we discovered during our SipWell SummerTour last August – where we went to concerts, events and touristic places with a promo-team – that a water cooler in general is unknown in B2C land. Only a few non-business people even think about having a water cooler at home. When you say water cooler, many people think about a white pillar with a heavy bottle on it. So we decided to bring more added value to our home customer.
So, we invented a designer cooler, with still and sparkling water, with a light 10 litre bottle on it – which is available in several fashionable colours.
The specific goal of this marketing campaign is to make people aware that a water cooler fits in their home.
What’s next for SipWell in terms of customer service and using your website and social media to improve their experience and connection to the company?
Our next step towards customer service, related to our website, is the implementation of chat-sessions with our customers and a direct access for our customers to our database. We want our customers to have full-control in terms of delivery schedule, administration and communication. To achieve this, we have made an agreement with a well-known software company in our business who will implement a new CRM-system and a customer platform in 2016.
Next to regular adverts, we are creating a game on Facebook where prospects can take a picture of their kitchen or any other location and put a cooler in that picture on the spot to see what colour and what location would suit them most. When finished they can go to the call-to-action section or share the pic and win a prize.
Another very popular add-on we already have is a hydration-awareness game based on a few questions where people can measure whether they and their children drink enough water and how to solve the lack of that.
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