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A foray into viral marketing by the Bon-Ton Stores Inc. yielded a six percent response rate. That isn't too shabby, even if the responses were in the form of e-mail names, not sales.

The campaign's catalyst was a mandate to boost the number of e-mail addresses in the company's records. Before it launched its effort in late 2009, the file held around 450,000 addresses, according to Tiffany Tocco, Bon-Ton's director of marketing and planning.

From these, Bon-Ton made two selections of 100,000 apiece from across its eight sub-brands. The messages were not personalized to reflect whichever brands the recipients had done business with: All eight were represented across the bottom of each communication.

“We weren't promoting anything specific,” Tocco says, commenting on the decision to use all of the brand names. “There was no statistical variance across the names in regard to click-through and open rates.”

That said, some segmentation did go into the name selection. The first 100,000 target cell consisted of what Bon-Ton called high-performers, a designation based on their open, click-through and other engagement rates, but not transactions. The second select was pulled from a random sample of the consumers who remained in the file.

Each was sent a coupon offering either $10 off a $25 in-store purchase, or $30 off an online purchase of $100 or more. But the coupons weren't automatically redeemable. To activate them, recipients had to forward an invitation to sign up to a minimum of three contacts. Bon-Ton included a contact importer that allowed recipients to easily enroll friends without having to tediously re-type (and potentially misspell) e-mail addresses.

Personal Follow-up

Messages to the initial groups of 100,000 were not personalized, but follow-up efforts thanking recipients for forwarding the offers and activating the discounts were. And anyone to whom the initial recipient forwarded the promotion received a personalized invitation — from the referrer, not from Bon-Ton.

“E-mail is a form of social media, just not a sexy one,” notes Oscar Padilla, director of interactive services at Vertis, which designed and coordinated the effort.

The promotion ran from the second week in December through the end of the year. Slightly more than 10,000 consumers opened the e-mail, and of those, 3,200 forwarded the offer to an average of 3.5 friends apiece.

By the time the program was officially over, Bon-Ton had collected 11,200 new e-mail addresses. Of those, 1,557 agreed to receive further communication from the apparel chain.

Bon-Ton has not linked any purchases to the new addresses, nor has it evaluated the redemption rates of the coupons. This campaign was designed to further the company's move into targeted communication — a move reinforced in late March when president and CEO Bud Bergren revealed the company had cut back on run-of-press advertising and was putting more resources toward television and targeted marketing such as direct mail and e-mail.

So was the program a success? That depends on who is chopping the numbers. The three-and-a-half referrals per participant exceeded the expectations set out at the program's beginning.

But for Tocco, the amount spent on the program didn't pay off in the number of e-mail registrations generated, based on the amount Bon-Ton spent on the test.

“We anticipated collecting 15,000 to 30,000 names,” she says. “We were significantly lower. But it was a short window.”

The Results

Tocco is happy with the results. “Process-wise, the approach and offer were great. We are building this strategy into our everyday contact promotional e-mails,” she says. “I wouldn't test it in this way again. I would roll it out in the footer of every e-mail program.”

The campaign, combined with efforts at the point of sale across Bon-Ton's various lines, has boosted the company's e-mail file to a half-million names. The company hopes to double that amount by the end of the year.

Bon-Ton continues to work with Vertis, and in early 2010 started harvesting numbers for a mobile marketing program. As of April, it had collected around 2,000 numbers from consumers interested in Clinique offers, and another 5,000 from those wanting additional information about its Juniors programs.