Andy’s Frozen Custard: Building Neighborhood Awareness Across Texas

When a regional restaurant chain expands aggressively into new markets, the question isn’t “should we run flyer distribution?” — it’s “how do we run flyer distribution at scale across multiple cities, without losing the per-market focus that makes flyers work?”

Andy’s Frozen Custard, a regional restaurant chain with a strong Texas footprint, partnered with Direct to Door Marketing (DTD) across multiple Texas locations as the brand expanded. The result was a sustained, multi-campaign relationship that taught both teams how to scale physical-media marketing across a multi-city restaurant network without sacrificing the neighborhood-level precision that makes door-to-door distribution effective.

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The Challenge

Restaurant grand openings and ongoing-awareness campaigns face a specific challenge: the buyer pool is geographically narrow (people who live within a reasonable drive of the location), but the awareness window is critical (the first six months after a new location opens disproportionately shape long-term sales).

For Andy’s Frozen Custard, this meant:

• Every new Texas location needed a coordinated awareness push at and around the grand opening window
• Existing locations needed periodic reinforcement to capture new movers and re-engage lapsed customers
• The creative had to be brand-consistent across markets but tactically tuned to each neighborhood’s demographics
• The execution had to scale — Andy’s was opening enough Texas locations that running each campaign as a one-off would have been operationally unmanageable

The previous approach — handling marketing on a market-by-market basis with different local vendors per city — created consistency problems, accountability gaps, and operational overhead that scaled poorly as the chain grew.

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What DTD Did

DTD’s approach for Andy’s Frozen Custard centered on three structural decisions:

1. Single-vendor, multi-market coverage

DTD’s nationwide network of local distributors meant Andy’s could run a coordinated multi-city campaign with a single partner instead of stitching together five different vendors across Austin, Cedar Park, College Station, Pflugerville, and Waco. The Andy’s marketing team specified the targeting parameters; DTD handled the operational coordination across markets.

2. Targeted polygon mapping per location

For each location, DTD used its custom campaign planner to define the target area around the restaurant — typically a multi-mile radius adjusted for actual neighborhood density and demographic alignment. The polygon-drawing tool let Andy’s team see the exact house count in the target area before committing to the campaign size, removing the back-and-forth that typically accompanies “estimated reach” conversations with traditional flyer vendors.

3. Premium print stock for brand consistency

Andy’s Frozen Custard is a brand-conscious operation. The door hangers were printed on 100# gloss cover — the premium-weight stock that holds up to weather, handling, and the doorknob environment without tearing or fading. The piece in the customer’s hand carried the same brand quality as the in-store experience.

Each campaign followed the same structural workflow:

• Target area defined via DTD’s campaign planner
• Creative supplied by Andy’s marketing team
• Print run executed at DTD’s standard quality
• Local distributors deployed to walk the routes
• Proof of Delivery photos delivered at campaign completion

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The Field Operation

Local distributor recruitment is the difference between a flyer campaign that gets delivered and a flyer campaign that gets delivered well. For Andy’s Frozen Custard, DTD’s distributor network for the Texas markets included people who lived in or near the target neighborhoods — people who knew the streets, the cul-de-sacs, and the specific houses.

A field supervisor was on the ground in each market during the active distribution window. The supervisor’s role: verify that pieces were going to the right neighborhoods, audit placement quality (door hangers on the doorknob, not in the wrong position), and confirm coverage was complete before signing off on Proof of Delivery.

Photo verification was captured during the campaign. At completion, the Proof of Delivery report — photos plus field supervisor sign-off — went to Andy’s marketing team as the closing artifact of each campaign.

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The Result

Andy’s Frozen Custard returned to DTD across multiple campaigns as the chain expanded. Six confirmed WON campaigns landed across Austin, Cedar Park, College Station, Pflugerville, and Waco. The pattern that developed:

• Each campaign refined the playbook from the prior one. Targeting parameters that worked in one market got applied (with adjustments) to the next. Creative iterations stayed brand-consistent but tactically tuned.
• Distribution windows became predictable. Once the first few campaigns established a working timeline, subsequent campaigns ran on a confident schedule — no surprises, no scrambling.
• The DTD-Andy’s working relationship became operational, not transactional. The Andy’s team knew what to expect from DTD, and DTD knew what Andy’s needed. Friction got designed out of the process.

We’re not publishing the specific response rates, location-level sales lift figures, or campaign-level ROI numbers from the Andy’s relationship. Those belong to Andy’s, and our standing policy is qualitative reporting only on public case studies. What’s public is the campaign volume, the markets covered, and the fact of a sustained multi-campaign customer relationship — which, in our experience, is the most reliable indicator that flyer distribution is producing real results.

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What Other Multi-Location Brands Can Take From This

Three lessons surface from the Andy’s Frozen Custard campaign history that apply to other multi-location and multi-market brands considering flyer distribution:

1. Pick one vendor with national coverage, not five regional vendors. Coordination overhead across multiple regional flyer vendors is a tax on the marketing team. A single nationwide partner with local distributors in each market is operationally cleaner and produces more consistent execution.

2. Use polygon targeting, not ZIP codes. ZIP code targeting wastes pieces on demographic segments that don’t match your buyer. Polygon targeting — drawing the exact area you want to cover — concentrates spend on the households most likely to convert.

3. Plan for multi-campaign relationships, not single campaigns. The first campaign teaches you. The second campaign refines. By the fifth campaign, the program is dialed in. Brands that treat flyer distribution as a one-off underutilize the channel; brands that treat it as a sustained program get the compounding returns.

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Want to Run a Multi-Market Restaurant Campaign?

DTD has run campaigns at every scale, from a single-neighborhood grand opening to nationwide brand rollouts across multiple states. If you’re a restaurant chain, a franchise operation, or a multi-location service business considering flyer distribution at scale, the DTD campaign planner lets you draw your target areas and get instant house counts for each market — and an expert campaign advisor will help you structure the program.

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