Pizza Shops: Get Into Your Customer's Phones

The Yellow Pages industry made a point a of reminding people that the yellow pages are an ideal place to look up pizza places during January. This happens to be a busy month for delivery due to sporting events and the weather.

While the yellow pages are certainly a good advertising venue for pizza shops, here's a tactic that may have even higher returns: Get into your customer's phones. How? By publishing vcards on your website. Make it easy for people to download your business' contact information with one click. Then, the next time they're hungry for pizza they'll already have your digits - and possibly only your digits - so you'll gain more recurring business for no additional cost.

If you have to occasionally put people on hold, consider putting a "don't forget to add our number to your phone's address book" reminder to the hold message. Add the message to your receipt.

Anything that gets your into your regular customer's phone is going to help cost effectively generate more business down the line.

I assume there are three types of people in the world: 1) those who never order pizza, 2) those who order pizza very often, and 3) those who infrequently order pizza.

1) Something must be wrong with these people.
2) Your regular customers are your gold in the food industry. Coupons for the fridge, a robust Web site with online ordering, and a database system for remembering address, last order placed and credit card information, so when a customer calls they barely have to say anything. As you said, Ed, getting your number (and Web site) into these people's personal contact management system should be a key concern. @emily, that's a sweet example.
3) I assume this crowd is the audience for cold-calling pizza places -- needing to look up a number before they call. I did this once at a hotel because my laptop was dead. Otherwise, companies would still be better off investing those marketing dollars in SEM, table tent partnerships with hotels, couponing and local community PR.

That's a nice tip. I discussed a while back about some strategies the "big boys" are using to "get in the phone":

Google Maps allows for most of their business results to be downloaded onto a phone. I have observed this working with my Nokia E71 and my boss' Palm Treo.

The other ideas are excellent marketing tips, but to some degree, downloading contacts is already available.

Comments

1. Posted by: Emily on January 15, 2009 8:13 PM:

When I was in college, Papa John's did a promotion one day where if you programmed your number into your phone in front of them, they would give you a free pizza.

It was a brilliant move; they ended up being the only pizza number in my phone and therefore got a call every weekend at bar time.

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