“EKO Racing 100” Case Study

Brief

• EKO, a subsidiary of Hellenic Petroleum group, one of the largest energy groups in South East Europe and a leading Greek company in the oil sector, with over 270 gas stations, launched in April, its second consecutive "EKO racing 100 contest", that lets customers win huge prizes with every purchase of EKO premium fuel “Racing 100”.

• EKO aim was to increase sales of its premium fuel, taking advantage of the spring break holiday seasonality, when it’s the time of the year people travel a lot by car.

• In 2018, a single channel EKO racing 100 contest has been organized, based on a microsite where users uploaded a photo of their receipt with Racing 100 fuel. Participants, got rewarded with one participation in a lucky draw, regardless of the amount of their purchase. This year, EKO had already launched a new mobile application and required for the contest to be mobile first.

Challenges

The main challenge was to create a contest that would be simple to participate, connected to offline purchases of the specific premium fuel EKO Racing 100, from 520 different gas stations!  From a technical view, the implementation of the contest was particularly demanding and difficult because:

• There are dozens of different ERP systems (almost east gas station had a different one), thus technical integration was not possible.

• There were many different formats of purchase – more than 50. Thus, the difficulty in this case was to create an algorithm that recognized all different cases of receipt formats.

• One more challenge was fraud participations prevention – each purchase had to be used only once.

Insight

Keeping business objectives and digital transformation best practices in mind, Warply mapped a rigorous business plan encompassing both the establishment of an effective digital presence and the strategic implementation of the EKO App.

Under this brief and those challenges in mind, Warply designed proposed and created “EKO Racing 100”, omni-channel contest campaign that was launched early April 2019 and will be completed by 9th of June 2019. Users can enter EKO App or Website contest and upload their purchase receipt in order to win FLAGS (reward points). When a receipt is identified as unique and has fulfilled the validation criteria, FLAGS are rewarded to the user, respective to the receipts amount.

Users can redeem their FLAGS either from the EKO App or the Website and use them to declare their participation in the contest, in accordance to their prize preference they wish to win. The more FLAGS redeemed on a specific prize, the greater the possibilities in winning their preferred prize!

Warply’s Software Engineers implemented this highly demanding omni-channel contest campaign “EKO Racing 100”, ensuring high performance and optimal integration with multiple systems:

• The scanning mechanism, is based on technical pioneering Deep Learning (DL) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. It can scan at least 50 different formats of receipts at once, out of approximately 520 ΕΚΟ fuel retail stations which are participating in the contest.

• Users who upload a receipt through the EKO app earn triple FLAGs and are also rewarded extra FLAGs by performing their weekly login and Facebook share in the application.

• Warply team managed to overcome the problem of text extraction, as it constructed an AI algorithm. Initially before the text is extracted, each receipt undergoes a process (Gaussian smoothing, Blurring etc.) followed by an Edge Detection Algorithm, that helps isolate the receipt from the background of the photo. Using these techniques, we have been able to make the AI mechanism work successfully both in horizontal and vertical photographs.

As part, of this partnership, EKO’s App is connected to Warply Engage, which makes EKO’s core business more effective and efficient by offering the following services:

• Push Notifications

• Newsletter Campaign

• Geofence Mobile Campaign

• Marketing Automations

These innovative features are offered via a single CRM platform, uniting all users’ reaching points - desktop, mobile and tablet. These new services establish Warply Engage, as one of the most innovative and integrated omni-channel marketing automation platforms worldwide. Warply Engage offers EKO’s company the opportunity to build a robust mobile strategy, empowering them to put their finger on the pulse of their customers by connecting with their customer base in the most relevant and effectively.