Gifts and housewares cataloger Walter Drake hopes it comes up a winner in its deal with online gaming portal Bingo.com. In August, the Colorado Springs, CO-based mailer arranged for winners on the Bingo.com site to be able to exchange their Bingo Bucks prizes for coupons good for up to 15% off merchandise from Walter Drake’s core Website and its Home Marketplace sister site.
Walter Drake will pay Bingo.com an undisclosed percentage of the gross sales made by Bingo.com buyers. The Bingo.com site encourages users to play bingo, poker, and slot machine games for prizes. “We felt that with the older market we serve with our catalog — women over 65 — there would be a good match with online Bingo players,” says Barb Krystyn, Walter Drake’s director of e-commerce.
About 80% of participants on Bingo.com are women. They have an average income of $58,000 and a median age of 34, says Mark Devereux, Bingo.com’s vice president of corporate affairs. Walter Drake customers have an average income in the mid-$40,000s; the average income of The Home Marketplace customer is in the mid-$50,000s.
Bingo.com used to have its own online store where winners could redeem coupons they won for prizes. But Devereux says the store cost the Vancouver, BC-based company too much to manage. So the company closed it in June 2001, opting instead to work with catalog advertisers who’d handle product fulfillment. Walter Drake is its first catalog partner.
For Walter Drake’s part, “we’re always looking for any kind of pay-per-performance arrangement where we pay commissions only if we make a sale,” Krystyn says. The cataloger has for more than two years had Internet-based, pay-per-performance partnerships with Junction.com and Performics.com. “Both programs have gone very well” in bringing new prospects over to Drake’s sites, Krystyn says.
Bingo.com hopes to attract more catalogers to partner with. “Walter Drake sells only in North America, but we want to expand internationally,” Devereux says. “We’re looking for similar product lines to Walter Drake’s and The Home Marketplace’s to serve other markets, such as the United Kingdom and Australia. We also will look at other catalogers to fill orders in other niche markets, such as travel.”