Retail chain Shoppers Stop, with their tagline ‘Start Something New’ have embraced social media enthusiastically, and have come up with a variety of ways to attract and engage  with customers via digital.

Earlier this week, they held a Twitter contest which invited people to tweet with the hashtag #sstweetstore to win a variety of different prizes. The USP of this contest was the specially created micro-site which displayed a real-time Tweet Counter. Each tweet was assigned a serial number, and prizes were announced for the 500th and the 800th, and different numbered tweets. The micro-site would show the prize on offer, and the counter showed how many tweets were left to reach the winning number.

The response received was prolific – in less than 30 hours it garnered over 22500 tweets. Speaking about the initiative, Mr. Vinay Bhatia, Customer Care Associate and Senior Vice President – Marketing and Loyalty, Shoppers Stop Ltd. said:

“We are proud to be among the first retailers in India to recognize the potential of social media and leverage it. It gives us immense pleasure to have hit yet another milestone with our ‘sstweetstore’ initiative. While the numbers speak for themselves, the true gauge of our success is the level of customer engagement this medium has allowed us. It gives us an opportunity to enjoy real-time dialogues with an engaged community.”

Shoppers Stop have inculcated several elements of digital into their marketing strategy. They have Apple, Android and BlackBerry apps as part of their ‘First Citizen’ loyalty progammes, so the customers don’t need to carry and swipe a card while making purchases.

They announced their end-of-season sale in January this year with the help of a newspaper advertisement with an augmented reality app. The ad featured a code to download the app, which when pointed at the newspaper ad, then showed several special offers and discounts. The ad can be seen here: