The ultimate sticky promotion
The Times
A great online promotion can do many things. It can guide users’ behaviour, provide valuable data capture and be a great way to get users to engage more with your brand. This piece we did for the The Times did all these things to great effect.
The challenge The Times set us was to increase traffic to the Driving section of their website, to raise dwell time, number of page views per person and ultimately, capture data. They had a seriously good prize as an incentive but needed help to leverage it for maximum possible effect.
Our approach
We recognised that for an online promotion to be successful it must have two things. Firstly an enticing prize (which The Times already had – in this case a Porsche Boxster); and secondly it must have simplicity, of both the concept and the mechanic so it’s easy for people to understand and participate.
An online treasure hunt
We developed a ‘treasure hunt’ mechanic whereby, after registering, users had to browse the driving section to collect a total of 5 virtual keys to gain entry into the free prize draw for the Porsche.
A flexible promotion
“Collect and Drive” worked in such a way as to allow The Times to either fix the keys into specific pages on the site or set the number of pages a visitor had to view before they found a new key allowing the promotion to be responsive to how it was being used.
Integrated advertising campaign
Traffic was driven to the site with a banner campaign that ran across the whole Times site and repeat visits were encouraged with spot prizes.
The results
Collect and Drive was a huge success. The banner campaign received the highest internal click through rate of any promotion in the history of The Times site. We smashed the client’s target of 10,000 sign ups by over 50%, delivering just under 16,000 acquisitions in less than three weeks. Registrants also showed an incredible level of participation, with 86% collecting 4 or more keys.
What was next… The Treasure Hunt mechanic was intentionally developed to be highly flexible, and we have since adapted it for other clients – most notably for The Carphone Warehouse as part of their high profile sponsorship of ITV’s The X Factor.
