Most pizza marketing sends one message to everyone: a coupon, a special, a post. PizzaSMARTS starts from the opposite idea. Your regular customers and your non-customers are two different audiences, and the same message can’t work on both.
From the 1997 manual
“Regular customer - he’s easy. Save your coupon expense here.… Non-customer - he’s tough. Raising his awareness level of you may only remind him that he doesn’t like you.… Remember that he has rejected all of your previous marketing attempts - so do something different.”
Two Entirely Different Strategies, Developing Plan
Two ways to grow, two strategies
The manual puts it simply: sales are the number of customers you have times how often they buy. So there are exactly two ways to grow. You can get the customers you already have to order more often, or you can get more customers. Each needs its own approach:
| Regular customers | Non-customers | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Order more often | Try you for the first time (or again) |
| Offer | Light. They already like you. | Heavy. They need a real reason. |
| Message | Toppings, new items, combos, a thank-you | Something radically different from what they’ve ignored before |
| Number that proves it worked | Purchase frequency | Market penetration (new customers) |
Sending everyone the same coupon gets both groups wrong. Regulars get a discount they didn’t need, which costs you margin on orders you’d have gotten anyway. Non-customers see another version of the ad they’ve already ignored.
How to do it today
- Market to regulars where they already are. Your A and B customers are on your email and text list, or can be. Reach them there with low-cost messages: a new item, a combo, a reminder. Save the deep discounts.
- Reach non-customers by place, not by list. Non-customers aren’t in your database, so you find them by neighborhood: Every Door Direct Mail postcards by carrier route, door hangers, and ads targeted to your delivery area.
- Keep your customers out of your new-customer ads. Most ad platforms let you upload your customer list and exclude it, so your strongest offer goes only to people who haven’t ordered.
- Make the non-customer offer look different. The manual’s classic non-customer postcard didn’t even show who it was from on the front. If they’ve tuned out your brand, lead with the offer.
What to measure
Look at the two halves of sales separately. For regulars, track purchase frequency: orders divided by customers. For non-customers, track market penetration: active customers divided by the households in your area. Total sales can hide a win in one half and a loss in the other.
The most valuable non-customer you’ll ever win is the one who just ordered for the first time. What happens next decides whether they stay: win the second order.