retail

Bon-Ton Maxes Out On Mother's Day

A single day to celebrate Mom just isn’t enough for some people, so Bon-Ton Stores is running a weeks-long sweepstakes promotion, designed to boost digital engagement.

Called "Celebrate Mom! Love. Gift. Repeat," the campaign kicked off in mid-April and runs through Mother’s Day, with each day revealing a different kind of Mom in people’s lives, whether it’s a mom who loves wine, lives for the beach, or always looks fab.

Besides offering products linked to the day’s theme, users can enter a sweepstakes for daily prizes. And each entry triggers a donation of a baby essential, like clothing or a blanket, to the March of Dimes. (All told, it hopes to generate at least 5,000 such gifts, which the chain says are valued at about $50,000. Since 2013, Bon-Ton campaigns have helped the group raise $1.2 million.)

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“We wanted to elevate our position as a great gifting destination, and to curate a broad assortment of gifts,” says Tiffany Cooley, VP of marketing for the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based retailer. “The whole premise was to think of a way not just to increase sales, but to drive more customer engagement. The differing daily prizes are the unique hook.”

Because each day’s gifts have a different personality, she tells Marketing Daily, the hope is to draw these shoppers back to the microsite on multiple days. About half of all visits to Bon-Ton’s sites are via mobile devices, she says. Digital agency HelloWorld helped create the site and sweepstakes.

So far, it says, the campaign has seen that 75% of the site visitors have entered the sweepstakes, and that there have been an average of three logins per registrant.

Like many department stores, Bon-Ton is having its struggles. In its most recent quarterly results, same-store sales fell 1.9%, and overall sales dropped 1.6% to $927.9 million, compared with $942.6 million in the same period a year ago.

But for this holiday, department stores still have an edge. In its survey on 2016 Mother’s Day gift plans, the National Retail Federation reports consumers are more likely to buy presents from department stores than any other channel, including discount stores and online retailers.

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