Lindt Engages 1 Million Fans On Facebook In Less Than A Week In Chocolate Giveaway

Lindt Chocolate USA successfully gave away all 1 million coupons in just seven days, increasing their Facebook fan count by more than 100% in the process due to CoupSmart's social commerce technology, and people's love of great chocolate. For this campaign, CoupSmart implemented their Smart Deals app on the Lindt Facebook page, and required a simple 'like' from customers in order to print out their coupon.

After determining that a Facebook promotion would be the best approach for dramatically increasing trial and engagement in a short amount of time, Lindt looked to CoupSmart to help them get a lasting benefit from the campaign. The Lindt team used television and Facebook ad buys with the branding "chocolate beyond compare", along with posts on consumer-focused coupon sites to get the word out before and during the coupon giveaway. CoupSmart set up a custom-designed app on the brand's Facebook page allowing fans to print their coupon and easily share it with their Facebook friends. The giveaway campaign began October 9th, 2012, and in the first four hours the fan page gave out over 100,000 coupons for 1 FREE bag of Lindor chocolates (up to $3.99 retail). The pace of traffic continued steadily with the page seeing a 30% increase in 'likes' in less than a day.

"The days of paying for 'Likes' are numbered", says Blake Shipley, Founder/CEO of CoupSmart. "Clients like Lindt are looking for ways to turn these fans into repeat customers. They need that critical metric, ROI, in order to justify continued growth in social media spending. This, along with a clear path to driving repeat business, is the value that CoupSmart provides."

When fans use the app to claim their free chocolates, a line of communication is opened with these customers that can be fully utilized within CoupSmart's system. Because each share, print, and in-store redemption is tied to the customer by Facebook profile, it's easy to follow up with more targeted, relevant offers in the future that inspire loyalty and generate future revenue.

"The value of the data cannot be overstated", said Chuck Ball, VP of Sales for CoupSmart. "Our technology not only enables brands to assign a value to an individual's 'influence' on brand sales, but allows them to re-market to those advocates through behavioral targeting, increasing the lifetime value of that fan."

The final results of the 1 million Lindor Truffles giveaway were, by all measures, impressive. Lindt saw a 91% print rate of the coupon and maintained a 90% fan retention rate after the promotion ended. Additionally, they received unprecedented engagement with 25,000 unique wall posts of the deal by fans, amounting to 6 million additional impressions through virality alone. Facebook's 'People Talking About This' (PTAT) measure for the Lindt page grew over 1000% to top 550,000 the week of the campaign, the second biggest increase for a food/beverage company on the site. While final redemption numbers will not be available until about 4 weeks after the expiration date of the coupon on November 7th, initial figures have been high, showing the value of social offers.

For additional information on the news that is the subject of this release, or to request a demonstration of CoupSmart's technology, contact Sean Grace or email info@coupsmart.com

About CoupSmart
CoupSmart is a social marketing system that allows businesses to bridge the gap between offline and online customers and create a measurable, recurring revenue stream from their social media efforts. CoupSmart was started to bring about the vision of making coupons that continue to work for businesses after distribution. The system focuses on collecting the right data from fans and then automating the remarketing process to deliver the right offer at the right time.