freebreakfastnow.com Lets Visitors Register And Receive A Coupon For A FREE Chick-fil-A® Chicken Biscuit

by Sol Shah
in Branding, Email Marketing, Ethical Business, Social Media Marketing
January 1, 2008

Chick-fil-A® have done it again by using a descriptive domain name to increase traffic to their promotion by capturing the attention of those who are looking for a free breakfast.

This is yet another promotion being run in the US by Chick-fil-A®, a fast food restaurant, where the visitor can register to be sent a coupon for a free Chick-fil-A® Chicken Biscuit in the mail.

When the site visitor goes to www.freebreakfastnow.com, they arrive at a landing page which asks them to click on an image to enter and register. When they click the ‘enter button’, the visitor gets taken to a form that asks them for their key details such as first and last name, email address, telephone number, full address, date of birth, and gender – and to top if off, they are ALL mandatory questions.

What the company gets from this is vital information about their target market – i.e. where they live, how old they are, what gender – as well as specific contact information so that further promotional material can be sent to them by post, by email, and over the phone.

Beneath these mandatory questions, there are the optional survey questions. Now HERE’s where they get really clever. They start by asking a couple of simple basic questions such as “Have you ever eaten at a Chick-fil-A® restaurant?” and “Have you ever eaten breakfast at Chick-fil-A®?”, which are most likely there to conceal the more sneakier items that follow…

Here come the subtle yet powerful marketing messages disguised as questions: “Please check which Chick-fil-A® Breakfast items you have tried:”. The page then allows the visitor to place a check mark next to any of the 5 items on the list that they may have tried for breakfast. Also, there’s the “Did you know Chick-fil-A® offers reloadable gift cards?” What this does is that even though these survey questions are optional, the visitor will still scan through them (even if they don’t answer) and even if they haven’t tried it, they will probably want to make a special trip into that fast food restaurant to have a taste of one of the other breakfast items, or even purchase a gift card.

Don’t you know, there’s no such thing as a free breakfast!?

In your business or community organisation, how can you model the promotional campaign that Chick-fil-A® have used to:

build your database of customers to directly promote to via email / post / telephone,
learn more about your target market, and
give your customers a subtle message about other products and services that are available?

What will be YOUR free breakfast?