Black Friday is omnipresent in Belgium and 2019 is the second year IKEA participated to the sales fever, as it becomes a lot more adopted by Belgian retailers and known by customers. Purchases are 46% higher during Black Friday compared with a normal Friday. 21% of people already buy presents for Christmas.

In 2018 IKEA successfully leaned on Black Friday as a growth driving opportunity. Building further on this blueprint they geared up in 2019 on both their D2C platform and in the physical space. Once the Black Friday offers concept was ideated, we ran a dedicated Social Commerce campaign. The overarching objective: generate sales and orders by boosting footfall in physical stores and e-commerce traffic.

A campaign rooted in 3 principles:

• Omni-channel approach to drive sales through e-commerce & in-store

• Personalization to increase audience relevance

• Social first content for a seamless purchase path

IKEA’s retail data helped us uncover the insight for our strategy: distance to the store strongly impacts IKEA penetration. Only 25% of IKEA FAMILY members living more than 50 minutes away from a store actually visits it. In contrast, 60% of members living less than 20 minutes away from a store are more likely to come. This understanding made it obvious our answer needed to be tailored to consumers both far and nearby an IKEA branch.

We developed a geotargeted approach around Ikea stores with personalized content, to push users to visit the physical POS. In parallel, we set out to target remote areas, far away from IKEA with ads leading to ecommerce and offering the same deals online.

Between 28th November and December 2nd we first generated awareness by using mass reach ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Once we achieved exposure and mass for retargeting, we changed our optimisation to conversion and split the funnel based on the retail data.

One workstream was built around users living nearby IKEA with a focus on driving footfall and sales.

The other stream was aimed at users living further away envisaging e-commerce. Facebook’s Collection Ads, a shoppable mobile format that lets the audience move from discovery to purchase in a smooth and immersive way, were very successful. Those who wanted to know more were eventually directed to a tailored landing page.

Monitoring performance at a granular level was essential and possible thanks to the Pixel, Facebook’s website tracking tool. Moreover the platform’s native Offline Conversions feature allowed us to have a precise view on in-store purchases driven by social ads.

The activation proved to be a bull’s eye, checking all KPIs. We reached 75% of our 2.5 million audience. We booked 14% sales increase compared to 2018, with 78% of the sales generated offline and 22% online. In terms of ROAS , every euro invested resulted in a €25 value for the online funnel approach and 61€ return for the offline mechanism (benchmark: €22).

This campaign was apart from an absolute value also a strategic insight driver. The fact that the geotargeted approach directing users to a physical point of sale outperformed its online counterpart, illustrates that funnelling down to one single conversion channel is not always the best way to get ROI from social. It underlined the essence of mining data, sophisticatedly bridging the gap between on and offline and applying omni-channel approaches in order to seize seasonal momentum and steer future IKEA sales activations.