o2 Top Up Surprises shows 52% response rate

o2 UK has 10 million Pay As You Go customers. In November last year, the company introduced a ‘Top Up Surprises’ campaign for customers.

It works really nicely: Every time you top-up your account, you get a text back from o2 with a ‘surprise’.

Surprises range from extra texts, picture messages and minutes through to prizes such as holidays, TVs and mobile phones.

It’s a really smart way of encouraging and rewarding customers to keep on topping up regularly. And, although I’m not an o2 PAYG customer, I can imagine I’d take a small (but nevertheless powerful) amount of joy at ‘winning’ a little surprise each time I topped up.

o2 Media, the chaps behind this, have decided to open up their platform to allow other brands to participate. The concept being that advertisers get access to a set of customers who’re already in the middle of ‘interacting’ and who’re ready and waiting for a ‘surprise’ deal or offer.

Blockbuster video got stuck into this channel. Here’s how it worked:

O2 customers visiting Top-up Surprises to claim their reward were offered a 30 day free trial of Blockbuster’s unlimited rental service, a £10 voucher to spend in a Blockbuster store or online and £1 off the monthly fee if they chose to take up the unlimited rental service. 52% of customers chose to take up the Blockbuster offer and of these 11% have already redeemed the offer voucher.

“This has been one of our most successful acquisition campaigns to date,” said Gerry Butler, Senior Vice President Europe, Blockbuster. “We’ve been delighted by the response rates which exceeded our expectations and look forward to continue to work with O2 Media to deliver campaigns through this highly effective channel.”

Very cool indeed. For the right products and services, I think this channel could very quickly become a key channel in the mobile marketing mix. I don’t think it’ll be long before Pizza and other fast food chains are getting stuck in too.

If you’d like to see what the end consumer sees, visit the site: http://topupsurprises.o2.co.uk/

This site also happens to be the highest trafficked UK site in the ‘Entertainment – competitions’ segment according to Hitwise. Good exposure for advertisers.

Talk to your mobile media buyer for more details on o2 Surprises.