GoCollect.com plans to launch a Mother's Day e-mail contest April 21.
GoCollect.com is a retail Web site that offers more than 10,000 contemporary collectibles ranging in price from a few dollars to $380,000 for its most expensive item, a dress owned by Princess Diana.
The site will send out an HTML e-mail to its 75,000 registered members. The e-mail will include special offers for items such as crystal roses and Precious Moment figurines and a poetry contest where users are asked to fill in the blank fields next to the letters “M,” “O” and “M” using words with those letters that best describe their mothers. The grand-prize winner will receive a spa vacation for two.
“Simple and short gets the best results. We wanted to make it easy,” said Sam Hanna, executive vice president of marketing of GoCollect.com, New York.
Daily winners will be selected, and their poems will be posted on the site. “It gives someone an opportunity to win something every day, and it also gives them a reason to come back to the site,” said Hanna.
To loosen consumers' purse strings once they are at GoCollect.com, there is a special offer for a free gift with purchase between April 24 and May 7. The gift will likely be either a gold chain or a pin shaped like a rose.
The site also will offer a special discussion board for Mother's Day, features written by mother/daughter collectors and themed e-postcards.
These features are meant to build community among site members. “Part of what GoCollect does is really work with people's needs and wants. We understand the collector's human side. We get together as a community and share our thoughts together and have a fun time doing it,” said Hanna.
Part of the site's success has been its popular points program, said Hanna. Users receive 50 points for joining, 10 points for taking a survey and one to two points for every dollar spent. For every 200 points generated, the participant earns a $10 gift certificate that can be used for any purchase at the site.
“It's an aggressive program that allows the avid collector to come back and get what they like,” said Hanna. “It also encourages people to participate more on the site as a member. They enjoy it because it provides them with a lot of fun opportunities to gain points.”
At press time the site was planning partnership deals with targeted sites such as Mom.com; however, no deals had been finalized.
