Harvester Restaurants’ couponing success

I missed this case study first time around, but since I seem to be thinking a lot about mobile and retail at the moment, I thought it worth sharing.

Harvester is a chain of family-friendly restaurants with 200 outlets across the UK. They’re open seven days a week and offer grills, sauces and sides, as well as a brunch menu and vegetarian options at very competitive prices. I haven’t been to Harvester restaurant in almost 30 years, so I can’t comment on the quality of the food but I have friends who enjoy it.

To attract new customers and to build repeat business, they rely on regular offers and you’ll see their website shows the latest offers and the latest menus. When the Apple Passbook arrived on the scene, mobile advertising firm, Millennial Media, teamed up with mobile couponing firm, Eagle Eye, to create a campaign to drive customers to store.

According to Gavin Stirrat, MD EMEA for Millennial Media, they served display adverts to iPhone 5 users and those who had upgraded to iOS 6, with a skew towards families. When you clicked the banner, you reached a landing page communicating the offer - £5 off when you spend £30 or more -  and the call-to-action to add this to your Passbook. Eagle Eye then pushed the individually coded coupon to their smartphone. No additional customer details were required making the process as seamless as possible.

Once the voucher was loaded into Passbook, you could redeem the voucher in the restaurant via the restaurant’s existing Chip & Pin terminal. In this way, it was possible to measure redemption rates and ROI. The campaign ran for two weeks and in that time, 16,000 vouchers were issued and around 700 were redeemed offering a 4.4% redemption rate. As the offer was for a minimum spend of £30, it drove at least £21,000 in revenue. And remember, this was just marketed to a subset of iOS customers who had iPhone 5 or iOS 6 so they had the improved Passbook functionality.

It seems that even iPhone 5 customers like a bargain…

More on Millennial Media’s site here and here. Press release on Eagle Eye’s site here.

Further reading on how digital can drive customer engagement, footfall and loyalty in the High Street from Eagle Eye’s Andy Smith in British Retail Consortium’s Winter 2012 publication. (It’s one of those magazine reader thingies so it won’t work on a tiny mobile screen).