Happy Birthday to Us
It's winter. It's a new year. It's a birthday, twenty years of Westside Pizza. Westside decided to celebrate by offering up two pizzas for twenty bucks. Sent out on December 31st, you have ten days to take them up on this offer.
It's a good offer, but Westside could have done more to get me to take it up. They could have positioned this offer to drive more business around it as well.
Let's start with the timing. New Year's is a time for parties. New Year's Eve is also a time that people go out. Given that folks are busy, this might not be the best time to be sending them the one e-mail that announced this offer.
One e-mail isn't enough anyway. Hung over on a Friday, maybe even having a family to feed, a New Year greeting the afternoon of the First would make sense, of course reminding customers of the offer, and that they don't really have to cook today if they don't want to. I'd follow up on the 6th, a Wednesday, and again leading into the last weekend of the offer on the 8th.
This might sound like a lot of e-mails. And we obviously don't want to drive our customers away, but if done right though, we wouldn't. We've asked our customers how often we can contact them (here's my sample form), and we can dial it in even more. We will adjust their e-mails according to their preferences. And we give them an opportunity to adjust their preferences at the bottom of every e-mail.
At the next level, this would be integrated with the sales system, and follow up sequences would appropriately trail buying activity.
As I look at their site, there are two other things Westside could consider. One, send out an announcement a few days before New Year's to let people know that Westside can provision their parties (or feed their kids and babysitter while the parents are out partying).
The second is to offer party-sized portions. You see Westside doesn't only do Pizza. They have oven-baked pasta, salads, and some fun desserts. They could offer up larger portions or even put together party packages.
Please feel free to visit my site for more thoughts on e-mail marketing for restaurants:
Disclaimer: I have no relationship to Westside Pizza other than visiting its site. When I use the term “we,” I mean it as an we e-mail marketers and nothing more.