How Fun is LEGO’s CRM Strategy?

We take a 360 look at LEGO’s CRM strategy. Check out how they rank against brands we graded so far

January 5, 2022

Not sure if you know or not, so let us introduce this week’s brand: LEGO, a company that makes plastic construction toys. Ever heard of them?

And, better yet, can you guess how the brand scores when it comes to CRM?

1. Be Transparent 10/10

LEGO posted a press release on its website about plans to build a new factory in Vietnam to support its growth plans. The press release was quite detailed, stating the facility is planned to be carbon-neutral, the cost of the facility, and the number of jobs the new facility will create.

Sharing expansion plans with customers – and not only shareholders – helps them appreciate the hidden work performed behind the scenes. This builds transparency and can make customers more satisfied and more loyal.

LEGO shares regular updates about its activities on LinkedIn. The brand posts a “Behind the Brick” series dedicated to showing customers the LEGO team znd the people behind the brand.

Spotlighting employees is a great way to cultivate an authentic online identity and convey what a company is about.

LEGO ticks all the boxes on our transparency checklist.

2. Perks and Incentives 8/10

Logging into the website, LEGO offered us a couple of incentives to get us shopping. Here’s what we found:

A sales page with a lot of discounts.

A loyalty program called LEGO VIP where customers get points for each purchase, receive special offers, VIP rewards, and more.

Free shipping from orders $35 and above

LEGO does a decent job of helping customers to save money and get perks. But we’d have loved to see more incentives like referral bonuses and discounts for making a first-time purchase or signing up to the brand’s newsletter.

3. Be Relevant 8/10

LEGO lets us know it’s the holiday season by displaying a Christmas-themed HP on its website.

Scrolling down the home page, we saw a featured article that had Christmas-themed content like “Top 10 LEGO Vehicle Toys at Christmas”. This type of educational content is timely and helpful for customers looking for Christmas shopping ideas.

LEGO offers customers a free LEGO Life Magazine 4 times a year. The magazine is targeted at 5-9-year-olds and packed full of LEGO news and behind-the-bricks interviews, comic adventures, games, and puzzles.

Having a magazine helps establish credibility and is a great way to build a strong offline relationship with customers.

LEGO offers flexible delivery options for customers looking to shop more conveniently, such as click and collect and express delivery.

Being relevant as a business shows you’re in tune with what customers want and is key to building a solid relationship with them. The only thing between LEGO and a perfect 10 here is a little more “real-world” feeling to the content on its website.

4. Be Helpful 10/10

For this commandment, we check how a company gives back to its community. Through the LEGO Foundation, LEGO donated funds to support COVID-19 relief in local communities.

This holiday season LEGO is helping customers use small bricks to build a big difference with its #BuildToGive campaign. For every star built and shared with the hashtag #BuildToGive on social media before the end of December, LEGO will donate LEGO sets, overall donating sets to 1.5 million children. Collaborating with customers to give back is a good relationship-building strategy because it makes them feel emotionally connected to a brand.

For working with customers to help connect the world through play, LEGO’s #BuildToGive program gets an “A.”

5. Realtime personalization 3/10

To test LEGO’s realtime personalization abilities, we spent a lot of time browsing the Harry Potter collection and finally added Harry, Hermione, Ron & Hagrid Brick Headz into our bag.

Sadly, our HP wasn’t adjusted in realtime to reflect our site behavior and as we navigated through the site, the messaging wasn’t tailored to suit our needs. On upselling, product recommendations were related to the Harry Potter-themed bricks we placed in our cart.

At checkout, LEGO offered us Santa’s Front Yard brick set as a gift to get us to make an additional purchase but the incentive didn’t convert us because we didn’t find it relevant. 🙁

LEGO could have used our customer data to learn we were interested in the Harry Potter collection and given us a personalized offer. When exiting LEGO’s site we weren’t tailed by ads on social media or the other sites to remind us of items left in our shopping cart.

LEGO’s attempt at personalizing the shopping experience does not meet modern standards.

6. Master UX 9/10

How well is LEGO’s e-Commerce website? Let’s find out.

The overall structure of the homepage looks good since we could explore the website according to our needs and interests.

LEGO’s product pages have detailed product descriptions, reviews, and ratings.

LEGO has a gift finder tool to help customers find the right Christmas present. We liked the product options we were presented with when we used the tool. We think this is an awesome UX feature to have.

LEGO provided a good user experience. The website was clean and easy to navigate. We could feel that the website developers cared about customers’ feelings while building this site. It’s not a perfect 10 just because as a standalone experience, it does not provide a memorable reason to come back.

7. Leverage Social Media 7/10

LEGO has an active presence on social media. The brand has 7.6 million followers on Instagram, more than 14M followers on Facebook, and almost 900k on Twitter.

On Instagram, LEGO posts in high frequency. The content is a mix of product promotions, events, and user-generated content.

We noticed LEGO uses branded hashtags like #LEGOBuildDay and #RebuildTheWorld. This helps the brand connect with its audience. We found short educational and fun videos.

LEGO posts regularly on Twitter but some product promotion posts were similar to what we found on Instagram. However, we saw a mix of fun, and creative posts that align with Twitter’s witty environment. The brand also uses videos and polls to drive engagement.

On Facebook, LEGO posts promotional content, event-related posts, and announcements.

Again, some product posts were sometimes similar to what we found on Twitter and Instagram.

LEGO’s social media strategy is tailored to its audience and we like how the brand uses live video formats to provide fun content and maximize engagement. These videos support the consideration stage of the customer’s buying journey. But, the fact the brand sometimes cross-posts is a bit disappointing. Having a visibly different content strategy for each platform could help them leverage the capabilities of each social media platform optimally and build a stronger relationship with customers.

Verdict time:

LEGO’s score is 55/70 – 78%, enough for a tie at 19th place with Best Buy and GHD. Not a bad position, in the upper third out of the 623 brands analyzed so far. Better realtime personalization and some minor tweaks on social media could send LEGO to the upper echelon.

Here’s the full rankings so far: