Auntie Anne's Drives Awareness of Honey Whole Grain Product With Impressive Sweepstakes Success

PLEASANT RIDGE, MI--(Marketwired - May 29, 2013) - ePrize, a leader in digital engagement for social, mobile and web campaigns, today announced the success of the Auntie Anne's Honey Whole Grain Sweepstakes -- a unique, branded multi-channel campaign. To drive customer awareness and trial of the new Honey Whole Grain pretzel product within its mobile-focused mom audience, ePrize worked with Auntie Anne's to launch an engagement program with online, mobile, social and gamification components. The $25,000 reward sweepstakes doubled its goal of registrants, drawing in over 200,000 participants across channels.

In launching their new Honey Whole Grain pretzel, Auntie Anne's sought to enable customers to get their hands on the brand -- literally and figuratively. Guests throughout the U.S. engaged with the brand online with a virtual Honey Whole Grain pretzel twisting game, as well as with in-store taste tests on Sampling Saturdays, with mobile-optimized QR code scanning to drive brand education. Digital media invited customers online to drive frequency.

"We were very pleased with the success of this comprehensive campaign, which drove trial and awareness of the new Honey Whole Grain pretzel flavor in an engaging way," explains Matt Simon, Director of Marketing at Auntie Anne's. "Auntie Anne's understands that we have a loyal brand following, but we were pleasantly surprised when we learned participants were spending an average of thirteen minutes connecting with the brand through an interactive pretzel twisting game."

Results exceeded expectations on all accounts, including the following data points:

• Overwhelming amount of registrants: Total registration, 211,173, exceeded Auntie Anne's forecasts by over 100,000 registrants. Moreover, 59% (124,768) of registrants opted in to become a V.I.P. (Very Important Pretzel Lover) in the Pretzel Perks email program to receive additional Auntie Anne's offers and promotions. Visitor and registration conversion reached 61%, over 15% higher than anticipated. Overall, the campaign drove over 1.6M sweepstakes entries.
• Mobile activity: Mobile acted as a highly effective channel throughout the promotion, with one-third of all registrations stemming from mobile web and SMS registrants.
• Customer engagement: The campaign successfully engaged consumers, who spent an average of 3:55 minutes on the site each visit and visited an average of 7.6 times.
• Social sharing: Word of mouth engagement via Twitter and Facebook contributed to the promotion's success with more than 4,800 tweets, and more than 13,000 shares on Facebook. More than a third of people referred to the campaign through Facebook went on to register themselves.

"Promotions like this are an effective means to engaging with a brand's valuable customer base," explains ePrize's VP, Account Director, Meredith Hillman. "We worked with Auntie Anne's to craft a campaign to better engage in a dialogue with their valued customer, and the results spoke for themselves. Registrant numbers of over 200,000 blew our estimates out of the park and the amount of mobile engagement similarly exceeded our predictions. It is always a pleasure to see customers with such steadfast brand loyalty."

The campaign's grand prize winner was Virginia Beach, VA resident Graham Thompson, who is using his winnings in part to help his mother with her finances. An employee of EQUI-Kids, a therapeutic equine riding program benefiting the special needs community in Virginia Beach, Graham was very happy to win the $25,000 cash prize.

About ePrize
ePrize is a global leader in digital and mobile engagement. A majority of Fortune 500 brands such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, The Gap, MillerCoors, Lenovo, NHL, Yahoo!, P&G and AT&T, have relied on ePrize's multi-channel solutions to engage consumers on their path to purchase -- all on a single unified platform. Since 1999, ePrize has created thousands of promotions, CRM and loyalty campaigns in 44 countries. Headquartered in Detroit, ePrize also has offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Seattle. Visit us at eprize.com or text CRM to 35350 for mobile demos and alerts. For ePrize's press kit, click here.

About Auntie Anne's
An award-winning franchise system that is owned by FOCUS Brands Inc., Auntie Anne's received the 2012 ZAGAT® top five most popular quick-refreshment chains honor, ranked number one in the category of hand-rolled soft pretzels by Entrepreneur's Franchise 500, and was granted the World-Class Franchise® honor (the most prestigious award in franchising) for the past seven years. For more information about the Auntie Anne's franchise opportunity, visit www.facebook.com/auntieannespretzels, www.twitter.com/auntieannes or www.youtube.com/auntieannespretzels.