Mobile marketing cooks up profits for Frisco-based Scotty P’s burger chain. June 21, 2010
Posted by Mike Vitamvas in mobile marketing.trackback
Gretchen and Don Reed hadn’t planned to eat at Scotty P’s one recent Friday.
But she got a text message at 10:30 that morning offering a buy-one, get-one hamburger if she showed up between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. at the location at Preston Road and Forest Lane where the couple regularly dine.
When they arrived, Gretchen showed the text message on her phone to the cashier and scored a free burger for Don.
“It always brings us in,” she says. “We were going somewhere else, and we changed our minds. We love the food.”
By “it,” she means occasional text messages sent by Scotty P’s offering a BOGO or another food deal. But “it” always comes with a catch: It has to be used at lunchtime on the day the message is sent.
Scott Pontikes put on this test for The Dallas Morning News to show what typically happens when the founder of Frisco-based Scotty P’s uses an automated, mass text messaging service offered by another Frisco company, Call-Em-All LLC.
In this case, Pontikes (pronounced Pon-tee-kez) sent out texts at 10:30 a.m. to 64 customers who have designated the Preston-Forest unit as their Scotty P’s location of choice.
The first customer arrived at 11:15 a.m. with his text message on his phone in hand.
During the four-hour promotion, 11 text-toting customers showed up, each with at least one other person in tow. They spent nearly $200 – money the restaurant probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
Big deal?
Well, yeah, says Pontikes, when you consider that he paid less than five bucks for the text service and got a 17 percent redemption rate. The only other hard dollars were the cost of making 11 burgers.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” he says after tallying the register. “I didn’t really expect much on a Friday at the beginning of summer.”
Pontikes started mobile text marketing in January when his friend Brad Herrmann, founder of Call-Em-All, asked him to be a guinea pig for the new service.
“Scott picked it up and ran with it,” Herrmann says.
Scotty P’s has been a Frisco institution since Pontikes opened his first burger outlet in 1999.
Pontikes, who’s 42 and holds a degree in hotel restaurant administration from the University of Houston, uses social media, e-mail and texting as a way of life.
He points out that people often don’t know where they’re headed for lunch until they’re leaving the building.
“Then everybody has the same question: Where do you want to go today?” Pontikes says. “We want to inspire you to decide on Scotty P’s.”
He typically gets a 12 percent to 15 percent response rate and has a total of 900 people signed up to receive texts. Most of the texters are in Frisco and Plano.
The Preston-Forest location is the chain’s newest and has the fewest texters signed up.
Pontikes says he wants to build up to about 2,000 participants: “Rather than having a list of 20,000 and getting 2 percent [redemption], let’s just have the people who really do want the deals.”
He can target one restaurant or all seven.
Rain and eating lunch out aren’t a winning combo. So one recent drizzly morning, Pontikes sent BOGOs to texters systemwide. Net sales (after the cost of the free burgers was subtracted) from the promotion was nearly $1,200 from less than $60 worth of texts.
“That’s huge for a small business like ours, especially in such a short window,” says Pontikes, whose chain grosses under $8 million in annual revenue.
He doesn’t want to turn free hamburgers into spam, so Pontikes doesn’t do text offers more than once a week. When he does, he has to be creative, since he’s only got 160 characters to work with.
“I like technology. But I don’t know how to write in HTML or any of the stuff that the really smart cyber guys do,” Pontikes says. “But I know how to text. It takes me five minutes.”
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