The results
Overall site:
- 220 percent increase in returning visitors
- 17 percent increase in visits
- 20 percent increase in gift card sales (all data compared year over year, March 2010 vs. March 2009)
Social media promotions:
- 400 percent increase in Facebook fans as a result of the April "Pucker Up" contest
Online fundraiser tool
- More than 200 fundraisers booked within the first month of launch, providing more than 100 percent ROI in less than 30 days
Club Veg members
- 70,000 new members subscribed on Souplantation.com in the month of January, resulting in more than 1.3 million members to date
Fresh Ideas blog
- More than 4,000 comments were received within one week in response to a St. Patrick's Day contest called "Eat Your Greens." Prizes included two sets of 10 complimentary meal passes for blog readers and additional prizes for Facebook and Twitter participants.
Lessons learned
Test, test, and re-test: We wish we had allowed more time for testing. For this project, we had just over a week for internal testing and a week for client testing to work through any defects. Ideally, we should have planned for two to four weeks just for internal testing.
Reallocate budget: We intended to save time and money by keeping the Flash map on the locations page as is. In hindsight, we wish we had reallocated budget for this to completely rebuild it in .NET using Google Maps for an overall better solution.
Where do we go from here?
Keep it fresh: We will continue to keep the content fresh and relevant to give the users a reason to keep coming back for more.
Grow Club Veg: This will be an even bigger push in 2010 focusing on more acquisition tactics in addition to maintaining customer loyalty.
Optimize: We will continue to evaluate and act on our analytics results to optimize the site.
Rebuild catering: This is our next big enhancement for Souplantation.com. We are really looking forward to this project after seeing such great success from the fundraiser application.
The first 100 days of Souplantation.com were an amazing success. We always knew the fans were loyal to the brand, and now users have a reason to indulge in Souplantation.com and return for seconds and even thirds.
Jeannie Fratoni is creative director and co-founder at Red Door Interactive.
On Twitter? Follow Jeannie at @jeanniefratoni. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.
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