By Matt Plapp
Let’s put an end to renting your customer’s attention.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve covered how to gain attention for your pizzeria as a part of my ABR strategy. If you’re a major chain with a big budget, you can afford to pay for advertising that leads nowhere constantly; that’s called renting your customer’s attention. But if you’re like most pizzerias, you don’t have an endless budget.
Paid advertising is literally the act of renting attention. You’re paying another company to reach its audience. They own the audience; they control who sees or hears your ad. And when you have great results and want to hit them again, it’s time to break out the checkbook.
Related: Matt Plapp’s 3-2-1 strategy: How to gain massive attention for your pizzeria
But what if there was a way to take control of the process, a way to own your customers? What if every time you spent money on advertising, you gained new customers instead of going after the same customers every month?
Well, there is. It’s the B in my ABR strategy: Building a customer database off the attention. This means that whenever you market on the front end, the goal is to gain their attention and leverage that attention to build your database. For example, a pop-up on your website shouldn’t only attract visitors’ attention with a special offer; it should get them to click a button and give you their name, email, phone number and birthday.
When a customer enters your pizzeria, your staff shouldn’t ask, “How are you doing?” They should ask a question to find out if you “know” them yet—and if you don’t, they should say, “Great, I’m sure you want a free appetizer on your next visit; scan this and join our VIP program.”
But before we get into what and how, let me show you proof of how two pizzerias made one simple change, adding only a few customers to their database daily and growing their sales.
Pizza Restaurant No. 1: Added 3 New Emails Per Day Through Their Point of Sale
In August 2023, this one location’s $500,000-per-year pizzeria discovered a new way to add customers to their email database through their Arrow POS system. On that day, they did a bulk upload and then continued to add more customers to their email database every week after that. There wasn’t a big push to get customers to give their data, and it wasn’t a huge number—they went from adding an average of 32 people per month to 119 per month. So they went from gaining one customer’s info per day to three per day.
From September 2023 until August 2024, they grew their database by 367% over the prior 12 months. What happened as a result? The sales from their email marketing program went up 32%. The graphic shows the monthly baseline sales before the increase. They averaged $6,154 in monthly sales from only their email marketing. After August 2023, the average monthly sales from their email program increased to $8,259.
By simply adding a few customers per day, they saw a $2,100 lift—that’s approximately $1,400 in incremental profit. Imagine what would happen if they added 10 to 20 people per day; we’ll cover that below.
Pizza Restaurant No. 2: Added 5 New Emails Per Day Through Facebook Ads
This is a one-location pizzeria that makes about $1.4 million in annual sales. In June 2024, they decided to launch paid Facebook ads to grow their email database. They’re located in Arizona, and the scorching summers are their worst time of year. So this initiative was launched in June to see if it could immediately impact sales and build momentum for the fall.
They ran Facebook ads with an offer so good people couldn’t pass it up, in exchange for their contact information so they could add them to their rewards program. They increased their database by 150%. They went from averaging 100 new customer signups per month to 251 per month. The difference can be seen in the sales in their loyalty program from the summer of 2023 to the summer of 2024.
The only change was adding more members, and their average monthly sales jumped from $24,855 to $31,816, a 28% increase.
These two examples aren’t rocket science; they gained more customer data to use in their pizzerias’ automated marketing programs.
How Can You Build Your Customer Database?
There are three main places you need to focus on to gain customer data:
- In-store
- Your website
- Social media
When you gain a customer’s information inside your four walls, that’s the most impactful. It makes sense; they’re the most important customers. In fact, we’ve found that the right marketing program can get 60% to 70% of those customers to return within a few weeks.
Your website is the second most important place to gain customers’ information. Yes, I expect you to gain the data through your online ordering, but where most of you miss your website visitors is by not trying to gain every visitor’s info. Many customers are coming to your website to look around—you know, “tire kickers.” It would be best to have a pop-up that greets them with an offer they feel stupid saying no to, so you can add everyone to your database. We’ve found that 45% to 50% of those customers will visit your pizzeria soon after.
And, last but not least, there’s social media. Facebook and Instagram are great places to gain customers. The easiest, lowest-hanging fruit is paid ads targeting customers near your restaurant. However, the ads must have technology behind them. You don’t just want to “rent” some space from Facebook. You want to take those customers on a journey once they click. With the right system in place, it’s not hard to get 20% to 30% of those customers to visit within a month.
That’s a lot of information for this article, so next week, we’ll explore how to get customers to give you their contact info. We’ll cover the “sales pitch” as well as the offers and ideal marketing sequence to get you the best results.
We will also explore the most important, and often overlooked, practice of gaining in-store signups. I personally experimented with this one: I worked as a cashier for three months at one of our client’s pizzerias, and what I saw was eye-opening.
Talk to you next week!
My name is Matt Plapp. I’m the CEO of Restaurant Marketing That Works. I’ve worked with thousands of restaurants since 2008 when I started this company, and over the next 12 months, we will help 2,500-plus restaurants with their marketing. This is the third article in a new weekly column for PMQ to help restaurant owners understand the gold mine we have to market in 2024—and beyond.
