Instant lottery tickets. Publisher’s Clearing House mailings. Direct mail pieces from a car dealership. What is under that surface? Where’s that dime so I can find out?
There’s just something exciting about the unknown. Scratch & Save from Solid Cactus, allows you to capitalize on that consumer curiosity. Scratch & Save is an online version of a scratch-card and can be installed on Yahoo! Store item pages. Customers click and drag a dime across a virtual surface to reveal a coupon code that can be applied upon check-out.
Heather Dominello of Doggie-Depot.com purchased Scratch & Save because she wanted to add something unique to her site that “would catch the eye of visitors and not cost a fortune.”
“My ultimate desire was to increase my conversion rate. It certainly did just what I had hoped. In the first week and the weeks that have followed my conversion rate has nearly doubled. The Scratch & Save paid for itself in no time at all,” she said.
Some store owners, like Dominello and Vance Selin from HomeandOutdoorDecor.com, leave Scratch & Save active at all times, while others activate it for special promotions. Either way, there are some clever ways to use Scratch & Save to capture more sales. Here’s a few:
• Seasonal Numbers for Percentage Saved Numbers in themselves may be boring, but here’s a way to get creative and have fun with holiday sales numbers. Think about what numbers are associated with a particular season or holiday and use those for what percentage savings are available.
For example, you may want to have a St. Patrick’s Day sale. Use 3% (for March) and 17% (for the date) as some ideas. For Halloween, the number 13 rings a bell. For Christmas, there are 12 days of Christmas. There are eight reindeer. There are three kings. For the new year this year, it’s ‘10. Have some fun with it! You get the idea. Of course, you will still want to have several numerical values available because that’s the fun in Scratch & Save.
• Cyber Monday Sale (or any other one-day sale) Use e-mail marketing and other promotional efforts to promote a one-day sale ahead of time, such as Cyber Monday. Build excitement for a special sale leading up to the sale date when the Scratch & Save is activated. You can use this in conjunction with other Yahoo! Store features like Solid Cactus’ Holiday Countdown to show how many days are left before the big sale.
• Treasure Hunt – Find the Sale Items While Scratch & Save ultimately takes a percentage off the entire order and not a single item, you can still have some fun with the feature by hiding it on certain items. This way, your customers will visit more pages. By browsing more they may find something they may not have otherwise seen.
Promoting the Savings – How to Promote Scratch & Save
Scratch & Save is an item page feature so many clients using this feature have started to get clever with promoting the savings through various marketing and on-site efforts.
Here is a look at how Scratch & Save can be promoted:
• Call-Out On Site
Create a banner to promote the feature and place it in your shell or homepage. The example shown here is from HomeandOutdoorDecor.com.
This banner appears below the header within all of the interior sections with the message, “Scratch & Save! Visit any item page to reveal additional savings when you order today!”
• E-Mail Marketing
If you regularly send e-mail marketing broadcasts to your customer base, be sure to tell them about Scratch & Save. Include a screen shot of an item page highlighting the feature to familiarize customers with it. If you only use Scratch & Save at certain times, be sure to let people know when it’s back, too. On the flip side, if you are doing an e-mail marketing campaign for store savings and do not wish to use the Scratch & Save feature along with that sale, you can do like Pam Macharola from BlairCandy.com and temporarily disable Scratch & Save during other store promotions. That’s the great thing about this feature. It can work in tandem with other store promotions or it can be turned off if you want to do another sale or promotion.
• Social Media
There are many ways to use social media to promote your Scratch & Save promotions. Place a note on your Facebook page about the feature and explain how to use it. Also, use Facebook to post a link to an item page with the feature being used. On Twitter, you can post links to the item pages as well or just a general tweet to show that you are having a sale. You can use YouTube to show a demo of the feature being used on your site.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Use your PPC ads to promote the Scratch & Save feature. Capitalize on that mystery savings within your ad copy, maybe highlighting the highest amount customers can save such as, “Save up to 17%…”
• Press Release and Informational Page
When Solid Cactus released SnapShop in 2007, one of our clients sent out a press release about the new feature. Several clients also created how-to pages about the new feature. The same can be done for Scratch & Save. Send a press release about the new store feature and how it’s saving customers money. Then, use that press release or a version of it as an informational page on your site to talk about the feature and how it works.
• Blog About It
If you have a blog that goes along with your eCommerce store, be sure to write a blog post about Scratch & Save. Include screen shots and even a demo video. Then, continue to blog about Scratch & Save in the future when you do something else fun with it.
Scratch & Save is an interactive feature that gives store owners a lot of control and customization opportunities. Use that control to your advantage with some of our suggestions mixed with your own creativity to capture more sales.
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