There are two key factors in the race for customers:
People can buy the same products in countless places. What sets you apart is the digital service you wrap around your product. Beyond offering a digital service that drives sales, you need to engage your users. Because users want to be involved. They want to upload photos, leave ratings, share their opinions, contribute ideas and much more.
When you engage your users, you are also turning them into customers. That means more members, better retention or whatever metric you’re aiming for.
Here are some of the digital projects I’ve worked on and solution, I have been working on.
Webshops, websites and web in general
I’ve worked with and have been responsible for several leading e-commerce and website brands, including Fitness World, Telmore, Fullrate, Sterling Airlines, and Life Extension. These companies come from industries with vastly different challenges, but they all share one goal: growing their business through sales and sign-ups.
To be among the best, you have to engage your users and customers. And let’s be honest—a great offer never hurts.
Apps
At Fitness World, we made a key strategic decision: we wanted to build the best health app on the market. Because reducing churn and boosting retention were central to our business.
Back in 2016, we were stuck with an outdated app. So we turned to crowdsourcing—asking our members what they really wanted. That kicked off an agile development process where we continuously rolled out small, incremental improvements. And the result? We built the best app in the category.
In 2018, our app hit #1 in the App Store’s health category and was nominated for App of the Year by FDIH. The following year, it won the Customer Journey category at the Danish Digital Awards. In 2020, we finally took home the Best E-commerce App award from FDIH (now Dansk Erhverv).
At Life Extension, we’re focused on expanding our mobile presence. Our solution was a Progressive Web App (PWA) which is essentially our mobile website wrapped in an app. We saw that the majority of our traffic came from mobile, but sales didn’t reflect that. So we redesigned our site with a mobile-first approach, which also formed the basis for our new app.
Mobile visitors to our webshop are prompted to download the app. Beyond driving sales, we expect the app’s features like push notifications to strengthen customer loyalty and engagement. See more about apps>>
E-mail marketing, newsletter and CRM
E-mail marketing (or CRM marketing) plays a key role in both customer retention and campaign success. It’s something we’ve worked with extensively at Fitness World, Sterling Airlines, and Life Extension.
At Sterling, more than 2 million subscribers—mainly across Scandinavia—received our weekly newsletter, customized for different markets and languages. At Fitness World, we tailored our newsletters to engage 500,000 customers. And at Life Extension, we continue to send localized consumer newsletters, as well as a dedicated B2B version.
The goal in every case is to create relevant, compelling content that actually gets opened and, hopefully, read. When done right, newsletters are a goldmine. Week after week, they generate millions in revenue. In fact, at Sterling Airlines, we even managed to quadruple newsletter-driven revenue at one point.
Sales Modeling with Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics
At Fitness World, we wanted more control over how we spent and allocated our marketing budget. To maximize its impact, we teamed up with Blackwood Seven (now part of Kantar), experts in measuring marketing effectiveness through digital sales modeling. The aim was to create a more data-driven foundation for how we invested our budget across different media and channels.
With the help of predictive and prescriptive analytics, we simulated various investment scenarios and projected customer growth based on media-specific spending. This enabled us to optimize both channel selection and budget allocation always with a focus on performance and return on investment.
This data-driven approach made our marketing planning more strategic and predictable. Early in the process, we could determine which media mix would deliver the greatest business value. That meant we could plan campaigns across the entire year and, more importantly, forecast member intake and acquisition costs with far greater accuracy.
Subscription and Subscription Models
Subscriptions aren’t just for old-school newspapers and sports clubs anymore. Today, they also include digital services and physical goods—all built around recurring payments. I’ve worked with everything from streaming platforms, broadband and telecom services, over fitness centers to trade unions and FMCG.
What they all have in common is this: if the customer doesn’t use the service or product, the subscription won’t last. Some customers might take a while to cancel, but if they stop seeing value, it’s only a matter of time. That’s why relevance is everything—along with the ability to reliably deliver what you offer, naturally. The latter is a given, but staying relevant? That’s the real challenge.
Even with digital services, success often depends on how well they’re wrapped in useful content and accessible design. At Life Extension, we introduced a subscription program for supplements and vitamins. No issues there. Sure, it comes with different challenges compared to digital services but that’s part of what makes it so engaging.
Design
Website design is incredibly important and can be crucial for how well a site converts. I’ve been involved in creating new designs (and, in several cases, implementing new CMS systems) at companies like Rambøll, Telmore, Fitness World, and Life Extension. Today, all websites are mobile-first, as most users access websites through their mobile devices. But do they also make the majority of purchases on mobile? That’s not always the case. This is why the entire sales or sign-up flow needs to be optimized for mobile as well. In one particular case, this focus led to a 184% increase in sign-ups!
SoMe (Social Media)
At Fitness World, social media was crucial. Our members were highly engaged, so it was clear that this was an area we needed to focus on. Social media gave us direct access to our users, unlike newsletters, which members have to open first for us to capture their attention. It’s no surprise that relevant content is essential for retaining and attracting followers. We decided to treat our social media as a forum for our members. This approach allowed us to quickly grow our fan base, reaching 178,000 followers on the main page. In addition, our local Facebook pages had nearly twice as many followers. We had a strategy for what to post and how to engage our members with both local and centrally published content.