July 6, 2010
RSVP and Nexus Awards
Gold standards
Originally published in NZ Marketing March-April 2010, page 24
RSVP Gold Winners
Tough times breed strong campaigns. These are six of 2009's best
Onecard Refreshed
New Zealand’s biggest grocery reward programme has transformed itself from a tired, stagnant, one-size-fits-all discount card into a refreshed, modernised, multi-faceted and engaging rewards programme.
It is no longer about grabbing a quick discount at the checkout: customers are now deeply engaged with Onecard points and earned 46 percent more rewards in 2009 than in 2008. Onecard is also adding genuine value to the customer experience with a set of leading-edge, data-driven personalised email communications that help them “shop smarter”.
Collecting email addresses is crucial: results show each opted-in customer can be expected to spend, on average, an extra $146 per year. To that end, the Onecard team have added an extra 150,000 precious email addresses over the last year, boosting the digitally engaged customer base to 316,598.
Onecard mySpecials
This weekly digital marketing programme delivered highly-personalised content to individual customers and is fully integrated across both email and the mySpecials website. Each customer’s previous purchasing history is analysed to identify and prioritise which products will be most relevant for them that week.
A personalised shopping list is created that enables the marketing team to focus on individual and total basket savings for each customer. Email is used to promote the top 10 most relevant products and the website is used for customers to explore and find more specials relevant to them, including those that aren’t promoted in other media.
Onecard mySpecials
The purpose of this sales generation programme was to drive incremental sales from Onecard customers by improving the promotion of all weekly specials and deals across the full range of supermarket products.
By September 2009, customer engagement was outstanding, with an open rate of 52.2 percent and a click through rate of 30.5 percent. In addition, conversion to sale was 78.6 percent of customers who opened the email and incremental sales targets were achieved.
Yellow Tree House
The Yellow Tree House was part of a campaign promoting Yellow’s business directory search via book, website or mobile phone, in which Aucklander Tracey Collins was challenged to build a restaurant halfway up a redwood tree using nothing but contacts from Yellow’s book, website and mobile application. Her progress was publicly followed and, in January 2009, the Tree House Restaurant opened to a sell-out two-month season.
The campaign drew unprecedented media attention, featuring in 90 different magazines, all the main TV news channels and as the lead story on the front page of the New Zealand Herald. However, its biggest impact was online: the campaign truly went viral, featuring on over 200,000 web pages as consumers distributed the campaign around the web.
The Tree House unlocked the secret to ‘viral’ success online by creating and disseminating highly compelling content in a range of forms, from a live webcam and daily blog, to image galleries and ‘webisodes’.
Consequently, yellow.co.nz’s monthly unique visitors rose above one million for the first time ever. Usage grew by 11 percent (against an objective of five percent) and recall grew by ten percent. And it did so three times more cost effectively than any previous campaign and with a smaller campaign budget. Amongst those who recalled the campaign, the perception of Yellow’s ‘internet leadership’ jumped ten percent.
Growing the Nation’s Brain in Just 7 Days
Brain Awareness Week is the Neurological Foundation’s big chance to reach a more youthful audience, driving brain health awareness and creating a ‘donor nursery’ for later communications.
The challenge to DraftFCB in 2009 was to generate awareness, educate and change behaviour amongst Gen X/Y with only $100,000.
DraftFCB’s big idea was ‘Grow a Bigger Brain in 7 Days’ and the entire country was invited to take part and make New Zealand a smarter place.
By ‘Login your noggin’ at brainweek.co.nz, participants could start growing a bigger brain by doing simple things like eating dark chocolate, chatting with friends and playing online games.
Completion of a daily task list earned virtual brain cells and a daily email kept participants engaged throughout the week. Brainweek.co.nz also formed a creative platform for future events.
Budget constraints meant media and PR had to work extra hard. Sponsors were engaged and provided media space and product. People ran Round the Bays with giant brains on their heads, Twitter and Facebook were utilised and journalists were ‘bought’ with chocolates.
The ‘Grow a Bigger Brain in 7 Days’ online challenge generated 3.9 million impressions of Brain Awareness Week in the media, drew 34,500 visitors to the website for an average of seven and a half minutes at a time and signed up over 5,000 potential new donors.
Golf GTI Track Day Invite
Just getting prospective customers in for a test drive during the recession was difficult enough, let alone enticing them to buy a new car. So the challenge for Rapp NZ and European Motor Distributors was to get current owners and a group of prospects to test drive the latest Golf GTI and create sales leads.
In place of a test drive, however, the target audience was invited to put themselves in pole position for an exclusive, private track day. Typically, GTI buyers are keenly interested in performance cars and driving, so Track Days meant these customers could put a new Golf GTI through its paces on a closed race track, with skill sessions giving them the opportunity to push the car like never before, experience the handling refinements and possibly fall in love with the new GTI model.
A leader-board like that used in the Top Gear TV show was the way in. It promised a fun day and spoke of sports car performance. A personalised magnet with each customer’s name, a visual leader board and a personalised invite were sent out, leading to an unprecedented 88 percent response rate from the mailer.
Track Days generated 212 sales leads and resulted in new GTI sales to the value of $460,000 and an additional 1,100 leads from other customers who phoned their local dealerships to find out about the scheme.