Vitamix Taps Email Marketing to Drive Loyalty

Need to Know

• Thanks to a dedicated relationship marketing effort, Vitamix has acquired over 80,000 loyalty program members for Vitamix Rewards.
• Those members have made over 18,000 purchases.
• The majority of loyalty onboarding and customer communication for Vitamix is taking place through dedicated email channel Adobe Campaign.
• Vitamix’s 2019 rewards launch campaign garnered nearly 20,000 pre-registrations.

Analysis

Rewards programs have become a normal thing for retailers across the world. Brands offer points, discounts, or free products as incentives to get consumers to choose their product over a competitor’s. But not every brand seems like they would benefit from a loyalty program.

Vitamix is one of those brands. As a company well known for its high-end blenders, it seems like a loyalty program might not jive with Vitamix’s buy-for-life product line. But with a trove of data under its belt, the company knew they could reach out to customers in unique ways if they cleaned up everything they knew.

Using Adobe Campaign, Vitamix began down the path of email segmentation, personalization, and automation, eventually integrating with all of their internal programs within a year.

By 2019, Vitamix realized that customers were tired of the current promotions and growing disconnected with the overall brand.

“In our mission statement, we state clearly that our mission is to create relationships for now,” Vitamix associate manager of email marketing Jimmy Wojtila told CMO.com. “Which made it only fitting to refocus our marketing to being a relationship-focused brand,” he said. “It was time to re-establish trust and work not only towards acquisition, but build relationships with current customers to increase retention and advocacy.”

Enter Vitamix Rewards, which launched in 2019. The digital portal tracks points and lets consumers spend them on the Vitamix catalog, as well as third-party offerings. Customers can also access articles, recipes, and more.

“The goal was to increase engagement and advocacy by igniting our fan base, ensuring end-user success, and providing new, frequent education content,” Wotjila said.

“We can understand them at a deeper level and anticipate their needs as we create new content, products and accessories.”

In order to launch the program, Vitamix set up a pre-registration campaign featuring a scratch-off promotion. It earned 20,000 signups and signified email as the main driver for new member acquisition. Now Vitamix sends out ‘surprise and delight’ emails that earn customers extra points or top them off to enter sweepstakes.

Vitamix has also created monthly recap emails for members, sending dynamic content that provides rewards info at a glance and reminds stagnant users to sign back in.

Since launching in 2019, Vitamix rewards has over 80,000 members and will top 100,000 by the end of this year.