7-Eleven's Free Slurpee Day Wasn't a Big Hit...

7-Eleven has been giving away free Slurpees, the company's flagship drink, on July 11th for more than 20 years. In 2019 the chain started requiring downloading its app to get the drink, giving us visibility into how popular the campaign is.

In 2022, free Slurpees were very popular!

The first time 7-Eleven ran this campaign tied to its app, back in 2019, the company managed to get 120K new downloads. At the time, this was 7-Eleven's biggest day of downloads ever! Roughly 12x more than a normal day.

Covid came in 2020 and made visiting a store more difficult. The campaign's second year added just 53K new downloads from the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates. At the time, that was a 7x increase over the daily average and about 11x more than covid time.

2021 was very similar to 2020 but with 70K downloads. A bit higher but not by much.

2022 set a record! Downloads rose to 288K on 7/11, 2,780% higher than the daily average, and 7-Eleven's most successful campaign!

And now let's talk about 2023, which wasn't stellar.

Downloads rose 10x this Tuesday, the 11th, to 101K, and even though it isn't the lowest, considering 2020 and 2021 didn't see many people out and about, I'd say this number is the lowest to date.

Do people no longer care about Slurpees? Does everyone have the 7-Eleven app already? I don't think so x2.

It's all about promotion, and this year I didn't really see much of this campaign. It may seem like giving away free stuff will always bring in all the new users but that's obviously not enough anymore.

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