PROMO Magazine’s Interactive Marketing Awards honors the best and brightest in effective interactive marketing and recognizes the valuable role that interactive tactics play in motivating consumer response and creating strong, exciting brands.

Partnering with E-centives for the online coupon technology and managed security, Toys ‘R’ Us won the first place award for programs that used electronic direct marketing to drive brand promotion.

Read excerpts from the PROMO Magazine’s Interactive Marketing Awards on Toys ‘R’ Us and E-centives, below.

Pressured by Wal-Mart, Costco and other big-box retailers offline, as well as online toy purveyors like Amazon, TRU needed to build traffic for its bricks-and-mortar venues during Christmas 2005 while creating a low-price buzz that an-swered the competition.

The in-house marketing team, led by marketing manager Torquil Perry and creative managers Shi Chen and Tom Au, came up with an e-mail data collec-tion and fulfillment strategy that was low-cost and quick to turn around...

...Then, from Dec.1 through Dec. 12, the offers began to flow—each good for that day only in any TRU store. The daily emails linked to a host page where recipients could select just the coupons they wanted.

“We wanted to generate excitement and urgency as well as get immediate action for those who wanted to take advantage of the offers,” Perry explains.

E-centives hosted the coupon program and managed security, preventing generalized online posting or use outside the target market. Each recipient was only allowed to print coupons once per day, and his or her name was printed on each coupon.

Even so, with a 21% redemption rate against downloads, response was way beyond what TRU marketers had anticipated. Inventory levels for some items thinned so quickly that a few coupon offers were modified at the last-minute.

With success like this, Geoffrey the Giraffe might make Rudolph wonder about his job security!

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