#AsiaeCommerceAwards highlight: Lenovo wins loyalty gold with its Pro programme

Lenovo showed its prowess at this year’s Asia eCommerce Awards as the brand took home the gold for Best eCommerce Loyalty Programme, and a bronze trophies for Best in eCommerce (Brands) – Electronics & Gadgets. Ajay Shankar also bagged the bronze for eCommerce Leader of the Year (individual).

With its “Lenovo Pro” campaign, Lenovo was able to continue its efficient growth whilst providing top-notch loyalty programme for its customers as the brand strives to remain competitive in the highly competitive marketplace. 

Challenge

In early 2019 Lenovo realize online cost per acquisition continuing to rise rapidly in Asia market and consumer acquisition for IT products continues to become increasingly competitive especially with online marketplaces disruption. To continue its efficient growth, Lenovo identified small and medium businesses (SMB) segment as one of the key audience group to target.

Lenovo recognised that SMB IT spending continues to grow rapidly across the globe and it was expect to cross US$630 billion by end of this year according to IDC insights. Some of the key trends that Lenovo noticed are:

1. 60% of SMB’s IT decision making preferring for self-service platform;
2. 66% of SMBs will have digital transformation as an IT strategy;
3. With the on-going pandemic, more than 60% of workforce are mobile which results in SMB seeking more IT solutions.

As such, Lenovo needed a solution that can actively ensure that it would remain competitive in the consideration set, to enhance retention business with SMBs while purchasing online, and establish LenovoPRO as a one stop destination for IT products and solutions. 

Strategy

LenovoPRO is a loyalty program designed to be an all-encompassing portal that not only covers all business IT needs in once place but also helps businesses make better decisions on purchases while saving money via preferred pricing on Lenovo products but also providing various value offering such as trainings, credit functionalities and exclusive offerings tailored for SMB needs.

The program is free to join and it is designed to have three tiers so that businesses can enjoy savings that can be scaled up as they grow. Every signup starts with PRO and each sign up is entitled to a purchases up to 10 of a single item while enjoying the preferred business pricing.

For companies with spending that exceeds US$10,000, they will be upgraded to PRO+ and they will be able to enjoy even lower prices on business purchases. The maximum discounted item quantity for PRO+ will be increased to 25. For businesses with spending that exceeds US$50,000, they will be upgraded to Pro Elite members and they are eligible to enjoy the best business pricing of the entire Lenovo inventory, with an extended purchase limit of 50.

Lenovo PRO members enjoy premium support for all Lenovo products, where a business specialist is available to assist them as well as special leasing options like our Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) subscription model–which bundles all IT expenses into a single monthly fee.

The PRO membership allows members to track spending across their business with just a few clicks. Account admins can create a custom catalog for other employees to browse when buying a new rig for the office. Apart from that, admins can also manage the company’s Office 365 licenses from the same account.

The program also offers a best price guaranteed proposition to all its members, enabling Lenovo to be a trusted partner for its clients business, for a hassle free purchase for Lenovo products and solutions

Lastly, the LenovoPRO platform also offers various skill building and learning courses for SMB’s IT decision makers as free value offering on Lenovo product purchases across 38 different courses to enhance their skills and efficiency. 

Execution

Lenovo Pro was launched in multi markets such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan from August 2019 through to September 2020. To increase awareness of the product, both ATL and BLT was leveraged to engage with Lenovo present and future clients.

A dedicated drop-down box was added to the brand website to increase exposure to all visitors to drive traffic to the website. In addition, existing customers were automatically registered as a member and a notification was sent via EDM. On the other hand, to reach prospective customers, Lenovo leveraged on Google and Facebook’s massive reach capability via their display and news feed network.

The campaign was phased out according to several initiatives such as the LenovoPRO early access sale, Everyday Savings as well as the partnership with various co-working spaces such as wework, fastfive among others for early access to expand the SMB user base.

However, identifying B2B audiences can be difficult in a mass reach digital media as the lines are often blurred between a consumer type user and a commercial type user, even more so on a consumer centric platform such as Facebook.

To combat the issue, smart data layering was leveraged in order to ensure that Lenovo was able to reach as many relevant target audiences as possible.

A three-prong approach was used where the team leveraged audience data owned by Lenovo on both the Google and Facebook platform:

1. First party data: Generate awareness among existing audiences and activate audiences who did not respond to BTL campaigns.
2. First Party look alike data: Leverage machine learning on Google and Facebook’s platform to identify audiences who exhibit similar traits to the first party data.
3. Publisher contextual data: Use Google's machine learning ability to capture new registrations via contextually relevant targeting on websites such as business news and technology related websites which are of interest to our target audience.

Result

The campaign proved its success as it brought in quality audiences to the platform with the average transaction rate per visit from Lenovo Pro being 30 times higher than the site average conversion rate.

Not only did the people who went to LenovoPRO were more likely to transact, they also have a larger basket size as the program helped customers improve the perceived value that they received from ordering via LenovoPRO, thereby contributing to the efficient growth of Lenovo.