What Domino’s Knows About Lead Generation
Some think Domino's went off the deep end with their latest lead generation campaign. At first glance it seems insane to reward people for buying from their competition. But there's more than meets the eye.
Crazy offer
Using a crazy offer to get new people in the door is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it for years. But sometimes these promotions can be disastrous when people actually do read the fine print.
These promotions always remind me of the I love Lucy episode where the offer was “The best beans you've ever ate or double your money back!” Crazy offers can pay off. But you need to make sure you cover your bases.
Domino's Offer
Domino's will let people build up points for taking pictures of their pizza. Those points can build up to earn a free pizza. But here's where the offer gets crazy: It doesn't have to be Domino's pizza in the pictures! They'll accept the image as long as the app recognized as a pizza. So you could get a free Domino's pizza for sending them pictures of their competitor's pie!
Real World Promo Fails
Well, It's not just TV that has some outrageous examples of how a promotion can go wrong. There's real world promotional fails where people held companies to their word, down to the letter. Hoover's British division ran a promotion where buying at least £100 worth of their products got round trip tickets to a destination in Europe.
It would have been successful if they left well enough alone. But they found people weren't using the vouchers… Somebody got the idea, “If people aren't using the vouchers, we could get more sales if we sweeten the pot…” Then they opened the offer up to US destinations. In effect they gave away £600 of airline tickets for an outlay of just £100. You can easily see how that went awry fast.
Good intentions, bad results
Do you remember what kind of car Oprah gave away? Don't worry, nobody else does either. Why? Because Oprah wasn't giving it away. Pontiac set up the promotion for the G-6 model. But Oprah got all of the credit and publicity. Oops!
Lessons Learned
Domino's seems to have taken these past fails into consideration when they designed this promo. They took great measures to limit their exposure by limiting the number of points that could be earned for the week, how many can be earned by a single user, and the total points available for the 12 week promotion.
Unlike the Pontiac debacle, Domino's will be known as the benevolent pizza gifter. They're building up that goodwill with their new app holders, so they will benefit from the reciprocity that creates.
The Real Win
While a report from Deloitte says online orders have a 26% higher value per order than offline, that's only a very narrow view of what's going on here. What Domino's is aiming for is building their list. The more people they can reach out to again and again, the greater likelihood of getting the holy grail of business, more repeat customers.
When you have increased average order value, and a growing repeat customer base, the next step is dialing in increased order frequency. That's when you're getting Maximum Revenue Per Customer.
Rob Calhoun
Latest posts by Rob Calhoun (see all)
- Fresh Content: Updating Blog Posts Do's & Don'ts - January 23, 2020
- List Hygiene Gone Wild - July 1, 2019
- What Domino's Knows About Lead Generation - February 5, 2019
- Don’t Try To Bury Bad Customer Reviews - August 18, 2017
- More Important Than Money - November 3, 2016
