hello pizza ppl, i have new 11x17 tri fold menus being made with room for coupons. wanted to get to insight on what coupons have worked best for u guys and which ones have bombed ?
When I was in the business I was not a fan of coupons…And being removed from the business so long, I can not not comment on what works best these days…
But, my experience was that if we kept sending out menus we kept our sales moving…But one needs to calculate whether spending more money to increase sales was more profitable than using coupons which often increased sales but also food costs…In my method we increased our marketing costs but it gave us a better return than coupons…
It is possible to put a menu in each home every 4 to 6 weeks with a feature pizza and/or product that may pull more than some sort of discount coupon…This depends on your market and you must track everything you do…Excel should be your best friend…
Just doing constant $$ off and buy-one-get-one will reposition you as a discount joint…
Go with:
Something free with a purchase such as breadsticks with a large pizza…
Bundled deals to get the ticket average up (again, large pizza + items)…
Test doing something like $5 off with any purchase of $25 or more…
These are designed to keep ticket average up… and avoid attracting junk traffic that just orders when you’re losing money…
KK
one word of advice with the bundles - make sure you offer a range of options.
No good offering a family sized pie and 2 or 3 sides even if it is a bargain IF you have a lot of singles or couples who simply won’t eat it all.
I’ve had a good response from offering 2 medium 2-topping pizzas at a discount. I’m also a fan of offering a free item with something at regular price. If your breadsticks cost you $1 to make, wouldn’t it make sense to throw them in free with a 16" pizza than just discounting that pizza on it’s own? That was one of the biggest things I’ve learned about doing coupons, work on perceived value using low cost items and you can easily turn a higher profit off the same customer while offering them more too.
we use them in our menu and we get alot of them back… check out our website and in the menu part there is a pdf file of our actual menu with the coupons… http://www.louiespizzeria.net
a lot of customers that come in to the store and take the menus they use the coupons… next month we are doing a mailing and hopefully get alot of the coupons back 