Rimi Baltic uses iPaper to create shop links automatically, allowing them to focus more on high-quality marketing campaigns
Rimi Baltic operates 291 stores and has more than 11.000 employees in the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).
Each country publishes a new digital leaflet every single week.
We’re four minutes into our 45-minute meeting about Rimi Baltic’s digital leaflets.
Valdis, with the “The Office” virtual background, is the head of Rimi Baltic’s Omnichannel Team.
Anda is a Senior Digital Marketing Specialist at Rimi Latvia, while Sandra leads the design team in charge creating the digital leaflets.
Time is running, and I have a lot of questions.
How did your digital leaflet journey begin?
We started to switch our mindset towards digital leaflets because of the printing costs.” - Valdis Vikmanis, Head of Omnichannel
Speaking of cost, when starting out, Rimi Baltic used a cheap solution to create digital leaflets – and they got what they were paying for:
What was the biggest pain of that manual work in creating enrichments?
”Selecting the piece of square, finding that product on the eStore and then copy-paste the link for for each square. It was really the kind of job that everyone was dreading to do, because it is important link people to the product in the digital catalog, but it was such a manual monkey job.” - Anda Latsa, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
How much time did the manual enrichment take?
”In total, it would be around five hours per catalog. So, 20 hours in a month, per country.” - Anda Latsa, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
This is an example of manually creating enrichments, for illustrative purposes, in iPaper. Please note that, before adopting iPaper’s Enrichment Automation, Rimi Baltic was not using iPaper to create digital leaflets or enrichments manually.
To Rimi Baltics, the digital leaflet must follow other digital channels and become interactive and connected to the buying journey.
Why did you change your previous solution?
We started to understand that we needed to change our previous solution, because we wanted to add some, let's say, ”flavor” to the digital leaflet.” - Valdis Vikmanis
“Flavor” means inspiration, a key stage in the Store Metaphor for digital catalogs.
And creating inspiration means more enrichments: Product icons, videos, interactive animations etc.
But adding more enrichments would have required even more manual work.
Instead of just accepting this and settling for their current solution, Rimi Baltic chose iPaper - and thereby turned manual into automatic.
Now, Rimi Baltic uses iPaper’s Enrichment Automation to create the enrichments automatically.
How much time do you save?
“In total, 4 hours saved per country per leaflet.” - Anda Latsa
The 5 hours of manual enrichment have been reduced to seconds, while one hour of PDF tagging work now lies with Sandra and the design team.
With one leaflet published per week in all three countries, that adds up to 12 leaflets per month in total.
Which means Rimi Baltic saves 48 hours per month as an organization.
And that’s without even counting themed digital catalogs, like Christmas, Easter and so on, which would add up to much more time saved.
The shop icons seen in this Rimi Baltic digital leaflet are made automatically.
What can all that extra time that you’re saving be used for?
“It could be a landing page. It could be banners. It could be something on the app. All those things that come together to create a campaign. We can add some copywriting, do more work on search engine optimization and so on - instead of creating enrichments manually.” – Anda Latsa, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
What is the outcome of those efforts?
”Basically, now we can focus more on making the campaigns better, quality-wise.” - Anda Latsa
Now, the branding and UX of Rimi Baltic’s digital leaflets have been streamlined.
What has changed?
This makes it easy to navigate on all devices, and gives the shopper trust in the branded digital leaflet.
What stands out about iPaper?
By using a single digital catalog solution, Rimi Baltic can easily manage user-access, make leaflet changes and view results.
“Better done than perfect” is a common saying at Rimi Baltic.
And by now the interview is four minutes over time. Paradoxical for a meeting about saving time.
To wrap it up, I ask one final question to Anda:
So, by using Enrichment Automation, Rimi Baltic is actually getting a little bit closer to ‘perfect’?
Despite the image of Anda only taking up a fraction of my laptop screen, I can still see it.
Quite clearly, actually.
She’s smiling.
“Yes.”
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