SuperMarkets Online saw over a three-fold increase in e-mail registrations during a first ever instant win promotion for its coupon Web site and plans to run similar promotions to push its e-mail database over one million addresses.
SuperMarkets Online (SMO), the online subsidiary of Catalina Marketing, St. Petersburg, FL, gave away 10 Micron Electronics personal computers over a 6-week period leading up to Christmas. Consumers entered the contest by providing their zip code and supermarket of choice at the ValuPage Web site and printing out a barcoded list of promoted products. Scanned barcodes were used to select the winners.
Consumers earn store discounts at 8,500 supermarkets by purchasing items on the coupon page that are scanned at the checkout register for Web Bucks. Web Bucks are cash rewards redeemable for their next store purchase.
By entering an e-mail address at www.valupage.com, consumers get weekly e-mail updates of products that earn Web Bucks and become eligible to win a year‚s worth of groceries. SMO collects an average of 5,000 to 8,000 e-mail addresses per week, according to vice president of marketing and new business development Will Gardenswartz. During the Micron promotion, that total jumped to between 20,000 and 25,000 addresses per week while store traffic increased close to 20 percent.
SMO has collected 700,000 e-mail addresses in a year and Gardenswartz expects to reach 1.5 million in the next 12 months.
Contestants that provided an e-mail address but didn‚t win were sent an offer for an extra year of warranty service on the purchase of a Micron PC and encouraged to stay tuned for future promotions. SMO expects to run another instant-win promotion for Mother‚s Day and every two to three months thereafter.
Consumers that use Web Bucks and participate in a frequent shopper card program at participating stores can also win a trip to Hawaii. This universe, which represents 10 percent of SMO‚s total database, can be also targeted for special e-mail offers based on purchase history data collected each time a card is scanned.
SMO collects and analyzes purchase data on a daily basis and has amassed detailed 65-week histories on over 30 million households that use shopper cards. The households are segmented by product type and presented to packaged goods companies for special offers that are printed on red-bordered Catalina coupon strips at checkout. Offers can be based on real-time purchases or purchase histories.
“We could go to Kraft Philadelphia Light Cream Cheese and tell them we are aware of one million healthy lifestyle households,‚‚ Gardenswartz said. “When you use the card it will trigger the offers that target your lifestyle. That‚s the more targeted business we're in.‚‚
SMO is promoting ValuPage with Web banners and buttons on high traffic sites and across networks like Flycast and DoubleClick. ValuPage is also the coupon button at over 30 supermarket sites including www.meijer.com and www.shoprite.com. Gardenswartz said one third of printed coupon pages come from these co-branded sites.
Stores can customize specials into an e-mail message. The red coupon strips received at checkout are a traffic builder for these sites.
“One of the best ways we have helped promote the presence of coupons [for our partners] is by issuing a message, ŒIf you like coupons, come to our site‚” Gardenswartz said.
