The Dole Food Co. is running a major online campaign featuring emails to promote its Fruit Bowls diced fruit product.
The campaign started with a newspaper FSI (40 million circulation) on June 17,
then became an online campaign with banners at Marthastewart.com and an email campaign from Penn Media, a Chicago area firm that operates 940 email newsletters. The other participants in the campaign
are Flair Communications, Los Angeles, which did the creative and SoftCoin, a San Francisco Web based promotion service provider that coordinated the online efforts.
The campaign gives consumers
$10 off purchases made at a variety of online stores. A sweepstakes offering a trip to Hawaii is also being used. Both are promoted on Fruit Bowls packages and online. Consumers get an activation code
and pin number from the packages or the email they receive, which they enter at www.dole.com/deals to learn about the $10 discounts, then click a link to go to a sweepstakes landing page.
Among
the retailers offering the discounts are Sunglasshut.com, Kbkids.com, Cooking.com and Shoebuy.com. "Dole tried to pick partners that fit the demographic profile of women 24 to 45," says Jim Diehl,
account director at Flair. The company wants "active, on the go women," who can be found online, he says.
Seven retailers at a time are listed and consumers can get discounts from all seven and
save a total of $70. Links to the retailers are available at dole.com/deals. The savings promotion runs through next February. The sweepstakes goes to September 7.
The email for the campaign was
done by Penn Media, which specializes in large email promotions to its multiple newsletter lists. Twenty to fifty different lists were used, with five to ten million impressions sent, according to Roy
Weiss, Penn's executive vice president of marketing. "They tell us the target audience and we select the newsletters," he says. Dole used The Daily Recipe and other newsletters sent to women. The
newsletters are mostly one page, with ads above the fold that include links to dole.com/deals.
"So many package goods companies are getting into it because people spend more time online and it's
the most effective way to reach them," Weiss says. "Newsletters are the efficient way of reaching them and we monitor the performance." He didn't have the numbers on the Dole campaign yet, but
believes they'll be high.
The company charges a CPM rate to send newsletters. The rate varies depending on the number sent, but averages $12.47, he says.
Dole benefits from "getting new users
to the category, it's a loyalty program," Diehl says.