Brugal & Co. is a legendary rum company that produces some of the finest Caribbean rums in the Dominican Republic. Established in 1888, Brugal's founder Andres Brugal believed in pursuing “the best possible” in all things. This is the foundation and value upon which the brand has been built.
Brugal started as a family business, but with each and every generation Brugal has grown into an extended, international family. A family of experts committed to bringing out the very best and ensuring that the Brugal legacy continues.
In 2023, the company prepared to launch a new promotion campaign called "Promoción Baseball Brugal," a customer loyalty initiative designed to reward loyal customers by providing them with a chance to win one of three trips to Miami to see a major league baseball game. Customers could enter to win by purchasing a bottle of Brugal Rum and submitting proof of purchase along with their details on a competition landing page.
The challenge
Brugal was onboarded to HubSpot CRM recently, and the company sought to manage the entire campaign from within the HubSpot platform. Historically, these types of campaigns were managed manually, with form submissions being entered into spreadsheets or handled by disconnected tools. The Brugal marketing team would then sort through these submissions, pull out consumer details, and put them through a platform to select a winner randomly. They knew they wanted to take a more streamlined, integrated approach with this campaign, which was where Salted Stone's expertise was needed.
Our solutions
Salted Stone started the process by first understanding the needs of Brugal and what they hoped to achieve with this project, mapping out the details of their requirements for the competition and the campaign around it. Hubspot Solutions Strategist Micheal Peach lays out his approach, “Architecting a solution that was both effective for this specific use case, but also scalable to be used again in the future was the goal here. I spent a good amount of time testing different solutions including custom properties, a single custom object, and even marketing events, before finally settling on using two custom objects to facilitate the build.”
The team began by creating two custom objects in Brugal's HubSpot CRM instance, one for “purchases'' and the other for “entries,” enabling contest entries to be managed directly through their HubSpot account. Salted Stone created purchase object properties for the product(s) purchased, along with workflows that automatically created competition entries based on the quantity and type of products purchased.
Salted Stone then created a custom object list of competition entries. When Brugal was ready to select the first winner, Salted Stone generated a random list in Hubspot consisting of a single entry from the original list. The selected entry was then manually verified as valid by checking those entry details against the terms and conditions of the competition. Once verified, the contact attached to this entry was selected as the first winner and was then filtered out of the future lists used to select the second and third winners.
The solution allowed Brugal to track purchases and customer details, and winners could be easily selected. Micheal Peach highlights the value-add of this approach, explaining that “it enabled us to capture and store purchase data in the Purchases object, which will be really beneficial for future segmentation and remarketing, as well as providing us the core data schemas which we can re-use for capturing purchases from other sources in a consistent, scalable, and efficient manner moving forward.”
Salted Stone also provided guidance on the design and functionality of the landing page that visitors would use for the promotion. Customers were prompted to scan a QR code on their receipts that would take them to the landing page to fill out a form submission to enter into the competition.
The results
HubSpot Solutions Consultant Alana Mulligan boils it down simply, saying that “the goal was to create a seamless solution where the competition mechanics could run autonomously in the background, with Brugal only needing to briefly interact with the setup to pull their winner. And we were able to achieve this and delight the client.“
The campaign was a success, with a total of 820 form submissions, out of which 641 were unique. These submissions registered 1,341 purchases across the different bottles included in the promotion, resulting in 1,809 competition entries.
The email sent at the end of the campaign announcing the winners had an open rate of 77% and a click rate of 50%, driving important traffic to their Instagram profile.
Overall, the campaign was a major marketing win, attracting more customers and generating deeper engagement with the Brugal brand.
