DUKKY

Objective

Café Express, a Houston and Dallas based restaurant chain, recently expanded their menu to include pick-up and go breakfast items that are prepared using fresh ingredients.   Although the company already had a loyal following for their lunch and dinner menu, Café Express asked Dukky to help expand awareness of their AM Express breakfast offerings, particularly in Dallas where the company’s market share was not as strong.

Solution

To attract new customers, drive in-store visits and elicit brand feedback, Café Express was willing to offer 20K free breakfasts.   With Dukky, the offers were mailed in the form of a personalized gift card in the recipients’ name, which could be activated online through a personal activation site branded Café Express.  The activation site fed a real-time performance dashboard.

Results

Three weeks after the promotion launched, Café Express enjoyed 3,951 responses (17%) to their offer.   Using actual dashboard snapshots below, see the initial insights gleaned from the promotion:

After 20 days, 17% of mail recipients had visited the activation site. Of them, 80.8% activated their card. Of them, 16.7% shared the offer with an average of 3 friends. The most exciting number was 20% — that was the number of mail activations who shared the offer socially. Ultimately, the split between primary and secondary recipients was 60/40.

66% of secondary recipients who arrived at the site activated vs. 41% of primary recipients who arrived at the site. Translation:     Respondents alerted by a friend were more trusting/interested than those contacted directly by CE.

Facebook was by far the most popular sharing mechanism for CE customers (78%). But Email had the highest conversion of secondary activations (45% successful).

Looking at the poll responses, 36% of respondents had never eaten at Cafe’ Express prior to this promotion. The “Weekly” (46%) and “Monthly” (31%) dining frequency helped CE confirm internal (CLV) figures (without the expense of proprietary research, of course). And regardless of age, gender, geography and response mechanism, they preferred “breakfast sandwiches”. Go figure.