Trivia Games Deliver a River of Customers for AARP, Others

When AARP unveiled its new website last summer, it used a trivia game for the first time asking questions that prompted people to move around the site exposing them to all the new content, tools and features.

The game, with a goal to build qualified Web registrants, offered an added benefit: those who played were entered into a sweepstakes to win $5,000. AARP knew that many of its 40 million members liked to play sweepstakes, and the trivia game offered the possibility to improve response. The results of the one-month promotion were stunning delivering more than 60,000 registrants and their email addresses, or 80% over goal.

“We know that games work well for this demo,” Nataki Edwards, the vice president of AARP digital strategies, said. “We see in our general site that this is a very popular area. We also know this demo wants to remain sharp. Mental acuity is important to them.”

Helping move people around a refreshed website is just one way marketers have found to put trivia games to good use. InterContinental Hotels Group enhanced its Priority Club rewards program with a travel trivia game that let registered members win extra points in daily and weekly contests. Duracell took its video commercial a step further by overlaying it with brand and trivia questions that helped people learn more about its new myGrid battery-charging pad for mobile phones. And Starbucks used trivia in a text-based scavenger hunt.

One lighthearted trivia game from ETrade stars that lovable talking baby. The game, included in a branded video created by Grey Advertising, was embedded on a tabbed page on both ETrade’s general and ETrade baby Facebook fan pages and delivered to fans through the News Feed to 28,000 fans. The video and trivia game were also placed as a pre-roll for airline travelers to access free Wi-Fi service at three major airports. The 60-day campaign delivered 50,000 video starts.

“It’s all about getting the content in front of people who choose to receive the message,” said Scott Reese, the chief executive officer of Blurb IQ, which handled the ETrade trivia game.

Playing the game

Based on the success of its game, AARP last fall developed and housed a trivia portal on its site: A permanent home for games to live and be rotated in on a regular basis. This time the goal was to increase page views. The portal launched with 100 quizzes, each quiz containing 10 questions that led to related articles. It is also running a few quizzes on its Spanish-language site. By the end of 2010, more than 3 million page views had stacked up. Social sharing is encouraged through ShareThis functionality, as well as the Facebook “like” button.

“This is a great page-view generator, which of course leads to advertising,” Edwards said.

AARP, which caters to the 50+ demo, offers “Jeopardy”-style trivia featuring 10 quiz categories central to the website: money, food, health, technology, entertainment, travel, relationships, home & garden, giving back and personal growth. The questions are all related, such as “Which movie won the Academy Award in 1966?” and “Which type of pepper is the hottest?”

“These shouldn’t be difficult, puzzling questions, it should be fun and lighthearted so people come back and engage more than once,” Lisa Feldberg, vice president of business development at ePrize, which handles the work for AARP, said.

Best Practices

A key reason in gaining success using trivia games is employing best practices. EPrize’s Feldberg offered the following tips:

1. In each exposure, serve up three to five questions.
2. Serve new questions everyday to ensure repeat visits.
3. Add a “hints” button or prompt where consumers find additional information or learn more about your brand or product to get the answers. This not only provides valuable information, but also increases engagement time.
4. Don’t make the questions too difficult. They should be easy and fun so players want to find out more.
5. Layer on an instant-win game or sweepstakes to give people another reason to return regularly to play.
6. Run the promotion between 8 and 10 weeks, it’s a good time frame to attract a large volume of people. Use a list of 30 to 40 trivia questions and serve up new questions to returning customers. On average, consumers come back six to nine times.
7. Add social extensions, such as posting a trivia question on Facebook or Twitter.
8. Provide scoreboards for players to maintain a friendly competitive environment.
10. On the first return visit recognize people by their email address.
11. Provide an opt-in mechanism for future marketing.
13. Follow up with a mobile version, then tie mobile, social and digital all together.
14. Advertise the game via messaging tied to all in-market marketing.

For AARP, getting the word out about its trivia game was simple. It emailed its more than 4 million newsletter subscribers and included a print ad in “AARP the Magazine,” which has a circulation of 22 million subscribers.

And in keeping up with technology, AARP in January launched a version of its trivia game for mobile devices. By February, more than 700,000 page views were coming from mobile devices, up 40% from January.

“We could not be happier with how trivia has taken off,” Edwards said.