October 12, 2000
Case Study

StoreRunner's Instant-Win Campaign Generates 40 Million Pageviews from 3.5 Million Visitors

SUMMARY: No summary available.
CHALLENGE
The StoreRunner, "The quickest way to your favorite stores," site makes its money by getting consumers to browse and purchase through it's collection of more than 500 retailers featuring 8,000 products from cereal to CD-ROMs. So the site needed a way to get millions of new visitors, demographically skewed toward female shoppers, to explore it very deeply (aka lots of page views per visitor) ... and to then get them to return again and again. They hired RealTIME media, an agency specializing in online scratch-off cards and related sweeps promotions. RealTIME's Senior Digital Marketing Executive Jody Kaiser told us the details.

CAMPAIGN
First StoreRunner and RealTIME worked together to create a series of campaigns to drive serious site traffic. Offline the site ran billboards, bus ads and radio spots in America's top Internet markets such as Washington DC (where you couldn't miss them this Summer!) Online the site ran a whole series of banner ads through Doubleclick, frequently changing creative to optimize results. Kaiser says, "If a banner was not performing, it was down in three seconds flat and a new banner was put up." StoreRunner also did blast emails to rented opt-in lists. Kaiser says, "When you went from banners to the promotion or emails to the promotion, the landing page art related to the banner or email they came from. It's very important to have a correlation between what they click on and where they go to."

In all cases the creative was bright and cheerful, often using a similar theme, "Win a 4-Runner from StoreRunner!"

Visitors could register to be entered in a sweepstakes, and were then directed to surf through the site collecting ten pageviews to earn a virtual scratch-off game card. Plus, they could get additional game cards by visiting the site daily. Visitors could also refer friends to the site for additional prizes. Kaiser notes, "We constructed the prize pool to be family or women oriented. It included FTD bouquets, Owens Mills family portraits, Mrs. Field's cookies, plus some Web certificates which were as good as cash for online shopping."

RESULTS
The campaign generated 40 million pageviews, 3.5 million unique visitors and over 500,000 opt-in registrants. 15% of visitors used viral tools to tell their friends about the promotion and 20% of these friends then visited the site to register. 58.5% of visitors were women, most aged 25-34.

Banners that worked the best featured specific words like "Win" or "Win Instantly".

After the campaign finished in August, StoreRunner hired research firm Greenfield Online to run an online focus group in order to find ways to make their next roll-out even more successful. Based on results, StoreRunner has adjusted the prize pool to include a laptop PC, trips to Orlando and a Caribbean cruise. They've also changed the odds of winning slightly from 1:22 to 1:15, "it's more enticing, " says Kaiser, "Women just wanted to win, win anything. We got thank you letters for phone cards! So even lower level prizes make people happy." The games themselves have also been simplifieda bit, "there were too many things going on. Simplicity is the key."

COST: StoreRunner spent about $6 million.

NOTES: One great online promotional idea (with a low price tag) is to have your product, site or service featured as one of the prizes in a campaign RealTIME media is running for a client. RealTIME's Bonnie Liss-Wolf says, "We've had calls from women's sites who want to give away online shopping spees; spa getaways; phone time ... Maybelline just gave 4,000 lipsticks for a campaign. Visit Florida is a big partner." Interested? Contact Liss-Wolf at 610.896.9400 x234.

We love the realistic "scratching" noise the scratch and win cards make when you run your mouse over them. RealTIME Media has a patent pending on this instant-win scratch technology, so you have to call them to do a test campaign.

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