By Rick Hynum
UNO Pizzeria & Grill expected its latest value offer to be a hit. They didn’t expect it to crash their website.
When the brand announced its first-ever $99 Pizza Pass—which promises unlimited deep-dish pizza, salad and Pepsi drinks—on August 18, customers made a beeline to its website. UNO sold its entire inventory of 1,000 passes within hours, but customers kept coming, until the site couldn’t handle the traffic.
The promotion was so successful, UNO Pizzeria & Grill announced round 2 this week, selling an additional 100 Pizza Passes, which will be available on Thursday, September 3, until they sell out too.
The $99 Pizza pass allows customers to eat one dine-in meal a day every day over the course of the 10-week promotion, which runs from Saturday, September 5, through Friday, November 13, at participating restaurants. For what works out to be less than $1.50 a day, they can enjoy unlimited servings of all eight menu-featured deep-dish pizzas (personal-size only), plus all the Garden or Caesars salads they can eat and all the Pepsi products they can drink.
There’s one catch: Pizza Pass holders cannot share food and drinks with anyone else. Bring a spouse, child or friend, and they have to pay full price.
Here’s why UNO’s Pizza Pass is a shrewd promotion:
1. It’s a perfect example of a value offer you’d feel stupid saying no to. But UNO sees it as financially viable from a cost point of view. From the outset, the brand knew the maximum number of customers who could participate over the limited 10-week window: 1,000, tops. (Well, add 100 more with the follow-up deal.) And the pass can’t be shared with anyone else. To redeem the offer, customers have to present a valid ID with a name that matches the Pizza Pass.
2. It’s similar to a pizza subscription strategy, except it lasts only 10 weeks instead of a year. And a basic truth of pizza subscriptions—or any restaurant subscription—is that most customers won’t come anywhere close to extracting its maximum value. Some diehard pass-holders might take full advantage of it every day for the first week or two, but over time, they’ll taper off as the novelty fades or everyday life intervenes. Others will feel they’ve gotten a terrific bargain after only a handful of visits. So that gap between the value that customers perceive and UNO’s actual cost of fulfilling the offer is what can make a promotion like this work.
3. The Pizza Pass gives UNO something pizza brands constantly struggle to create: a reason for customers to come back again and again—and hopefully bring someone else who doesn’t have a pass. Repeated visits can build a dining habit and strengthen loyalty to a legacy brand like UNO, which is competing for attention in a crowded and noisy pizza market.
4. The promotion builds up UNO’s loyalty program, even though that’s not immediately apparent from the Pizza Pass marketing itself. UNO quietly tied the Pizza Pass to loyalty membership, a fact that’s buried in the Pizza Pass Terms and Conditions page on the website. Pizza Pass purchasers must enroll in UNO Extras, which the company uses to administer and redeem the pass. Granted, some purchasers might have already belonged to UNOS Extras, but the offer almost certainly attracted hundreds of new members—and many of those folks might never have signed up for a rewards program without the Pizza Pass incentive. Now they’re hooked and reeled in.
So, to sum it all up, UNO customers are getting what they perceive to be a generous amount of pizza for a low price. UNO itself, meanwhile, bought weeks of repeat traffic, social buzz and earned publicity, especially when its website crashed—a story that news outlets around the U.S. have reported.
And for those who missed the boat on the Pizza Pass, UNO has unveiled another “bottomless” value deal: $14.99 per person for unlimited deep dish pizza and salads, no Pizza Pass required. Like the Pizza Pass, that offer, which does not cover drinks, will run from September 5 through November 13.
Chuck Buttiglieri, president of UNO Pizzeria & Grill, put his own spin on it, of course.
“The response to the Pizza Pass showed us just how much people love the idea of unlimited deep dish,” he said in a statement. “The additional Pizza Passes and Bottomless Pizza & Salad are our way of keeping that experience going for everyone who may have missed out the first time around.”
