Homeenter Pushes Digital Membership

Nordic mail-order club Homeenter's 600,000 members can now get their club-member magazines via e-mail instead of by post. By digitalizing, Homeenter can offer better service and faster information to its members - while lowering costs. for the company.

"We now offer digital membership in all our clubs," says Johan Pauhlsson, website sales manager at Homeenter. "Every third or fourth week members receive a personal e-mail with their chosen product and other special-offering products. Then we send a reminder e-mail one week before the final refusal date. If you belong to a club that includes a member magazine, you get a link to a digital magazine you can page through on the web."

Homeenter tested the concept of digital membership first with one of its clubs to see if it affected a range of factors, such as buying and refusal frequency and whether people ordered more or less.

"We saw that we could actually perform better in many aspects with digital membership than with a traditional magazine sent to people's homes," says Pauhlsson.

Homeenter also asked its members what they thought and further developed the concept using members' responses.

"Members appreciated that they couold choose a more environmentally friendly alternative to a printed catalog and get information in a spot that's easy to access: their e-mail. We decided not to spend a lot on the digital magazines either, since it's more effective to sell if people are already on the website than to try to do it via a digital magazine."

While digital membership offers more relevant, frequent and up-to-date information, it's only the beginning.

"We are working on developing digital membership so that it is even easier to personalize and improve the flow of information to members," says Pauhlsson. "We're looking as well at mobile possibilities and challenges." Plus, in the future Homeenter will be starting up new clubs that are purely digital.

"We and our members believe in digital development and we are sure it will make possible enormous improvements for club membership, both for us and for our club members," says Pauhlsson.