Au Bon Pain, the casual dining chain, is ramping up its efforts to get consumers engaged and to sign up for its rewards programs through a series of social and mobile campaigns.

The brand is sending out email notifications as well as social posts encouraging users to engage on social media. The brand’s social streams also include encouragements and call-to-actions to join Au Bon Pain’s eClub rewards program.

Social campaigns
Au Bon Pain is leveraging the power of social media and viral content to get consumers to sign up for its eClub rewards program and to follow the brand on all of its social platforms.

To get customers to sign up for these two lines of connection, Au Bon Pain is relying on a mobile-optimized email campaign that sends out emails with vertically-oriented animated gifts and ecards that are meant to be viewed on a mobile device.

By nature of it being hosted on email, the campaign can be tied across multiple mobile and desktop devices.

Consumers can see the campaign on their smartphones, tablets or personal computers, bridging the gap between devices and ensuring that the largest number of customers possible be exposed to the campaign.

The content relies on a brightly-colored style with energetic animations that appeal to consumers and incentivize them to click and to follow and sign up for rewards.

A younger audience
This campaign serves two purposes. On the one hand, users who sign up for rewards programs will make more purchases and can be incentivized to come back to the store more often through deals, promotions and other personalized incentives.

On the social side, consumers who follow Au Bon Pain are more likely to keep the brand in mind when searching for a place to eat or make purchases. With that kind of brand awareness afforded by social posts, it is no surprise that Au Bon Pain is pushing as hard as it is to get consumers to follow and sign up.

Other brands have had significant success with social media incentives as a way of targeting younger audiences.

For example, The North Face recently launched a social video campaign called Question Madness that made use of video and social incentives to capture the attention of young, mobile-savvy consumers in urban areas such as New York city where North Face had just opened a flagship store (see story).

Au Bon Pain is banking on the same kind of appeal, bringing younger consumers into their content stream so that they can be retargeted and marketed to later.