The proudly Texan 100% natural spring water brand that people know and love teamed up with Recess recently for a refreshing initiative boosting their No Dry January campaign. We collaborated on how best to identify, attract, and unleash the potential of a targeted group of prospective buyers using in-person brand activation and product sampling events, a network of strong partners, and focused digital amplification tactics.
Not only were we able to drive many people on-site to nearby retailers through sampling activities, we optimized digital marketing efforts throughout the campaign cycle to achieve outstanding results such as a click-through rate that was +900% above industry benchmarks. Drenching the right audience through multiple channels with positive Ozarka interactions was key to the strategy’s success.
Campaign goals: increase brand awareness and drive retail sales
Bottling up success is no small feat, especially when there are plenty of products that consumers can buy to stay hydrated. But what beats 100% natural spring water? That’s what Ozarka Spring Water wanted to get across through their No Dry January campaign and in working with the Recess team to increase brand awareness and drive retail sales. More specifically, by sampling bottles of their Ozarka Spring Water to fitness enthusiasts, who definitely need to quench their thirst during and after workouts, they could encourage new and returning customers toward future purchases.
An omnichannel product sampling strategy dripping in expertise
We took the idea of sampling to fitness enthusiasts one step further once we knew Ozarka’s goals. By using our data-saturated platform and its information on consumer demographic, customer behavior, purchase activity, location, and proximity to retailers, we created a customer audience targeting pool that allowed our campaign to get specific and closer to success.
It wasn’t only about knowing that Ozarka wanted to get in front of fitness enthusiasts, but it was knowing where we should be for our sampling events. Would these locations be in close proximity to retailers that carried the brand? Had the people in these geographies recently purchased bottled water more than once? Pinning these down allowed us to sample physical Ozarka Spring Water products to those with greater likelihood to purchase and retarget those browsing digitally so that they would check out Ozarka online.
Campaign results by the numbers
What did we see with such robust tactics? We distributed nearly 40,000 bottles at 12 fitness studios to happy participants and garnered nearly 1.2 million total impressions digitally. A click-through rate that was 9X industry benchmarks blew the campaign out of the water, and we were stoked to see hundreds of leads generated for Ozarka through all of the digital amplification efforts - from multiple social posts to thousands of emails sent to site retargeted ads with impressive conversion rates.
Both Ozarka and Recess also learned much from the campaign such as which digital tactics saw the best lead conversion rate, what calls-to-action and visuals worked best as we continually improved the campaign materials, and which platforms their potential customers used most. This would help both parties hone the strategy for future similar campaigns.
Campaign results by the qualitative feedback
The numbers don’t tell the full story though, and we were elated to hear from both participants and partner location teams how they felt about Ozarka and the campaign.
Many expressed how fun and enjoyable the Texas-themed bottles were, and from a functional level, these engaged fitness enthusiasts appreciated how the bottles had sports caps to make it easy to drink during workouts. Fitness studio staff overall loved the sampling campaign and wanted to work with Ozarka again, even enhancing the sampling experience further with pull-up banners and branded coolers.
Campaign goals: Achieved
By getting precise on building the audience pool using our software platform and using digital media retargeting through multiple channels, Recess was readily able to support Ozarka’s campaign goals of increasing brand awareness and driving retail sales.
Looking for ways to increase the ROI on your product sampling campaigns?
Recess can help. With more than 15,000 opportunities for sampling which you can filter by consumer demographic, customer behavior, location, proximity to retailer, Recess can support your unique brand activation and sampling event execution in turnkey, measurable, and scalable ways. Talk to a Recess expert to learn more.
