In an effort to be everywhere its target customer is, cable and online shopping channel HSN gave its traditional “Great Gift Giveaway” promotion a 360-degree makeover this past holiday. And the results were strong enough to lead HSN to start strategizing about expanding its other annual campaigns in the same way.
2010 was the fifth year HSN has run its giveaway promotion, which offers participants a chance at both daily and weekly prizes in the holiday shopping period. In the past, the campaign has worked both the online and broadcast channels.
But this year, with the assistance of promotion management company ePrize, HSN spread its big holiday campaign over a wider range of channels, including smartphones, text-capable feature phones, and Facebook. The different channels were linked to one back-end administration platform, so that HSN was not faced with running separate campaigns on multiple channels.
Starting on October 20 and running through December 14, participants were able to enter the promotion via a form on the now-closed contest Web site. But this time they could also enter the contest through the MyHSN application on Facebook, or by texting HSNGAME to short code 76060.
In each case, entrants were allowed to log in once a day on each channel to get an entry into that week’s sweepstakes, for a weekly prize of $2,000 in electronics equipment. They also got a chance to play an instant-win game for one of 4,500 $20 HSN gift cards given out over the course of the promotion. After trying their luck at the daily instant-win promotion, players were offered the chance to get up another instant-win play and a second daily sweepstakes entry by submitting names and valid e-mail addresses of three friends who could be invited to join the game play.
The game also tied into HSN broadcast content, because winners of the weekly sweepstakes drawing were announced Friday evenings on the HSNtv cable channel, where the different methods of game entry were also promoted.
Reaching out to HSN fans over multiple channels was a very productive move, says Amber Minson, the brand’s director of multichannel marketing. Speaking after the promotion ended, she reported that top-line game registrations were up 20% over last year, and that other metrics suggested similarly increased levels of engagement with the newest version of the campaign. “We saw double-digit growth of about 11% in engagement [over last year] and had more than 5 million game plays,” she says. “That makes it a very powerful vehicle for communicating our brand message.”
The other salient metric is game players who opted to receive further communication from HSN outside the game framework. While Minson would not reveal absolute numbers, she said that 80% of “Great Gift Giveaway” players also gave the brand permission to send them messaging. That’s 40% higher than game administrator ePrize reports as a benchmark for other promotions in the category, Minson adds.
HSN was moved to expand its approach to this promotion—one of the two biggest regularly scheduled campaigns in its sales year—because its targetcustomer, the female shopper, s spending so much time in places other than on the Web site and in front of the TV. “We want to be everywhere our best customer is,” Minson says.
Some other significant metrics from HSN’s supersized promotional platform:
- Mobile sign-ups actually outperformed those in the Facebook network, with 7,000 registrations compared to 3,000 in social.
- Email opt-in rates in Facebook ran ahead of those on mobile, with 86% of Facebook players agreeing to get email from HSN compared to 75% of mobile entrants. However, 6% of mobile players also opted in to receiving text reminders to play the game.
- Mobile registrants referred an average of three friends to the game—a very strong result for a new platform, Minson says, given that the average number of friends referred at the game microsite was five to eight. Overall share rate for the promotion reportedly ran 20% higher than ePrize’s benchmark for other campaigns in the category.
- On Facebook, 6% of registered players using that channel were posting a message about their participation in the promotion. About three quarters of those messages were to their own Facebook wall, as opposed to posting messages on their friends’ walls.
Running the game on three platforms rather than one as in previous years “appears to have fulfilling on the hypothesis we had going in: that more points to interact with us would deepen engagement,” Minson says. “Check that box ‘Yes, true.’”
“It really brought the promotion into line with our overarching strategy, which is ‘HSN everywhere’. The metrics we’re seeing prove that when you fulfill on that promise, the consumer is right there with you.”
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