About Bon-Ton
Founded in 1898 as a one-room millinery and dry goods store in Pennsylvania, The Bon-Ton Stores, Inc. now operates 275 stores in 23 states. Featuring clothing, footwear, bedding, furniture, jewelry, beauty products, and housewares, the retailer employs more than 27,000 associates.
Goals
Increase awareness of Bon-Ton as a gift-giving destination
Drive sales for traditional gift-giving categories
Drive traffic and repeat visits during holiday season
Increase engagement throughout campaign
Enhance the customer’s omni-channel gift buying experience
Solution
At Bon-Ton, we understand how hectic things can get for people around the holidays. In an almost relentless cadence, consumers are inundated with thousands of campaigns attempting to solicit their business, which has created an extremely distracted and difficult to engage consumer. Simply adding to the noise and attempting to shout louder than competitors is not a viable strategy, which is why we decided to do things a bit differently this year.
While brainstorming different campaign options, and searching for gift-giving inspiration in our own lives, we uncovered our “ah-ha” moment—everybody is searching for inspiration. When shopping, having a bit of inspiration can mean the difference between finding the perfect gift and finding nothing at all. As we explored this idea, many of us admitted to searching Google for gift giving guides, scouring Pinterest for unique gift ideas, viewing tailored shopping lists in magazines and more all with the goal of uncovering gift giving inspiration for the people we care most about. It was this discovery that led us to begin planning an inspiration campaign to help provide gift ideas during consumers’ holiday shopping season
When launching this campaign, the main goals we wanted to achieve were to: increase awareness, drive sales, drive traffic, increase engagement, and enhance customer experience—all of which as a means to a successful holiday season for our brand. We already knew Wyng was experienced in providing fun and unique holiday campaign ideas, so we tapped them to provide a number of different templates we could potentially leverage.
The template we ultimately decided on was a Christmas Countdown Calendar, which offered personalized gift list ideas in an interactive calendar format. Each day, a new tile on the calendar would be unlocked giving visitors access to a new tailored gift list. These tiles were targeted at dozens of different personality types such as: wine lovers, foodies, fashionistas and more—ultimately allowing us to provide gift inspiration for a wide variety of consumers. In each of these lists we provided exclusive sales and promotions for their respective products, and allowed users direct click to purchase capabilities from within the calendar.
Although we anticipated the daily release cadence would be a great driver of repeat visitors, we wanted to further sweeten the deal to ensure consumers returned day after day. To do so, we included a sweepstakes component within the campaign encouraging consumers to submit their name and email each day for a chance to win that day’s respective gift list, as well as a grand prize of all of the individual gift lists. This helped keep the Christmas Countdown Calendar top of mind for consumers throughout the entire month of December. Additionally, because we were collecting contact information throughout the process, we were also better equipped to identify our most engaged and interested customers during the campaign and retarget them with additional offers thereafter.
One of the biggest takeaways from this experience is just how desperate consumers are for unique engaging experiences. People don’t want to be sold to, they want to be inspired. By tying our campaign strategy directly to individual personality traits, consumers were better able to associate the different gift lists to whom the consumer was shopping for such as their foodie aunt or fashion conscience niece, which ultimately resulted in incredible participation, a very happy consumer, and off the chart sales for our brand.
The campaign was a resounding success not only for Bon-Ton, but also for all of our sister brands—Bergner’s, Carson’s, Elder-Beerman, Herberger’s, and Younkers—which leveraged the same campaign technology to attract their respective brand’s fans. Not only did the holiday campaign generate thousands of new leads and triple digit ROI for each brand, but it also stood out from the crowd of every other holiday marketing campaign by providing consumers with a fun and inspirational experience. This allowed us to capture the attention of an otherwise distracted customer and provide them with real value during their holiday shopping experiences.
The success of this campaign is something we will compare the rest of our programs to throughout the year. Never have we experienced such a high return on our efforts. We plan on continuing to learn from the many great lessons we learned during this campaign, and leveraging its success in new unique ways in the near future.
Results
6,600+
unique email sign-ups
1,081,000+
visitors
40,400+
clicks
Triple digit ROI on Both Program budget and Wynginvestment
