Blog

Chick-fil-A app campaign analytics show just how big a win it was

July 22, 2016 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group

You can drive consumers to your app, but you can't necessarily make them download it. This has been the perpetual problem for restaurants that want their guests to be intimately linked to their brands via smartphones. 

As difficult as it may be to achieve, new research from Survey Monkey Intelligence shows it can be done, and according to its data, Chick-fil-A will serve as a shining example of that for the immediate future. Survey Monkey's number-crunchers said they looked at the data behind the Chick-fil-A brand's successful June campaign to document its success. The chain gave away free chicken sandwiches to anyone who downloaded and created an account on its app between June 1 and 11. And well, to put it briefly, it was a huge success.

Over one day, the brand's app went, from receiving an average of about 1,500 downloads daily to approximately 400,000 downloads per day on the campaign's launch date. In case you're calculating, that's a 26,566 percent increase.

As we reported, it made the little Chick-fil-A app the No. 1 downloaded app that day in the U.S. Of course, after the campaign closed on June 11, that rate dropped off dramatically, but Survey Monkey analysts said their data shows that it still remained higher than before. Combine that with the knowledge that overall the number of downloads works out to about one per every 100 Americans, and yes, you guessed it, everybody behind that campaign is probably getting a bonus this summer. 

Survey Monkey did a data analysis of the chain's campaign numbers compared to those for other QSR chains and the proof of its success is shown clearly in the adjacent graph comparing some of the top chains and their app adoption rates. 

And the crunchy coating on this chicken is …
The audience that Chick-fil-A ultimately hit with its free-food-for-a-download campaign makes the win look even better for the chain, according to Survey Monkey Intelligence data.

It found that the typical user is a 32-year-old woman with a high school degree whose household takes in about  $62,000 annually. This means the average Chick-fil-A app user is in a higher income bracket than the average McDonald's app user. Of course, it is also true, according to Survey Monkey Intelligence, that Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts app users still come out with a higher average annual income than those who use the Chick-fil-A app.

The lingering effect… 

Survey Monkey Intelligence went a little further to find out how long the effects of all those downloads would last by looking closely at the number for daily and monthly active use of the app. Those numbers showed that although a ton of people downloaded the chain's platform they didn't actually use it that much over the next few weeks. 

Survey Monkey said that although this might not have been the long-term goal of the folks at Chick-fil-A, it's still worth thinking about if considering such a campaign. Once they have people enrolled in the app, they can also activate other campaigns and send purchase incentives through new notifications and emails.

Overall, the campaign helped raise the chain to one of the top three slots among all QSR chains for app penetration, along with Starbuck's and McDonald’s. 

About S.A. Whitehead

---

Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.