We are all geared up for our first ever major give away - 150 FREE small pizzas.
8,000 flyers went out at the weekend in our local free community newspaper.
I believe this to be the first major giveaway of this magnitude by an Independent pizza shop in our state and possibly in Australia ( we are not into it like you guys in America ).
Camera all set for heaps of photos, plenty of menus and our new design fridge magnet to go with every order, heaps of staff on hand excited about the night and me hoping for a giant turnout and lots of return customers after the event.
Just wondering what the reaction, or counter plans the new National chain franchise store just recently opened 100 mts away from us have in mind? :? Funny thing is of the 4 nights they have been open we have experienced our 4th biggest night, best night for nearly 2 years, best ever Sunday trade and tonight 75% up on the smae night last year :? :lol: Just hope it lasts.
Will post tomorrow night on the results.
Dave,
I’ll bet it went great and you had to keep in the kitchen all night . . . or maybe it was great BECAUSE you stayed in the kitchen all night and didn’t show that gruesome mug.
Just got home from our free pizza night.
At opening we had about 30 in a line with their coupons in hand.
We had rolled out the 150 bases and topped 40 (8 of 5 variants from our menu) ready to be placed in the oven. Pizzas were rolling out beautifully.
The rush we were expecting didn’t evenuate to the levels so I went into the mall and spruiked and handed out more flyers telling folks to get in quickly as they may miss out. One of my staff went down to the cinema complex at the end of our centre and the ticket staff took the flyers and gave out to customers as they purchased their movie tickets.
At the end of the night we gave out 100 free pizzas and of these 18 were upgraded to large pizzas for $5 extra.
Points to note from this exercise -
The inserting into the newspaper was not efficient as many were in the middle where the real estate sales section is
The concept hasn’t been done in our state previously by an independent pizza shop and this concept is not the norm for any operation here so people may have been wary of a hidden trap (?)
We drew around 25% declared non previous customers so we will be following them up with a phone call in the next day or two to see how they liked our pizzas and look at a bounce back to get them here again (paying this time)
Customers kept asking why were we giving away free pizzas. They couldn’t get the gist of the concept (refer to 2) so I think we will repeat this again in the later half of the year. We told them it was a customer appreciation night and an opportunity for non customers to see how good our pizzas were without any cost to them. They liked this reply.
Customers of the chain groups wre suprised that our small pizza was around the same size as Domino’s and PH large. They all lifted the lid to look at the pizza and commented that they looked far superior and larger than the cheapies.
Everyone had to fill out a name and address form on special order pads we did up so we got an immediate data base
Every pizza went out with a menu, box topper with coupons, fridge magnet and a note highlighting our strengths vs the cheapies (see at end of this reply)
We sold heaps of drinks and snacks while they were waiting
Where possible I got out and around with the customers introducing myself and finding out about them.
The "about us " box topper used tonight ( a bit distorted fro cut and pasting in another format) ABOUT PIZZA PIZZAZZ
[i]We hope you enjoy your FREE pizza tonight and that we see you here again buying our great pizzas
Hopefully if you are a first time customer you will
notice the difference in our pizzas compared to the others who sell only on price and not quality.
At Pizza Pizzazz Currambine we use only the
best and freshest ingredients, our own blended base sauce and real mozzarella cheese
Our large size pizza is 13†compared to the
cheapies who call their 11†size a large - what a rip off - this is a whopping 35% smaller than ours
We cut our vegetables fresh everyday unlike the cheapies who buy theirs in pre cut in sealed bags
We use the best quality smoked eye bacon, not
inferior quality shredded fatty rasher bacon
We have transparent pricing on our menu not
hidden extras that you only find out once you
ordered - no $2.95 for 1/2 & 1/2 or extra toppings
We are the biggest independent pizza shop in the northern suburbs because our pizzas are
BIGGER, FRESHER and TASTIER
and our customers know we are the best for
taste, value for money and customer service
We know you will like our pizzas and will come back again like countless others have done
To top it off we had a reasonably good general sales night so we broke even, or made a little profit on the night so I am happy with that. We rang up all the free pizzas as a sale and will now have to pay the 10% Goods and Services Tax (GST) to the government but we can claim the whole cost as marketing as a tax offset so the night was virtually cost negative.
