Every business needs to know what their secret sauce is – or in this case what their ice-cream is. For popular American ice-cream franchise, Dairy Queen, they realised the trick to improving sales and customer service was their ice-cream.
Why be vanilla when you can be choc chip?
Using a hyper-customised email marketing campaign aimed at its Blizzard Fan Club members, Dairy Queen upped the ante by taking advantage of the fact that customers are more likely to socialise brand-related content when offered an attractive and clear-cut incentive.
Using their existing database, Diary Queen has targeted the approximately 2 000 members who call its customer service line each month with coupon related queries.
Dairy Queen initiated an email lookup system that helps the customer service team verify and track coupon distribution. From there, it has taken advantage of social sharing through a series of initiatives including ‘buy one, get one’ email offers.
Double scoop of personalisation
The content of each email is hyper-customised to the recipient by using relational tables that allow Dairy Queen to construct detailed profiles of each of its fan club members in the email database. To help the offer go viral during ice-cream weather, Dairy Queen has encouraged its members to recruit friends to join the club, a Share-to-Social feature enables members to share the ‘buy one, get one’ on Facebook.
The cherry on top
The results of the ‘buy one, get one’ coupon campaign has resulted in Dairy Queen’s fan club growing by nearly one million members in nine months, topping out at four million members in total. The added bonus was striking 22% higher than the initial goal.
Customer appreciation emails that followed the coupon drive also had positive results with a 37% open rate and 83% click-through rate to its website, driving the most visits in the history of DairyQueen.com.