Eagle Boys March minute madness: The results
Last week we reported on a new promotion being run by Eagle Boys. Following on from the end of that promotion, we sat down with Eagle Boys Kate Pettiford, to see how it went and what lessons had been learnt.
QSR: How did the campaign go?
Kate: Mad Minutes ran for five days and as a first for Eagle Boys, and the first promotion of its kind to be executed by an Australian QSR, it was a great opportunity to launch a concept which had such value in engaging existing and new customers, while giving us lots to talk about through EDMs, PR and via social media.
The Mad Minutes campaign’s purpose was to encourage more people to become part of the Eagle Boys family while further enhancing our culture where our customers love to hear from us and know our EDMs will always include something special. We achieved this not only through an increase of orders, subscribers and EDM opening rate, but also the increased engagement with customers via social media.
This digitally focused campaign was launched to determine the viability of this kind of promotion and now that it’s finished, we’re discussing what we can do to make this even bigger and better for next time.
QSR: What type of deals were released?
Kate: Our Mad Minutes deals were insane, enticing, and with the redemption time varying between 29 and 90 minutes, the campaign’s mechanics proved a fun way to order pizza. It was almost a game as customers raced against the clock to order their delicious meals for their friends or families. People were glued to Eagle Boys’ Facebook page or checking their emails for the first glimpse of the daily insane deals.
The campaign kicked off on the Wednesday with one BBQ Meat Lover’s pizza, one Garlic Bread and one 1.25L drink for $6. Thursday’s deal was pizzas from the EB’s Classics pizza range for $3, with the Friday feast, three pizzas, two Garlic Breads and one 1.25L drink for $20. The weekend’s deals were deliciously tempting and included one Cheese Lover’s pizza and one Cheesy Garlic Bread for $4 and Sunday was one delicious Hawaiian pizza, one Dessert Thingie and one 1.25L drink, all for $5.
The most popular deal was Thursday’s offer of EB’s Classics pizzas just $3 and customers could order as many pizzas as they needed. We had great comments back that it was such a treat for the family and a sporting team within a store community decided to have their end of season party on Thursday, just because of the awesome deal of unlimited pizzas.
QSR: How did you prepare your outlets to deal with the promotion?
Kate: We communicated the promotion to our franchisees well in advance of the promotion beginning on March 12. We advised the ingredients they should consider ordering, plus the extra pizza boxes they would need for the duration of the campaign.
QSR: Has anything surprised you with the campaign?
Kate: We were amazed by the level of community engagement, particularly through social media. We were also delighted to see this enthusiasm spread to not only our franchisees, but also to our internal stakeholders and partners.
QSR: What did your IT preparations involve?
Kate: As you can appreciate, with this being an online promotion, and the first time anything like this had been tried in the Australian QSR industry, our IT team had technical challenges to overcome, but our IT department worked tirelessly to ensure that the E-Commerce system could successfully support the expected and sudden traffic the campaign drove to the website.
Eagle Boys IT Manager Darryn Parker said: “The platform was more than capable of facilitating the high number of new and returning customers, some ordering from our website for the first time. We’re all proud to say that the vast majority of orders were placed with the customer’s local store within minutes of the ordering process beginning, much faster than any of our competitors.”
