Publishers Clearing House Finds More Ways For You to Win
Publishers Clearing House (PCH) is one of the largest and most successful multi
channel direct marketing companies in the world. Founded in 1953 as a magazine circulation
agency selling discounted subscriptions by direct mail, its business has broadened
over the years to include a wide variety of merchandise that now accounts for a
large portion of the company's sales.
The company's rapidly growing website, PCH.com, offers the general public access
to PCH's marketing activities and a broad array of company information. For web
surfers, PCH.com provides sweepstakes entry and shopping opportunities for magazines
and merchandise. For consumer marketing companies, PCH.com offers cost-efficient
marketing partnerships that generate substantial numbers of qualified leads.
PCH has recently expanded its existing network of web properties, PCH.com, PCHlotto.com
and Blingo.com, with the launch of PCHgames.com, PCHquiz4cash.com, PCHcoupons.com
and PCHcashback.com. The company plans to continue online development by adding
more sites to its network over the next 12 months that revolve around attainable
winning opportunities and great deals.
Arkadium Helps PCH.com Drive Traffic and Engage Consumers
PCH.com turned to Arkadium to help them strategize and develop a unique way to engage
their users online while remaining true to the brand. Their core goal was to give
visitors a fun site experience with attainable prizes to keep them coming back for
more, while also finding a way to drive more site traffic and revenue for their
marketing partners.
Arkadium’s approach to this challenge was to help PCH.com create a customized, private
label games platform, PCHGames.com. With this solution, consumers could play games,
register to become members and redeem reward tokens for all kinds of prizes, all
while providing PCH.com with an easy platform for future game development and revenue
building advertising opportunities. And as online game play is a natural extension
of the brand’s sweepstakes playing theme, this seemed like a logical solution for
the brand.
“The private label games platform that Arkadium presented us with was the perfect
combination of a way we could create even more opportunities for our customers to
enter sweepstakes, and also create more advertising revenue opportunities. With
this solution we suddenly have more valuable video and banner inventory to offer
our consumer marketing partners,” said Alex Betancur, General Manager of PCH Online.
Fun and Games at PCHGames.com
PCHGames.com has a wide variety of games to choose from, ranging from the most popular
card, casino and arcade games to challenging sports games. Members can play for
free, earn valuable tokens, track scores and enter to win prizes including $500
Walmart Gift Certificates and other gift cards from leading merchants such as Target,
Amazon and Home Depot. As members continue to log on and play games, they earn more
tokens and fabulous prize winning opportunities. The site also includes leaderboards,
which allows members to track how others are doing and compete against each other
to be the top token leader on the site.
In a very short period of time PCHGames.com has far exceeded expectations. The company
promoted the game center through an email campaign to members and banner ads on
its home page, and in its first month alone (January 2008) site visitors had completed
over 4 million game plays on the site, 35 million tokens were redeemed for prizes
and 40,000 entries were submitted for the January sweepstakes.
In addition to growing the sites daily traffic, PCHGames also helped to drive increased
site interaction time. No longer were visitors logging on, entering sweepstakes
and logging off. Instead, visitors stay on the site and play for over 12 minutes
and then continue to play, on average, 5 more times. The higher traffic and frequency
of visits resulted in increased opportunities for exposing customers to pre-roll
and banner advertising.
“Expanding our presence online is a major initiative for PCH and games were an obvious
choice. Developing a network of sites for the millions of PCH customers who do business
with us online provides a strong foundation for our current marketing strategy.
Arkadium is a great partner. They helped us select the games, build the site and
have been involved in our ongoing dialog about future game development and instant
win mechanisms,” said Steven Brita, Senior Marketing Director of PCH Online.
