XMPie and iGen Help Elixia Fitness Centers Generate €1.5 Million in New Membership Fees

Wittusen & Jensen, a print and marketing services provider headquartered in Oslo, Norway, had been promoting its XMPie one-to-one cross-media marketing capabilities for a few years through various campaigns. Elixia, a leading health-and-fitness center chain with over 30 locations across Northern Europe, took notice to the success of these campaigns as they were looking for ways to strengthen customer loyalty and acquire new members. To Elixia, this represented a perfect opportunity.
The Campaign.
Elixia partnered with Wittusen & Jensen, who put together a plan for an interactive campaign, utilizing postcards and e-mail, while driving current Elixia members to a Response URL Web site (RURL). Once on this site, members were presented with an offer of up to as many as six months free membership by recruiting new members. The theme for the campaign was, “Get a good friend to become a healthy friend”, with the corresponding imagery aligning to eight different segments that were based on the recipients gender and age.
How They Did It.
Wittusen & Jensen designed the campaign components in the Adobe Creative Suite with the XMPie plug-in, whose common design elements were linked to the Elixia customer relationship database. This allowed for personalization and generation of each component using one simple set of business rules. The variable content on the postcard included names, addresses, gender, age-specific photos and language, as well as a greeting from the nearest fitness center. By using XMPie uImage, the recipients name would also appear in graffiti-text behind a gender-specific image.

The postcard encouraged recipients to visit a Response URL, allowing them to update personal membership data (thus validating and strengthening Elixia’s existing database), as well as access the member recruitment page. A follow-up email was also sent if the recipient did not visit their RURL within a pre-defined timeframe.
To refer-a-friend and get one step closer to receiving their free membership incentive, the user simply had to visit the RURL and provide a friend’s e-mail address. This would prompt the XMPie system to automatically generate a personal e-mail with a RURL for that friend. The site also allowed the user to track whether friends they had referred actually responded and visited their RURL.
The postcards, which headed the campaign, began with a mailing to 65,000 members and were all printed on a Xerox iGen3 Digital Production Press.
The Results.
By creating an ongoing conversation amongst Elixia’s customers and prospects, the campaign resulted in the recruitment of 2,500 new members worth €1.5 Million in annual Elixia revenue. This was a tremendous improvement over a previous non-XMPie ‘refer-a-friend’ campaign that they had tried which only resulted in 39 new members.
The response rate of this XMPie campaign, which was defined as the number of individuals who received their postcard/email and visited the RURL was a very impressive 27.5 percent. Additionally, many responders updated their contact information along the way which strengthened the Elixia database and can ultimately be used to improve their next campaign.
By using the browser-based XMPie uProduce Marketing Console, Wittusen & Jensen was also able to track results in real time at any point during their campaign for Elixia. This real time tracking ability allowed them to not only view the progress of the campaign, but also offer practical suggestions and feedback to their client. The relationship between the two has clearly strengthened, and Elixia has since become one of Wittusen & Jensen’s largest clients. It is client relationships like this that blossom as a result of profitable and successful direct marketing campaigns; and can provide some valuable insight as to how Wittusen & Jensen grew their digital business by 30 percent the year this campaign launched. They have since added a Xerox iGen4 Press to their facilities, and have been an XMPie user since 2007.
I encourage you to learn more about XMPie and how this offering can be used to bring relevance to your marketing with the power of one to one marketing campaigns.
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