The Shakey’s Pizza Parlors franchise is continuing to experiment with social media marketing in an effort to make their stores more receptive to today’s Internet-reliant consumers and they seem to be having a fair amount of success with text message pizza coupons.
In an experiment intended to boost pizza sales during slow periods, the parent company spent three months advertising a text message coupon campaign for 30 different Shakey’s restaurants across Southern California. The advertisements were run in both print media and on outdoor advertising signs and asked customers to text key words back to a text message number in order to receive instant discount coupons for Shakey’s’ pizza. Options Media Group provided the clever text campaign mobile application and also helped Shakey’s to build the database of mobile consumers.
The campaign advertisements all contained different key words that allowed each ad to be tracked for response. Understandably, the ads inside the Shakey’s restaurant locations had the highest rates of response, but the effects were still positive for almost all of the ads overall. A typical ad run during the campaign offering a discount coupon would receive at least a 10% response rate even if the coupon was only valid for one day and ran during a time slot that was traditionally slow for Shakey’s.
By the time the phones stopped ringing, the ads had resulted in attracting over 16,000 new texting pizza fans to Shakey’s database. A Shakey’s spokesman said that every store involved in the promotion was quite happy with the results of the mobile advertising program and that the company definitely plans to continue to expand the strategy to include other areas of the country.
