Dairy Queen Fan Engagement Campaign

Challenge:

As a large corporation within many active states across the U.S, Dairy Queen faces a myriad of challenges. Developing and launching localized revenue-generating campaigns can be costly. In addition, maintaining consistent brand recognition across multiple locations throughout the U.S. can be difficult.

These challenges are compounded by the lack of localized data, untapped data silos – and, therefore, untapped insights – for the quick service restaurant (QSR) giant at an individual franchise operator level.

Objective:

Dairy Queen needed a new way to achieve stronger local brand recognition and engagement for individual franchise operators with the goal of growing its user base to enable localized and personalized marketing.

Dairy Queen needed to capture local data for franchise owners, conveniently centralize the data, remove data silos, and, in turn, gain a greater understanding into its customer demographics and personal preferences so as to refine the accuracy and effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

Strategy:

Using Velocity Worldwide’s data, personalization and insights platform, Darius® for Retail, Dairy Queen activated a pilot sweepstakes-led campaign to gather local customer data and insights for franchise operators in Texas.

Individual customers entered the sweepstake via a SMS short code or QR code displayed on in-store point of purchase (POP) and digital signage. The campaign was also promoted on each individual franchise operators Facebook page.

Centralizing campaign data within the Darius® platform eliminated data silos (and their associated disadvantages), thereby allowing for more thorough and valuable customer insights, used to shape future personalized marketing campaigns.

This data was then used to refine audience targeting and improve subsequent secondary campaigns through re-targeting.

Results:

Top-line Insights

Customer preferences:

• 98% are interested in receiving offers on Food
• 35% are interested in receiving offers on Cakes
• 55% are interested in receiving offers on Drinks
• 95% are interested in receiving offers on Treats

Customer visit frequency:

• 28% of customers visit more than once per week

Most popular coupon:

• 61% of customers selected Buy one, Get one free (BOGO) Medium Blizzard Treat as their coupon choice

Most visited restaurant:

• 21% of customer visit Grand Prairie Outlet’s Dairy Queen

Darius® for Retail’s strength lies in its ability to utilize a centralized marketing campaign hub to turn big data into local data, which can be refined and activated by Dairy Queen’s individual franchisees or regional marketing teams to created localized marketing content.

Through this customer engagement and discovery initiative, Dairy Queen has taken the first step in understanding their customers on a much wider, deeper and, more importantly, local scale. Building on and using this information through a ‘segmentation model’ made possible through Darius® will support Dairy Queen in analyzing and creating specific, localized and personalized customer-centric campaigns that appeal to their various types of customers.

What’s Next?

With the commercial and competitive benefits of the Dairy Queen/Darius® model now proven through the Texas project, we are now proceeding into the next phase of our ongoing partnership, in which we will continue to measure the effectiveness of Dairy Queen’s marketing by providing a seamless, real-time and personalized in-store experience through proximity based customer engagement (specifically, via guest Wi-Fi), and by integrating Darius® with advertising and in-store, Wi-Fi, digital kiosks, and point of sale (POS).

By integrating multiple data sources and using Darius® to activate regional and local campaigns, over time, Dairy Queen will gather rich and valuable customer insights at each location.

A connected customer journey, the growth in the number of restaurant visits, the increase in spend per visit and spend across individual categories is proving to Dairy Queen the clear commercial and customer experience benefit of allocating a small proportion of their marketing budget to unified data collection, segmentation and activation.