As Cincinnati’s LaRosa Pizza chain uses e-mail marketing to get more customers ordering online, long-time customers are starting to order more than just pizza and increasing average order size, says Pete Buscani, executive vice president of marketing.
LaRosa, which operates 56 restaurants, uses a single call center to process all telephone orders. But with about 70,000 calls per week, it wanted to move about 10% to online orders, figuring that would let it provide better customer service as it continued to expand the number of orders, Buscani says.
In April, it launched an e-mail marketing campaign with its ad agency, HyperDrive Interactive, on an e-mail marketing platform from ExactTarget. Promotions included the chance to win free pizza for a year to e-mail recipients who completed a survey of their favorite items on LaRosa’s menu, which includes dozens of items in addition to pizza. The goal was to both get more customers interested in ordering online and introduce them to LaRosa’s full menu.
It sent e-mails to 50,000 customers, about half of whom opened the e-mails. Of those, 92% entered the sweepstakes. After an initial 47% jump in the number of online orders, LaRosa now gets close to 4,000 online orders per week, or about 5% of its weekly phone orders.
Although it still hopes that continued e-mail campaigns will boost online orders to 10% of orders, it’s enjoying other unexpected benefits in the meantime, Buscani says. Online orders for delivery average 50 cents more per order compared to delivery orders taken over the phone, and online orders for customer pickup average $1.25 more than phone orders. Buscani says he figures the larger orders are because customers ordering online take more time to view the online menu, instead of routinely calling the same phone number and ordering a pizza.
And because online customers are more likely to view the menu, they’re more likely to order items for friends or family members who don’t care for pizza, Buscani says. "We have customers for 20 years who told us they didn't know we sold more than pizza until they ordered online," he says.
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