During the 2014 holiday season, southern lifestyle retailer Belk held the Santa Baby Sweepstakes, which was designed to spread holiday cheer and encourage consumers to engage with the retailer across channels.
Developed in partnership with HelloWorld, the campaign drew 1.1 million sweepstakes entries. Belk also saw 233,500 registrations stemming from various activities, such as creating personalized eCards, sharing the sweepstakes microsite on social media and following the retailer on Instagram and Twitter.
“These outstanding numbers speak to the level of engagement we saw with consumers during the campaign,” said Jon Pollack, EVP of Marketing, Sales Promotion and e-Commerce at Belk. “Consumers loved this new and exciting method to share the campaign with friends and the eCard addition helped spread the campaign farther than we could have hoped.”
Over the course of the campaign, which ran from Nov. 8 through Dec. 31, participants created more than 1.6 million digital eCards, indicating consumers’ overall engagement with the retailer.
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“The eCard was a hugely successful component of the Santa Baby campaign, as it allowed participants to showcase, and more importantly share with friends, their creativity while playing into the cheeky and fun nature of the campaign,” Pollack said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Customers were also rewarded for referrals, and we saw over 15% of registrations coming directly from referrals.”
Customer Control Spurs Success
What made the campaign especially successful is that Belk gave consumers control over how much personal information they wanted to share and how engaged they wanted to get with the campaign, according to Pollack. For example, while consumers had the option to register and earn sweepstakes entries, they were still able to engage with the other elements of the campaign without registering.
“Consumers could create eCards and send to friends without registering, helping to spread campaign awareness and hopefully encouraging future registration activity,” Pollack noted. This strategy “helped increase the viral nature of the site and campaign.”
To boost awareness of the Santa Baby campaign, Belk leveraged Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as TV commercials.
Of all of its 2013 and 2014 campaigns, Belk reported that the Santa Baby contest had the greatest number of email and mobile opt-ins. These results, coupled with the boost in social shares, confirmed that “this is a good avenue to pursue when interacting with this audience,” Pollack noted.
Belk pays “close attention” to results from all past campaigns to ensure the most successful elements are weaved into future promotions, according to Pollack. “Routinely, our campaigns perform very well and we’re delighted that this program was so well received. This campaign, built upon a classic holiday initiative, proved successful in the past, and so when revisiting we further honed in using updated preferences and platforms.”
