Marketing Pizza by Mobile
As the rain clouds rolled in one evening in June, Jeff Leach swung into action.
Leach, cofounder of New Orleans-based World’s Healthiest Pizza, knows what happens when it rains in the Big Easy. The streets flood, people park their cars on high ground and hardly anyone goes out for dinner.
So that particular night, Leach typed out a message on his computer which read, “It’s about to rain. Let us bring you a pizza for dinner.”
Within minutes, the message, which also included a 2-for-1 pizza offer, was sent to the cell phones of the 400 or so people who had signed up for WHP’s text-message coupon service. A few minutes after that, the calls started to come in.
“We got about a 20 percent draw on that offer,” Leach said.
World’s Healthiest Pizza is one of a number of businesses experimenting with delivering coupons to cell phones as an alternative to direct mail. Although WHP has only been offering mobile coupons for about a month, Leach is happy with the results.
“I’m not sure long term how effective it is going to be, but overall it is a positive,” he said. “We just haven’t figured out the best way to use it yet.”