Groupon has always maintained a unique voice in the ecommerce world, and has driven its biggest successes using this brand voice to drive engagement and conversion. Snapchat was a big opportunity for those reasons.
The goal for Snapchat is to provide our customers a personal avenue for engaging with the brand while rewarding their participation with prizes, promo codes, exclusive info, or celebrity meet-and-greets. The self-destructing nature of Snapchat only added to the urgency of our messaging, which kept fans checking their phones.
Despite still being relatively young, Snapchat's users have shown interest in exclusive offers. A recent study of college users found that nearly 3/4 of respondents were interested in receiving discounts to purchase products from brands. The was a very big opportunity for a brand like Groupon because that is our primary line of business, and we have a brand voice and artistic sensibility to connect with followers.
Since launching we have 95% of our viewers completing our stories, driven 15-30% CTR despite the ability to actually click, and have given followers access to over $25K in Snapchat-only prizes and savings. We also show them behind the curtain of Groupon's famously weird corporate office, complete with enchanted forest, cat spaceship and tiki hut.
Snapchat users have overwhelmingly rallied and showed support for Groupon in this platform. Impressions and screenshots occur with total attention considering they have to hold their hands on their phone to see this. Plus, they are willing to leave the comfort of the app to visit an outside site. And we reward them for that. We pride ourselves on offering epic and exclusive experiences on this channel as a thank you and as an open and direct conversation with followers.
Kicking off our launch in July of 2014 we offered followers a chance to buy an exclusive deal for $4.20. The lucky purchaser was flown to Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado for tickets and meet and greet with Wiz Khalifa. We announced the landing page exclusively on Snapchat. That campaign garnered hundreds of followers, 7,000 snap impressions, 257 screen shots of posts and close to 1K message exchanges between users.
Since launch we've gained thousands of followers per week, have an average 93-98% story completion and have given away more than $25K in exclusive deals and prizes to fans for their engagement.
Groupon also partnered with both Sesame Street and Mashable in a recent campaign that gave people a behind-the-scenes look at Sesame Street HQ while also driving attention to their Autism awareness campaign. All parties worked together to share the combined story to their followers to create a powerful larger conversation. This campaign resulted in thousands of dollars in donation to Sesame Street's "Autism Speaks" initiative and sent four lucky people to tour Sesame Street to get a Muppet portrait drawn by one of their artists.
