Implementing share-to-social features to its email program helped Dairy Queen increase coupon redemptions and grow its Blizzard Fan Club database by nearly 1 million new members, to over 3.8 million members.
A primary marketing goal for American Dairy Queen Corp. is driving store traffic to the 5,000 Dairy Queen locations in the U.S. and Canada, says Kristin Olson, account director for DQ at its agency Space150, which worked with Silverpop to implement enhanced share-to-social features.
In the past, Dairy Queen had used email primarily to do monthly mailings to Blizzard Fan Club members, offering news about national promotions for things like gift cards or ice cream cakes, or seasonal promotions, says Olson. Emails were also sent to mark occasions, such as a member's birthday or the anniversary of when a member joined the club.
Working with Silverpop gave Dairy Queen the flexibility to do more one-off promotions, allowing Space150 to integrate the email efforts more with the overall media mix. Franchises are offered the opportunity to opt-in to whichever promotions work for their restaurants; about 100 participate in a typical email promotion.
As an incentive to get existing fan club members to share the promotions with their friends, DQ ran a contest last summer offering free Blizzards for a year to the member who got the most friends to sign up during a summer buy one/get one free promotion. "Share to social was an awesome way to encourage fan club sign-ups," Olson says.
Dairy Queen looks at various metrics to gauge the success of the promotions, including open and clickthrough rates, as well as engagement metrics such as how many people shared the promotion to their Facebook walls. "And of course, when there is a coupon element, the number of coupons printed is important," Olson notes.
"Marketers should think about taking one or two emails in their monthly marketing stream and redesigning them from the ground up to be sharable, to help drive their store traffic, or grow their database, or whatever," says Loren McDonald, vice president of Silverpop. "The key is to do it correctly—you can't be lazy. There needs to be a value proposition, something inherently shareable for the consumer."
Other retailers like Frederick's of Hollywood also use email to drive store traffic.
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