A “packed house” crowd of over 120 attended the September 2009 Cincinnati AMA luncheon at the Cintas Center as Darrell Sandefur & Ben Melillo of Kroger and Michael Stich of Bridge Worldwide gave a presentation on the topic of “Actionable Digital Interaction.”  The event was sponsored by Web Media Tools of Cincinnati.

The informative presentation detailed both the development of and the results from Kroger’s “Design a Reusable Bag” sweepstakes.  For the contest consumers were encouraged to visit the Kroger website to design their own reusable shopping bag, purchase their self-designed bag  and vote on the designs of other Kroger shoppers.

Michael Stich of Bridge listed the program objectives as:

• Drive Awareness
• Increase the Email Database
• Drive In-store Traffic
• Promote Sustainability

Ben Melillo listed the promotional tactics employed, which included: in-store radio and signage, a direct mailer developed with dunnhumby,  blog mentions, geo-targeted banner ads and search engine marketing via Google and Yahoo.  Ben also provided some data on the program results, which included:

• Over 800,000 unique visitors to the Kroger website
• 46,000 bag designs created
• Over 900,000 votes cast
• 30,000 email addresses added to the Kroger customer database
• 34% redemption rate for the coupon customers received for their participation
• 64.9% of survey respondents said they had a greater perception of Kroger as “green”

Before a short ‘Q&A session’, Darrell Sandefur described how the Kroger & Bridge teams used their web analytic software to  paint a detailed picture of where people who participated came from geographically and how they interacted with the website.  This analysis has enabled Kroger to fine-tune the bag design tool, thus improving the user experience, as well as improve the efficiency of marketing and advertising efforts.