This past week I had the thrill of being dad for the day. This is the once a year event where mommy goes to a retreat for one night and the four kids get treated to the way life would be if I were a 40-year-old full-time college student. The large decisions over this two-day span center around what type of fast food we will be eating. It is the running family joke, when mom goes away dad serves us Ding Dongs in a bowl covered with milk for breakfast. It’s like Candy Land with movies all weekend long.
Well of course it is not that extreme and this time we did in fact stay home and made meals and yes they were healthy. However I did tell the kids we could go out for something yet to be determined over the course of these two days.
Friday night after the kids were asleep I dove into the mail drawer to sort through the bills and direct mail. About halfway through was a direct mail booklet from Dairy Queen. I opened it up, as I do enjoy my DQ, and I found the holy grail of coupons. This thing was some 14 pages of gold. Two for one, $1.00 off, discounted sundaes, free cones, with about every product line covered. I was a happy man. That night I decided I was taking the family to DQ Saturday.
The direct mail did its job. It hit the right audience at the right time with the right offer and it got me and my four kids into their store to drop at least $20.00. The rest was up to them, I have written about ‘the client experience’ in previous blogs, they needed to make sure all went well once we walked through the door, and they did. The service was great, the food was great, the store was clean and the cashier was familiar with the coupon and how to use it, all was done very well. My kids were happy and I was happy to save $8.00 while earning one more nomination for dad of the year.
What struck me about this piece is how infrequent they have become. It seems to me that there is more of a push to online couponing and that is fine, but we need to keep in mind that the audience varies and the medium that they will respond to varies. We need to hit on all fronts.
In this example, if they would have sent me an email it probably would have gotten deleted without even opening. If it did manage to survive it would be gone after its first use. In the DQ case they used direct mail to stand out to me and then gave me a booklet of savings which is sitting on the kitchen counter to be used again and again over a four month life span.
Although they did a nice job on this campaign – they could have done better with a couple small steps.
I would have suggested that they add a url to the coupon book and integrate the campaign to the web. This allows them to provide another form of tracking and collect more information that can be used in their future marketing efforts as well as bring together their online and offline efforts.
Simply adding a url to the cover with an incentive of further savings by going to www.gpimage.com. Once they are there you can collect information on them such as an email address, birthdays, preferred store location, number of kids, etc. They could show them a list of possible store locations in their area they may not know. The key is to link their marketing efforts and get the most for their investment. Use it all and reach your prospects in the right place at the right time.
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Tags: Dairy Queen Coupons, Dairy Queen Promotion, Direct Mail, DQ Coupons, DQ Promotion, email, Marketing, Marketing Solutions, on-line, service
This entry was posted on March 20, 2011 at 5:49 PM and is filed under Industry Comment, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Want to go to Dairy Queen?
This past week I had the thrill of being dad for the day. This is the once a year event where mommy goes to a retreat for one night and the four kids get treated to the way life would be if I were a 40-year-old full-time college student. The large decisions over this two-day span center around what type of fast food we will be eating. It is the running family joke, when mom goes away dad serves us Ding Dongs in a bowl covered with milk for breakfast. It’s like Candy Land with movies all weekend long.
Well of course it is not that extreme and this time we did in fact stay home and made meals and yes they were healthy. However I did tell the kids we could go out for something yet to be determined over the course of these two days.
Friday night after the kids were asleep I dove into the mail drawer to sort through the bills and direct mail. About halfway through was a direct mail booklet from Dairy Queen. I opened it up, as I do enjoy my DQ, and I found the holy grail of coupons. This thing was some 14 pages of gold. Two for one, $1.00 off, discounted sundaes, free cones, with about every product line covered. I was a happy man. That night I decided I was taking the family to DQ Saturday.
The direct mail did its job. It hit the right audience at the right time with the right offer and it got me and my four kids into their store to drop at least $20.00. The rest was up to them, I have written about ‘the client experience’ in previous blogs, they needed to make sure all went well once we walked through the door, and they did. The service was great, the food was great, the store was clean and the cashier was familiar with the coupon and how to use it, all was done very well. My kids were happy and I was happy to save $8.00 while earning one more nomination for dad of the year.
What struck me about this piece is how infrequent they have become. It seems to me that there is more of a push to online couponing and that is fine, but we need to keep in mind that the audience varies and the medium that they will respond to varies. We need to hit on all fronts.
In this example, if they would have sent me an email it probably would have gotten deleted without even opening. If it did manage to survive it would be gone after its first use. In the DQ case they used direct mail to stand out to me and then gave me a booklet of savings which is sitting on the kitchen counter to be used again and again over a four month life span.
Although they did a nice job on this campaign – they could have done better with a couple small steps.
I would have suggested that they add a url to the coupon book and integrate the campaign to the web. This allows them to provide another form of tracking and collect more information that can be used in their future marketing efforts as well as bring together their online and offline efforts.
Simply adding a url to the cover with an incentive of further savings by going to www.gpimage.com. Once they are there you can collect information on them such as an email address, birthdays, preferred store location, number of kids, etc. They could show them a list of possible store locations in their area they may not know. The key is to link their marketing efforts and get the most for their investment. Use it all and reach your prospects in the right place at the right time.
Like this:
Tags: Dairy Queen Coupons, Dairy Queen Promotion, Direct Mail, DQ Coupons, DQ Promotion, email, Marketing, Marketing Solutions, on-line, service
This entry was posted on March 20, 2011 at 5:49 PM and is filed under Industry Comment, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.