News

Mapping out a marketing plan

April 9, 2006

The investment into any POS system is significant, so operators should learn quickly how to make the machine pay for itself. A solid POS database marketing plan can do just that — if only most POS owners would develop one.

That many don't use the machine's marketing function confounds consultant Kamron Karington. After buying his first pizzeria years ago, Karington worked hard and fast to train others to make his pizzas and run his business so he could focus on using his POS to market to his customers.

"The guy who sold me that POS system told me I'd never believe how many people didn't use it to market," Karington said. "I was blown away. Guys like that might make great pizza, but if nobody knows about it, they're dead in the water."

This story and all the great free content on PizzaMarketplace is supported by: Intura Solutions

Database marketing is a two-fold concept made up of serving the customers a business already has, and working to obtain new customers. And if 20 percent of a pizzeria's customers account for 80 percent of its revenue, it makes sense to capture data on their purchasing habits and make the effort to send them regular offers, Karington said.

"Most people order pizza at least twice a month, so if they spend $15 each time, that's $360 a year. Take that out just three years, and the customer is worth $1,086 to you," he said. "To think you can use a POS to send an offer once a month every month for 50 cents — $6 a year — to retain that customer is amazing."

Surgical strikes

Karington believes database marketing should be done "surgically" by tailoring offers to individual customer desires and focusing them geographically. Gary Peek agreed. As president of Intura Solutions, maker of the Intura Vision POS, he helped create a database system that allows operators to search for customers based on their purchasing habits.

"Within the module, there's a screen that allows you to build your own query based on 40 different elements," Peek said. "You could search for customers who ordered 45 days ago, whose name is Smith and who live on a certain street, and it'll pull up a list that matches that query."

Vision also has a color-coded mapping feature that gives users a vivid idea of the neighborhoods that account for most of their business.

"Not only can you see where it's coming from, you can see what the order density is," said Peek, adding that Vision was the first POS system to utilize Microsoft MapPoint. "You can set parameters to show the number of orders in a certain price range and then plot those on a color-coded map." The result is a quick assessment that enables an operator to target properly priced orders for each geographical area.

Karington has since sold his pizza company, but he did similar targeting in his day. "If they had an average ticket less than $13, they got an offer at $9.99 for a basic pizza. Those with ticket averages over that were probably into our gourmet offerings. So it was pointless to send them the same $9.99 deal. They wanted something more."