Just over a month ago, Starbucks launched a great campaign allowing users to buy $5 gift cards for friends directly on Twitter.
We’re excited to announce @Tweetacoffee, a new way to share the gift of Starbucks: http://t.co/E9OKYKYyV8
— Starbucks Coffee (@Starbucks)
All users had to do was tweet “@tweetacoffee to @recipient” and Starbucks would send over a link for an eGift card that recipients can redeem on their mobile devices.
How Did the Campaign Do?
We’ve been tracking the campaign using our Conversation Tracking tool since launch.
Here’s what we found:
- Over $180,000 has been spent to date, with users buying almost 37,000 gift cards
- More than 27,000 unique users bought gift cards for friends, and 34% bought more than one gift card
- Not surprisingly, much of the activity took place early — 32% of the gifts were bought on the first day
This Campaign Was About a LOT More Than Gift Cards
Couple of interesting takeaways from here that we thought were worth discussing.
First, it’s an interesting validation of the idea that social media can have a very direct ROI. While most campaigns that organizations run are brand-building campaigns, there is certainly a great opportunity for Twitter to become a direct response marketing channel as well.
Second, Starbucks now has information for all these gifters and recipients in their system, and this can have massive longer-term impact on the ROI of this campaign.
As these users continue to be customers, Starbucks now has a tie-in between the Twitter accounts + credit cards + mobile devices + their customer list, and they have it for 54,000 people (gifters and recipients) — that’s HUGE!!
Even tech companies have struggled so far with creating a link between these different IDs for their customers, let alone consumer brands. This Starbucks campaign was about a lot more than just $180k in eGift sales. It was about customer understanding, identification and targeting that will help them for a very long time!
Here’s a partial screenshot of the tracker.
Cheers,
Saif Ajani