Thanks for all the ideas prior to doing this back when I was planning it. It made things a lot easier and some ideas helped make the night profitable.
We now go down in local history as the first pizza shop do do mass give aways.
You’re obviously pleased with how things went so thats a big ‘+’ of you.
It would seem that the ‘message’ of why you are giving away the pies wasn’t clear, as you say people either didn’t understand, thought there was a catch or had to ask you why yo were doing it.
It would seem a good idea to revisit the ‘message’ again before you do it again. IMO non-pizza people almost certainly don;t know what a customer ‘appreciation’ day is so its wasted on them. Better to have a ‘I’m so confident you’ll love our pizza and become a regular customer I’m going to give you a free pizza to try’ message?
In terms of advertising - approach the local news paper and see if you can do a free reader offer. You let them produce a voucher in the paper (i.e. more sales for them) you get them to promote it front page over several days. Beats having a leaflet inserted any day. I’m on about my 4th reader offer in 2 years although I don’t do anything for free anymore - I learnt that one the hard way!
I am missing something… Why would you “ring up” something that you give away? 10% of what? If you give a $2 discount on a pizza do you collect tax on the full non-discounted price or on the price you actually charged? When you buy a $100 jacket that is on sale 40% off do you pay tax on the $100 or on the $60 that you actually paid?
When we did a 100 pie giveaway a few weeks ago we entered all the orders in the system, but with a discount on each one for the value of a 14" cheese pizza. When we sold toppings or upgraded to a 16" we charged the difference and collected the tax on that difference, but when we collect no $$, we owe no tax!
In our complicated taxation system we have the option of claiming the cost of the goods given away or the full “retail value”. If you go for cost of goods you can only claim the $2 or so that the pizza goods costs. If you go the “retail value” you have to ring up as a “sale” at the full retail price. You pay the government the 10% GST but as a taxable claim you claim the $10 retail price. It’s just a way of reducing your taxable income legally that not many people ae aware of being able to do.
So in our case we pay 91c GST to the government and get a taxable claim of $10 - nett value $9.09 vs $2 or so the cost of goods the other way. Just a piece of creative accounting.
It wasn’t in the message as such it was just that nobody has ever done this before so people didn’t quite understand why we were giving away a nights worth of pizzas free.
It wouldn’t matter what you put on the flyer people don’t take the time to fully read anything anymore . They just see the main heading and that’s it. We had clearly and in bold type that it was strictly 1 per person / family and 3 of the first 6 people tried to get multiple orders. We also had in the same bold type “shop pick up only, strictly no phone orders” and they tried to get them over the phone and get them delivered. We did waver on the phone bit only if they ordered other paid pizzas to go with it but all sales last night were shop pick up only as we had no drivers available (another story).
I think next time I would do a direct letterbox drop or maybe a cut out advert in the paper rather than the insert.
We will get an idea of the direct letterbox format over the next 10 weeks as we do non addressed mailings to 200 houses in each of the 5 surrounding suburbs offering a free large pizza. This has a letter (Nick and Daddio have seen them) in a printed envelope with our logo and FREE PIZZA offer bold printed on it. The letter basically says that if they are a customer then this is thank you and if you haven’t tried us before then you can absolutely free - no obligation. Why free because we know once you taste our pizzas you will then buy them. They get the choice from any of our “favourites” range of 14 pizza variants (it excludes our premiums and gourmets) so there is a wide range on offer.
They have a tear off section they have to fill out with name address, phone, email etc that has to be redeemed, so again we get our data base details.
Past promotion like this to 95 new house in a new suburb saw a 70% redemption and nearly 50% becoming regular customers, one now ordering up to twice a week.
Anyway we go we are putting added pressure on the new chain store near us and keeping our name out there in the public’s view.