So often we advise our clients not to be too “discount happy” with their products and services. It can often cheapen the brand and take away from the quality of the offerings. While that still holds true in most cases, we’ve had pretty amazing results working with Seasons Pizza on a discount focused campaign that has dramatically boosted sales.
With the objective of increasing sales across all locations, we started a small test campaign with a pretty stellar pizza deal – $4.99 for a medium, 2-topping pizza. We kept the marketing costs efficient by using a strictly digital strategy (emails, social media marketing, Facebook ads and programmatic media placements). Digital marketing components allowed us to execute highly targeted campaigns that focused on lower income areas that would truly value a deal like this. The campaign took off pretty quickly and the amount of sales per location increased dramatically. Existing customers came more frequently and more importantly, we got new customers walking through the doors as well.
But a campaign like this can be dangerous if you’re not ready to translate the new customer traffic into regular customers that are buying more than just the discounted deal. We had a plan for this type of situation! Fortunately, Seasons Pizza offers a very large menu to customers (from salad to sandwiches to pastas) which we regularly promote to encourage cross selling and higher ticket prices. So not only did we capture new customer information and add them to our internal marketing campaigns, we also saw a wonderful halo effect from the $4.99 deal. Customers were coming in for the $4.99 deal, but then they were leaving with salads, sandwiches, pasta and drinks to offset the cost of the pizza discount.
