RACQ’s Pet Competition Generates UGC and Quality Leads

The Royal Automobile Club of Queensland Limited (RACQ) is best known for providing its over 1.6 million members with motor and home insurance as well as roadside assistance. However, they’re less known for insuring people’s four-legged friends.

To reach, engage and inform audiences about their new pet insurance offering, RACQ decided to host a social competition.

“We wanted to use user-generated content to get the word out about our pet insurance,” said Sarah Bowman, RACQ’s Digital and Direct Marketing Specialist. “People are very passionate about their pets, so we decided to run a pet search competition encouraging Queenlanders to enter a photo or video of their cat or dog.”

While this was a fun and exciting idea for a marketing campaign, RACQ needed to collect detailed contact information for all the contest participants – which isn’t easy to do on social networks. “Since lead generation was our main goal,” Sarah said, “we needed a way to not only host the competition, but also capture the entries.”

They realized they would need a user-generated content (UGC) platform in order for the competition to be successful, and quickly decided that Stackla was the best platform to help run this contest while also enabling them to capture the leads generated from it.

RACQ quickly had Stackla in place and their goals set:

• Increase awareness of their pet insurance product
• Engage online audiences
• Generate 5,000 leads

The Pet Search Competition

In the entry phase of their month-long competition, RACQ encouraged people to share the best photos or videos of their pets via the Stackla GoConnect form on their competition webpage, offering the winner a $5,000 gift card and the runners up $500 gift cards. With the GoConnect form connected to their backend systems and customized with their specific competition and lead generation fields, people could easily submit their best pet photos and RACQ could seamlessly collect and track contest leads.

To promote the competition, RACQ launched a paid and organic social media campaign, supplemented by radio ads, a feature in their The Road Ahead magazine and Stackla-powered digital out of home (DOOH) ads highlighting the UGC images people were submitting in real time.

“There was a lot of engagement in all of our organic and paid social posts – more than our usual posts,” Sarah commented.

“We also had a tag set up in Stackla so that any image we wanted to promote on the digital billboards, we just added that tag to it and it would automatically feed right through to the billboards.”

[clickToTweet tweet=”RACQ saw “A lot of engagement–more than our usual posts’ by using UGC in their organic & paid social” quote=”RACQ saw “A lot of engagement–more than our usual posts’ by using UGC in their organic & paid social”]

Throughout the contest, they also used Stackla to display all the incoming photo submissions on the competition landing page as social proof to engage and encourage others to enter.

Once the contest was closed, RACQ had a panel of judges go through the entries and select the top 12 pet photos. “From cute to quirky, our judges just selected whichever photos they liked best for the top 12; there wasn’t a specific criteria,” Sarah said.

Those 12 photos were then open for the public to vote on to decide the ultimate winner. The public chose Leo the Tabby cat as the winner, awarding his owner the $5,000 gift card prize and landing Leo on the cover of RACQ’s The Road Ahead magazine. But the other top 11 pets didn’t walk away empty handed.

Each of the runners up received a $500 gift card and RACQ invited all of the top 12 in for a professional photoshoot, which they turned into a calendar that will soon be available for sale.

Personalizing Emails With UGC

As part of their winner announcement, RACQ followed up with all the entrants who opted-in to receive marketing communications by sending a personalized email, complete with the image they had submitted of their beloved pet.

“Since we had the image, the owner’s name and the pet’s name as well as the pet’s breed and age, we were able to take all that data from the GoConnect form and send a personalized pet insurance quote to all those leads.”

Surprisingly, Sarah said, “We even got a few emails back from the contest entrants saying ‘It’s so nice to see my dog in this email!’”

RACQ is also now able to have ongoing campaigns to connect with these contest entrants because of the personal information Stackla enabled them to collect. “We have their pet’s birthday information, so now we can send each of them a special offer on their pet’s birthday every year.”

The Results

Since people could submit as many photos or videos as they wanted, RACQ’s contest generated over 31,500 entries, 22,700 of which were unique entries. And the voting phase of their competition generated 33,000 votes from the public.

“Our initial goal was to get 5,000 entries and we ended up with over 31,500 entries – far surpassing our goals.” That’s 630 percent over their campaign goal! “Needless to say, everyone was quite happy with the outcome,” Sarah said.

[clickToTweet tweet=”RACQ’s #UGC pet competition generated over 22,700 marketing leads–exceeding their goals by 630%!” quote=”RACQ’s UGC pet competition generated over 22,700 marketing leads–exceeding their goals by 630%!”]

Since it was written into the terms and conditions of the competition, RACQ is now able to leverage that authentic content throughout their marketing promotions. “Going forward,” Sarah said, “we’ll be able to use some of the great UGC we got from this competition for our pet insurance product ads and social media outreach.”

By featuring personalized UGC in their follow-up marketing emails, RACQ was also able to far surpass their email performance goals. “We generally aim for an open rate of 30 percent and a click-through rate of 15 percent with our emails. The personalized UGC emails we sent following this campaign received open rates of 46 percent and click-through rates of 45 percent, performing significantly better than our typical lead nurture emails.”

[clickToTweet tweet=”#RACQ achieved 45% email CTRs by personalizing their marketing emails with UGC” quote=”RACQ achieved 45% email CTRs by personalizing their marketing emails with UGC”]

In the future, RACQ plans on running more competitions – particularly for their car insurance products.

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(Featured image credit to Clemenger BBDO)