Fazoli's Campaign Featuring Sweepstakes Drives Email Acquisitions, Engagement

Fazoli’s, an Italian chain restaurant with over two hundred locations, beat its monthly email engagement average in one campaign after partnering with Wyng to tap into consumer engagement. 

Fazoli’s ran a sweepstakes campaign this summer offering customers a chance to win either a trip to Italy or a year’s worth of free Fazoli’s Family Meals. The goal was to promote the restaurant’s new 100% natural menu and to acquire new email addresses. 

The campaign was the first application of Wyng’s Digital Campaign Index (DCI), a real-time scoring system to evaluate campaign success by measuring its engagement and virality. Fazoli’s utilized Wyng’s campaign measurement platform to help them build an email campaign and then optimize it against other campaigns in the industry.

Will Hanrahan, digital marketing manager at Fazoli’s, says the campaign was the most effective marketing or advertising campaign Fazoli’s has ever run.

The email campaign had a clear call to action and prize, and Fazoli’s added a layer of personalization by including links for consumers to share the campaign with their networks on Facebook, Twitter or email, along with a refer-a-friend component. Fazoli also incorporated a counter that kept track of how many consumers entered the contest using the personal link that someone shared.  

Fazoli’s had over 27,000 entries for the contest, a third of whom opted in to the restaurant’s email marketing lists. Of the 8,308 opt-ins, 6,172 were new members. Hanrahan says Fazoli’s acquires an average of about 5,000-6,000 new email addresses a month. He adds that the DCI gave him a good idea of how the campaign was working and what channels were most successful, helping him decide to spend more money on Twitter and Facebook ads.

He recommends that marketers utilize email and social “in tandem with each other.” 

Wyng’s summary feature, which enables users to export campaign highlights, makes it possible to view who referred friends to the sweepstakes and who the contest’s biggest advocates were. 

“They could be influencers in the future,” says Hanrahan.

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