If anyone needs proof of the viral nature of the web and the benefits that that can bring to e-retailers, they need look no farther than the online promotion that King Arthur Flour ran recently.
On May 26, King Arthur Flour, No. 458 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide,
sent an e-mail to 73,000 of its best customers offering to give 5,000 bags of flour to customers who would bake something, share it with their local community, then write about it on King Arthur Flour’s web site. By 11 a.m. the following day, the company had given away all 5,000 bags—in fact, the total was 5,218.
Interestingly, 75% of the bags went to people who did not receive the original e-mail offer. The company attributes that to the viral spread of the campaign.
“It was a surprise,” Halley Silver, director of e-commerce for King Arthur Flour, tells InternetRetailer.com. “We intentionally didn’t post it anywhere other than to announce it through e-mail so we could track how it would spread. We were surprised at the extent.”
Those who wanted the flour had to go to the site, put it in a shopping cart, then check out. Silver says that when 5,000 customers had put bags in carts, the company shut off the offer on the web site. But in the time between when the 5,000th bag hit the shopping cart and the shutdown went into effect, 218 more consumers had put a bag of flour in their shopping carts. “It was going so quickly, it backed up our system,” Silver says.
Silver says the intent of the promotion was “to spread goodwill by encouraging people to bake.” She says the company is sure it has picked up new prospective customers, but has not analyzed the data yet.
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