The Heinz Baby Club

Background

Heinz has a range of food brands across infant milk formula, meals, snacks and juices. Because of strict legal restrictions in the UK, talking to mums about moving from their milks to their wet foods and then on to snacks is extremely difficult.

CRM looked as if it could provide a solution and in early 2009 Heinz established the Heinz baby Club, where Mums could find useful advice and information about feeding their infants and about Heinz baby products. By asking members to opt-in to receive information about milks and feeding they could ensure that they adhered to all restrictions on marketing such products.

Idea

The challenge was to develop a baby club which was sufficiently different from all the other similar clubs out there to become a young mum’s favourite source of information about nutrition during pregnancy and in the first years of her baby’s life.

Learning to be a mother is a journey of discovery and the creative idea took this metaphor and made it meaningful at every step of the way.

Thus the direct mail packs were designed, both inside and out, to look like explorers’ rucksacks. Each rucksack and its content reflected a phase of mum’s journey and guided her through all her baby’s feeding adventures. The rucksacks also contained relevant offers, money-off vouchers and added-value information, like feeding guides, for mums to use and keep.

The CRM programme was rolled out through a series of on and offline communications, including four direct mail packs delivered at pivotal stages in the new mum’s journey - a Welcome Pack, a Birth Pack (covering breastfeeding and its alternatives), a Weaning Pack (covering the early stages of transition to solid food) and, finally, a Feeding Textures Pack, which dealt with developing taste and nutritional needs. Online elements included 23 emails over 21 months.

Results

After 6 months approx 24,000 mums have registered with the Heinz Baby Club.  Emails are being opened at a rate of 39% with the average click through rate being 6.3%.

Our Thoughts

I don’t suppose there are many pregnant mums who read Directory. A pity because this is one spread they would pause at. For me, the detailing of the packs isn’t just creatively gratifying, it explains the success of the campaign.

What makes CRM strategies difficult to buy is they demand a shift of focus, away from what many marketers want to talk about (product) to what the customer wants to talk about (babies). It looks time-consuming and costly, which it is, but over time the relationship will turn in a profit. There is a caveat. The moment your mailings become shoddy, ugly or just cheap is the moment you begin to diminish – in every sense.