From 4-6PM today we served pizza by the slice for free. We went through 125 14" pies cut in 12 slices for a total of 1500 slices and 40 lbs of wings. Best guess is 450 people showed up. The pizzas were our best menu combos. We made 16 different menu combos that range from 4 to 9 toppings.
Lots of smiling people, handed out a couple of hundred menus, talked about the combos and names and sauces and cheeses etc and got nearly 200 email addresses.
I guess the promo cost about $1000 counting food, extra labor and advertising. Well worth it to get face to face with a few hundred of your customers.
At $2 per head and guaranteed that the person was directly exposed to your product not too mention the feedback that was verbally shared… this was money well spent that should quickly pay for itself many times over. Direct pro-active marketing!!! :idea:
Did you place limits on the amount of food, slices, etc. that someone could eat? If so, how did you control that?
Not really. We mostly gave two slices per person, but they were welcome to come through the line again. Many did. We were serving slices from 14" pizzas. For the event we cut them in 12 slices rather than the 8 we usually do. We also served wings, pork wings, and chicken nuggets.
I assume no take out?
That is correct.
Did you perceive any increase in business over normal or new customers these three days after the promo?
A promo like this is not about the next three days.
Were you selling beverages, beer, etc?
We do not serve beer but we did sell bottled sodas.
Any particular difficulties moving that many people through in a couple of hours?
No. We set up tables outside like a buffet line and moved them along. We served 16 different pizzas but had about 6-8 and any given time.
We made a list of 20 pies ( cheese, pepperoni and our two best selling combos had one duplicate each and just made the list again over and over.
This has gotta be worth a go, we going through a relaunch process. I think this will be ideal way to show the difference in quality that my material just can’t do.(Everyone claims to be the best, freshest, cheapest, fastest and friendliest).
We had a lot of fun doing it. We made sure the kitchen looked its best. We did it from 4-6PM so it was over before our dinner rush started. (We did a normal nights business afterwards) People were smiling and laughing… asking what the names of the combos are, saying things like “I never would have tried that combo” or I have seen that one in your ads, but did not think I would like it" or Wow, I did not know my kids would eat that!, I don’t have to just order pepperoni!"
All our crew save on that was out of town was on that night. We had staff available to talk to people, we had sign ups for our email list which we put on clip boards at the front of the line. We ran a news paper ad for two days prior and on the day of the event announcing it. We also did an email blast and facebook ads. In our ads, we clearly stated that we were serving free slices and that we would do so for two hours or 100 pies whichever came first. As it was, we kept going to 128 pies which lasted the whole two hours.
We did one pepperoni and one plain cheese out of every 10 pies… mostly for the kids, and 14 different high end combos in rotation.