Esurance Awarded Its $1.5 Million Prize: What’s Next & Will The 200,000 New Twitter Followers Stay

It was a risky move waiting until the Super Bowl had ended to advertise the start of a giant $1.5 million Twitter sweepstakes, a risk exacerbated by the fact that the game was a rout. Fortunately for Esurance, it was immediately clear that its late play broke through the noise of the actual game-time advertisers. According to new stats from Leo Burnett, Esurance’s agency, there were more than 200,000 entries using the hashtag #Esurance30 within the first minute of the ad airing.

Since awarding the palette of cash to the lucky winner on Wednesday night’s The Jimmy Kimmel Show, the brand is now moving to capitalize on its bright exposure and explosive growth on Twitter.

The company went into the sweepstakes with just 8,900 Twitter followers. That number spiked 3,000 percent to peak at 261,000 followers. Social monitoring service Simply Measured shows Esurance gained more than 143,000 Twitter followers the day after the Super Bowl.

And the benefits spilled over from Twitter as well with 332,000 views of the Esurance commercial on YouTube, and Esurance.com had a 12x increase in visits in the first hours of the sweepstakes.

The Long Game Plan

The question now is how many of these new followers will stick around. Followers began dropping off yesterday, and currently the brand has just under 235,000 followers — off roughly 25,000 from that post-game peak of 261,000. Fall-off is to be expected from users who followed in sweepstakes frenzy, though, and the brand is already working to lure those that used the sweepstakes hashtag but didn’t follow the brand with tweets promising “more big opportunities” hinting at more big plays to come:

More often, Esurance has been sending a series of thank you Tweets to entrants with a “savings” pitch for the company’s insurance plans and a link to the Esurance homepage.

Whether these tweets will turn off users or keep the brand awareness alive and even convert some to customers, remains to be seen. These links are all tagged with with a promo ID for the “Win Big Tweet Community” and drop a 6-month cookie, so Esurance will be able to track and continue to market to their new Twitter visitors. Sadly the landing page is the just home page, with no special customization referencing Twitter or the sweepstakes.

The brand also appears to have laid the #EsuranceSave30 hashtag to rest. It wasn’t used in any of the brand’s tweets about the big reveal.

It will be interesting to watch how the brand manages its sudden Twitter growth spurt and whether it can hold onto its new-found glory, or if we’ll look back on this as Esurance’s Super Bowl glory days.  We’ll have to see what “big opportunities” it has in store.

Here’s the video of Esurance spokesman, John Krasisnki, and Jimmy Kimmel surprising the winner. For privacy reasons, Esurance says it isn’t revealing the golden tweet that won. But it was a single tweet that did it:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/mcVmasEVWDc[/youtube]