Free Pizza For a Year Contest flies off-the-chart
Company: Washington Post Company
Key executive: Tim Condon, Director of New Ventures, Digital
Technology partner: Second Street Media
Contest: Free Large Pizza and enter to Win Pizza for a Year
Challenge: Papa Johns wanted to build an e-mail list and drive online ordering of pizza at 111 D.C. area locations. The Washington Post Company, on the other hand, needed to drive email list growth for The Capitol Deal, it's daily deal program that replaced it's partnership with Living Social. (Note The Capitol Deal morphed in the spring of 2011 from The Capitol Dish, case study here, a restaurant-only vertical deal program. Condon says "consumers wanted more variety.")
A late starter in a highly competitive market, The Capitol Deal has much to offer that other daily deals cannot, even though Papa Johns typically runs all kinds of deal partnerships.
“We had the assets of the newspaper and online to put together a promotion, so that Papa John’s would get a ton of promotional value.”
Strategy: The Washington Post and Papa John's decided to partner on a “Free Large Pizza” promotion and contest, asking people to use the contest platform to sign up for a free pizza and automatically “Enter to Win Free Pizza for a Year.” The media company delivered the promotions, and Papa John's delivered the pizza. With a little finesse, both captured the e-mails.
The free pizza required online sign-up, and could be delivered for free or picked-up, but not ordered over the phone - hence training people to order online. A large map of the 111 locations was provided on the promotional page, to help contestants identify the closest one in advance.
The "Free Pizza" contest was set up as a deal, ie people registered as if they were buying a gift certficate, however, no payment was required. Condon says the Post scrubbed the list of out-of-area participants who were excluded according to the contest rules (see the attachment below this article for the contest's actual verbage, and restrictions).
The logistics are a little tricky: Papa John's on its own generated individual promo codes for thousands of people who registered, and delivered them in Excel format back to the Post, which merged these into its email list, to send promo codes to participants the day after the contest closed. So entrants on a Tuesday were able to order Friday (clearly spelled out in the description) and the double registration allowed Papa John's so also capture contact information - including e-mails, something most daily deals cannot do. All the contestants were also registered to win the free pizza for a year. (Note, Condon says that Second Street Media, provider of the deal platforms, also participated heavily to make the contest work, and gave a strong recommendation for them).
To promote the contest, the Washington Post leveraged all of their considerable assets, including :
*Printing a half-page wrap around the newspaper
*Promoting the contest to the general email list (see explanation of types of email lists here)
*Posting to their own followers on Facebook and Twitter
*Testing Facebook and Google AdWords campaigns (these did well, Condon says)
*Incorporating a Facebook contest: "If you share the contest with your friends, you get an extra entry in the contest for each friend on your list who comes in and gets a free pizza." This part was created on a new option from Second Street Media called Social Boost.
While Condon says Second Street predicted as many as a 100,000 registrants, while estimates from his staff were as low as 10,000, and most predictions were in the 30,000 to 50,000 range.
“Predictions were all over the map, we really didn’t know.” So when the contest went live on a Tuesday morning and by 11:40 a.m., 35,000 people had registered,
“That’s when we knew it was going crazy.”
Results: By the time the contest finished on Thursday, three days later, the final tally totaled 122,244 entries - or about 1000 pizza's per store. “How smoothly the execution goes is a big project.” Condon says they "talked their way through" the huge response with Papa John's.
The promotion also generated the largest single increase in e-mail opt-ins names for the Washingto Post; 60% of the participants were new. To give some perspective, the Washington Post had 800,0000 people on its general email list and 80,000 on its opt-in list in February, 2011. Condon will only say the increase in opt-ins from the contest is "a significant percentage." (For full discussion of the importance of the difference between general and opt-in lists for generating deal revenues, click here, How to Grow a Huge E-mail list.)
Lessons learned
Like many of Groupon’s major successes a “Monster Deal” is not without stresses on merchant. Even though Papa John’s understood the possibility of a huge result, gearing up to deliver 100,000 pizzas on short notice has got to be one for the history books. Here’s Condon’s lessons learned:
1. "We only needed to do it for one day. It ws 97,000 after one day, so we didn’t need a three day contest.” He also notes, “If we had to do it again, we’d cap it.”
2. “Make sure that you are tightly coordinated with the partner, that they are prepared for thee best case scenario, pizza had to buy on line, and its delivered.
3. Social Boost works, at one point, 23% of orders came through shared links.
4. Finally, and we think importantly, companies with online stores have huge potential for daily deals for two reasons: a. the merchants capture the e-mail via promo codes and are thus incented to offer more, and b. non-food online stores do not require multiple physical locations.
Many thanks to Second Street Media for sharing this success, and to Tim Condon, Director New for elucidating how it worked so our members can learn from this project.
Keywords
condon, papa john's, group deals, contests, washington post
