The Company
American Dairy Queen Corporation (ADQ), founded in 1962 and based in Minneapolis, Minn., franchises quick service restaurants specializing in frozen treats in the United States. ADQ operates as a subsidiary of International Dairy Queen, Inc.

The Challenge
ADQ was looking for a new email service provider that could help it better target its subscribers and grow its Blizzard® Fan Club (then 2.8 million members) in a short period of time through relevant offers and excellent customer service.

ADQ also faced the challenge of how to best handle the up to 2,000 fan club members calling its support center monthly with coupon-related questions. It needed a way to give its consumer relations team access to confirmation information about its Blizzard Fan Club membership and customers who may have deleted emails containing coupons, without giving the consumer relations team direct access to its email marketing platform.

The Solution
After a competitive selection process, ADQ chose Silverpop Engage. “We were really impressed with the user interface, and we saw a lot of value in both the social and landing page features,” said Jamie Guse, ADQ senior manager, digital marketing & social media.

Once the whitelisting process was complete, Guse worked closely with ADQ's digital marketing agency, space150, to begin creating campaigns that would help grow the Dairy Queen® Blizzard Fan Club, gather data about new members and ultimately drive fan club members into the 5,000-plus Dairy Queen locations in the United States and Canada. A few successful examples include:

• Customer Appreciation Day: The goal of this campaign was to drive traffic into Dairy Queen restaurants in January, a month that typically experiences lower traffic. This email campaign was optional for all Dairy Queen franchises, and each franchise could choose one of three potential BOGO email offers. Fan club members would receive a coupon for the store they specified that was the closest to their home during sign-up. Silverpop’s Dynamic Content functionality was used to personalize the store in the email, and relational tables were used to populate one of the three potential offers.
• Summer BOGO series: This campaign was designed to increase the number of coupon prints via email to Blizzard Fan Club members by 300,000 and increase the number of fan club members overall by 300,000. In the campaign, Dairy Queen strongly encouraged fan club members to recruit other new fan club members. To help make their offer viral, Dairy Queen offered members signing up for the Blizzard Fan Club the option of posting a BOGO offer to their personal Facebook page, using Silverpop’s Share-to-Social feature.

In addition, ADQ worked closely with Silverpop’s Professional Services team to solve its customer service challenge by building an external page that would allow the consumer relations team members to look up an email address, verify if the caller received a coupon email via Silverpop Engage, and resend the email with a new coupon code if necessary. One of the major requirements was integrating Silverpop Engage with ADQ’s couponing partner to make the process seamless to customers.

The Results
The Dairy Queen system has grown its fan club by almost 1 million members in the nine months since implementing Silverpop Engage. Its Customer Appreciation campaign was a huge success, with a 37 percent open rate and 83 percent click-through rate, which led to overwhelmingly positive results in terms of traffic into its stores.

The Summer BOGO campaign was also an enormous success, with Dairy Queen exceeding coupon prints by 37 percent and fan club membership by 22 percent over the initial goals. The month in which the campaign took place was also the highest trafficked month in DQ.com history.

“We are very happy with the results of our recent campaigns,” said Guse. “It’s clear that targeting and relevant offers are key factors in the 30 percent growth of our Blizzard Fan Club in less than nine months.”

The coupon partner integration was also a huge success. “Allowing our consumer relations team to access information in Silverpop Engage is a huge time saver that has helped us maintain customer satisfaction with the up to 2,000 loyalty club members calling into our consumer relations team every month,” said Guse.

Download the PDF to learn how Dairy Queen grew its fan club by almost 1 million new members.