Slow Tuesday? How one pizza operator doubled his Tuesday's sales.
By Rudy Vener
February 23, 2011
This all began on a Tuesday in mid February. It was already almost 2:30 in the afternoon when I got an email from Ray.
"I'm feeling overstaffed," he wrote, "I want to try an email for today only." Ray went on to describe the deal. Buy one large cheese pizza, get a second one free. Toppings would be extra.
Ray had attached a new graphic image, a photo of a pepperoni pizza for the new email promotion.
I checked the clock. It was too late for lunch sales, but if I could get the special online and the email sent out in an hour it would be just in time for the dinner crowd. Ray didn't know this, but in one hour I had to be somewhere else. Could I do it?
I was going to try! First I checked the photo image. It looked fine, but at 3 megabytes it was too big to use in an email. I sent off a quick reply to Ray, to tell him I was on the job, asked for a smaller image, and got to work.
The first order of business was to create the special. This involved setting up a new item in the online ordering system. I had to set up the options for toppings, give it a coupon code and set it to expire at the end of the day. The coupon code keeps the offer hidden from casual customers, if someone was going to order anyway, we didn't want to give away a free pizza. The offer itself was straightforward, customers could select toppings for both the first and second pizza for extra but the base price was the cost of a single large cheese pie. I finished making the special, tested it, and checked the time. It was now 2:50 pm.
Next I turned my attention to the email message. Fortunately I just needed to edit Ray's last email promotion with new text, a new web coupon and a new image. Did I have the new image yet? I checked email. No I didn't. Not to worry, we still had time. I incorporated the coupon code into the web coupon. This lets Ray's customers automatically enter the coupon code by just clicking the web coupon, and features the special as soon as they sign in. After that I edited the text and made sure all the web coupon and other links worked.
All was working fine. I just needed that image. Time to see if Ray had sent a new photo. Yes! This one was less than 100 kilobytes. That was still a bit large, but much better. Once the new image was added, I sent a test email to myself and to Gina and we both checked it out. Gina is far better than I am at proof-reading my typos. At last I sent the proof to Ray. It was now 3:10 pm.
Finally, Ray's "OK" came back at 3:20 pm, and I kicked off the email to his entire email list.
Done, with 5 minutes to spare. I had to go!
Later that night I heard back from Ray. "Great response to the email," he wrote. "I may do that every Tuesday. We got twice the sales we normally get on a slow Tuesday."
The next day the offer was gone from Ray's online ordering system, there were no pesky paper coupons hanging around to ambush him, and he turned a slow Tuesday into a record sales day. At the moment, everything is back to normal, until next Tuesday.
