Beyond The Dough Presented

By

Something I think about often is my great grandkids! It’s funny since I don’t even have grandkids yet. Why do I think about that?

Our parents and grandparents really only had the opportunity to leave still pics for us to see. We have an opportunity to leave VIDEO that will live on forever!

Your grandkids, great grandkids and great GREAT grandkids can see you on VIDEO! They can see the way you smiled. The way you talked. Your mannerisms. How you carried yourself. Where you lived.

I know it feels silly at first, but you’ll get better at it. Create videos of big, important days and the “regular” days in your life.

Post the videos on social media and let them live forever. Trust me when I say that you won’t regret it AND future generations will thank you!

To learn more about Perfect Crust’s pizza liners and other products, visit perfectcrust.com or email Eric Bam at Eric@perfectcrust.com

About Eric Bam:

A Boston native now living in Tulsa, OK, Eric Bam is VP of sales and marketing for Perfect Crust, with 20 years of experience in the foodservice industry. A powerful force in the workplace, Bam uses his positive attitude and tireless energy to encourage others to work hard and succeed. He has three children and loves helping the men and women of the pizza industry grow their businesses.

• Communication tailored to each loyalty member. Personalized communication allows our messaging to cut through the clutter of inboxes and newsfeeds on social media, so that members see relevant content with offers specific to their purchasing habits. With consumers being exposed to countless brands and their messaging every day, it’s important to be strategic in what you share so that it resonates with customers versus being overwhelming. Also, loyalty callouts/ upsells to our database via web, email and social are low-cost and are highly trackable so we can easily assess what type of offers are moving the needle.

• Promoting on the best real estate. While you don’t want to be too forceful with encouraging signup, take advantage of the best real estate that you have—the food. We have loyalty language incorporated on our pizza boxes and cups to make customers aware of the program while they are waiting for/ enjoying food. We also promote the program on our tables.

The Player: Mountain Mike’s Pizza, Newport Beach, CA (250-plus locations)

Credentials: In 2021, Mountain Mike’s introduced the Mountain Rewards mobile app and loyalty program, which was designed to reward loyal guests and build more meaningful connections with fans through personalized offers suited to their individual needs. Membership quickly grew after its mid-year introduction, and the company expects to have as many as 250,000 loyalty members by this year’s end.

How it works: “Consumers expect to be rewarded for their continued patronage and loyalty,” notes Carol DeNembo, vice president of marketing for Mountain Mike’s. “Additionally, you want to stay competitive—not just as a pizzeria, but being in the restaurant business in general. Having a loyalty program helps not only build brand loyalty, but it can also help fuel more frequent visits and higher average checks. It also helps us learn more about who our guests are, their ordering preferences and purchasing behavior, which allows us to deliver a more personal experience.” Mountain Mike’s also communicates its calendar and offers well in advance to all restaurant locations so the teams are engaged and ready for those redemptions.

Keys to success: In her own words below, DeNembo outlines the following as key practices to encourage signups:

• Money talks. To help encourage guests to join our loyalty program, we award new members $5 just for downloading the app and registering. We include promotional signage in restaurants around this incentive, use team member suggestive selling scripts, highlight the loyalty program on our home page with a call to action to join, and promote on social media. We have also developed app-exclusive offers, which our guests find very appealing.

• Check out the competition. There was a full competitive analysis conducted that allowed us to understand what other brands offered to encourage downloads/subscriptions. Mountain Mike’s has a strong check average, and we wanted the incentive to be compelling relative to our brand and based on what we were seeing competitively.

• Try a sweepstakes. We leveraged a partnership with the San Francisco 49ers to reach a very strong demographic for Mountain Mike’s—sports and football fans—and introduced a Score Big Sweepstakes. If and when the 49ers scored exactly 49 points during a regular-season game, Mountain Mike’s would award three lucky Mountain Rewards app members $75,000 each.

• Serve notice. We highlight our $5 welcome offer through in-restaurant promotional signage and on our website, promote it on our social media platforms, run targeted CTV commercials, advertise through the app stores and on YouTube, and also include info through direct mail marketing. When we have app-exclusive offers, we tap into our eClub (non-loyalty members) database to help encourage them to download and join our loyalty club. Our guests and app members love exclusive in-app offers—when we’ve offered these, we always see a jump in not only membership but also engagement.

• Tie in special events. We tested our first app-exclusive offer during Cyber Monday 2021. At the time, it garnered our highest numbers of subscriptions for a single day. Then, in March, we celebrated National Pi Day with an exclusive in-app offer of a $3.14 small one-topping pizza, valid only on March 14. We saw a 140% single-day app download growth and saw total same-store sales grow by 13.52%! The signup offer is quite strong and continues to work for us a year into our launch. Additionally, from a point-of-purchase perspective, we’ve added QR codes to all guest-facing material that directs guests to the Apple or Google app stores to make downloading our app easy and convenient.