To garner engagement and awareness during the holiday season for Kay Jewelers, we launched a 3 week game based on the traditional Christmas party gift swap, White Elephant. Each week visitors selected from 1 of 10 wrapped gifts, unwrapped the item, and either chose to enter to win it, or take a chance and swap it for another item. With only 3 swaps available each day, users had to carefully select the item they wished for, driving 600K direct clicks to product pages to Kay Jewelers ecommerce site. To incentivize shares, pins, and tweets of products during this important purchasing season, the brand also added an incentive to share items for additional daily swaps, resulting in 118K user shares, pins, and tweets for the program. With just a moderate media budget consisting of only Facebook promoted posts and leveraging traffic drivers from other owned properties (email, .com, etc.), the program generated a total of 11M owned-post and microsite impressions. Additionally, nearly three-fourths of all users who registered for the program opted-in to receive future email communications from the brand.
This program successfully encouraged fans and followers to engage with products during a season filled with clutter and competition, by leveraging a powerful social motivator: gamification. Players were actively engaged with the brand and its products during this time, commenting and replying on multiple owned channels to showcase their excitement for the promotion. This program also shows how a brand doesn't always have to a presence on every social network to reach people on it. Although Kay Jewelers did not yet have a Pinterest presence during this campaign, the program was designed to give users the option to Pin a product. This call to action (while optional) greatly increased the validity of the shares of the program, increased the visibility of the program, and drove awareness of key products during the holiday season. However, perhaps the key metrics that make it a program worth winning a Shorty is the volume of product page referrals to KayJewelers.com and email conversions it produced. These metrics show that highly engaging social programs can lead to lasting results by driving a higher rate of engagement with current and prospective consumers.
