McDonald's Restaurants is so impressed by its New Zealand-developed text message campaign that it is using it as a case study internationally.
The text messaging campaign, which recently concluded, was developed by Auckland-based digital marketing solutions provider Touchpoint.
The campaign will be presented to McDonald's operations around the world as an example of how to run a new technology campaign successfully.
It involved both Telecom and Vodafone customers, ran for five weeks and clocked up over 1.5 million entries with one in five entries winning a prize. Anyone who purchased a combo pack at McDonald's was given a scratch card with a code that would then be text messaged to McDonald's via Touchpoint. This led to a large number of entries being received in a relatively short amount of time.
"People don't tend to buy food 24 hours a day so there were huge amounts of traffic at meal times," Touchpoint managing director Steve Shearman says.
Touchpoint recorded up to 50,000 entries being processed a day during the promotion.
"From the consumer's point of view it was so easy to participate in - you could redeem them on the spot or for larger prizes you got them posted out to you."
McDonald's marketing manager Jason Paris says although the company has run similar promotions in the past, this one stood out as working particularly well.
"This is the first time McDonald's has done something at this level with SMS and obviously we're keen to do it again. It was very successful."
McDonald's took the opportunity to build an opt-in database of customers who would like to be contacted again in future, and Paris says that will be invaluable in future campaigns.
"It was a bit of a leap of faith in many respects but it went very well. We wanted to achieve three things - drive incremental combo sales, appeal to a younger audience and drive the opt-in database and all three exceeded our expectations."