Scratch my tummy this christmas

LiveScratch mixes seasonal fun with serious e-CRM

9 September 2004: Web solutions provider Akriga is introducing three variants of its successful LiveScratchT electronic scratch card to help on-line marketers implement fun campaigns during the all-important Christmas buying season. Advent Calendar, 12 days of Christmas and Christmas Card provide highly customisable platforms for the execution of bespoke campaigns in both B2C and B2B contexts.

Advent Calendar is designed to run on a website and encourages participants to come back every day between 1st December and Christmas Eve. Visitors scratch away the panel over today's date to reveal one of a number of options open to the promoter: instant prizes, e-vouchers, marketing messages or 'gold rings', icons that can be collected over the course of the campaign for prizes at the end. The rules enable people to join after 1st December and scratch away the panels of earlier dates but future dates are always inaccessible. Participants are encouraged, or obliged, to enter information about themselves as part of the process.

12 days of Christmas works on similar principles but runs from Christmas Day until the twelfth day of Christmas, 6th January, and is designed to support stock clearance initiatives. Promotions can support on-line sales or drive customers to the Sales at retail outlets.

Akriga's Christmas Card, available for use at any time in the run up to the big day, allows companies to send an entertaining email such as the Penguin 'Scratch my tummy' card below. The image revealed can be set to be a Christmas greeting, a prize or a voucher and companies can chose their own designs for the card itself. Applications can include both B2B and B2C e-mailings.

Chris Howells, Akriga's Sales Director explains why LiveScratch is such a valuable tool: "Compelling communications like those based on the LiveScratch Christmas platforms dramatically transform the results of online campaigns. People who are serious about e-CRM are increasingly waking up to the potential that these interactive mini games can offer. Campaigns can be implemented quickly and the parameters adjusted as they progress to deliver optimal results."

LiveScratch delivers tailor-made web solutions and incorporates Akriga's back-end competition management technology. This enables a wide range of functionality including interfacing with existing systems to ingest the data that drives a competition, delivering lists of prize winners and prizes to a fulfilment house, interfacing to bespoke systems, such as a hotel booking system, to deliver prizes online and in real time. It can be installed within the user's IT environment or operated on behalf of users by Akriga as an Application Service Provider (ASP).