Square Pie Guys on Pace for $1 Million/Year in New App Sales

Challenge

Square Pie Guys wanted to drive more direct sales after seeing their third-party marketplace business skyrocket. While they were growing third-party marketplace sales significantly, they recognized that they were spending a lot on commissions, offers, and sponsored listings while not retaining any customer data.

They wanted to provide a solution for customers that would give them the convenience that third-party marketplaces offered (saved payments, native mobile app, real time driver tracking) but without the hefty commissions and loss of customer data.

Additionally, they were spending a significant amount of money sending text messages through Attentive, but they weren't sure if those texts were leading to real revenue since there was no way to properly measure attribution.

Solution

Square Pie Guys decided to launch a custom branded mobile app with Open.

With Open's mobile app solution, Square Pie Guys got a native branded mobile app deployed to both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Their mobile app offers push notifications, loyalty and rewards, promotions, real-time driver tracking, Apple/Google Pay and more.

When thinking about loyalty, Square Pie Guys wanted to do something innovative and unique. They leveraged Open Loyalty to launch a digital punch card, allowing customers to buy 10 pizzas to get the next one free. Loyalty can be earned and redeemed easily directly in the mobile app.

As Square Pie Guys was thinking about delivery, they wanted to ensure their customers got fast deliveries, could track orders in real time, and got updates on order progress. They leveraged Open Delivery to connect with DoorDash Drive and Uber Direct, guaranteeing they always find the best driver for each order. Open's Delivery Promise also ensures that their customers are refunded for any poor delivery experiences (like missing items and late dropoffs).

For customer support, Square Pie Guys leverages Open's Support AI Employee to handle all real-time order issue escalations, allowing their in-restaurant staff members to focus on executing orders and serving dine in customers.

Square Pie Guys also wanted to better track their marketing initiatives and cut down on the time it took to set up and measure these campaigns. They leveraged Open's Marketing AI Employee to automate their campaigns, come up with creative ideas to drive more sales, and to get the most from their customer data on autopilot.

When it came to SMS, Square Pie Guys was leveraging Attentive, which was a great solution but came with a steep cost and with no end-to-end attribution. This meant spending $5-10K during some months without fully understanding the payback. With Open SMS, Square Pie Guys was able to get a text message marketing solution at a fraction of the cost with full attribution so they know how many sales each text sent generates.

Results

$1M in new app sales

Square Pie Guys is on pace to do $1M annually in completely new app sales. They've had extremely strong adoption from the start – receiving thousands of app downloads in their first day with 98% of customers opting in to push notifications. Push notification marketing has given Square Pie Guys a more cost effective and direct way to market to their customers.

30% of sales AI-generated

Square Pie Guys leverages Open for its marketing employee, and currently 30% of their sales are generated by this AI employee who works 24/7/365 and continues to get smarter every month. Their AI-generated sales continue to grow as the employee gets smarter (they nearly doubled sales in the last month alone).

$190,000 in cost savings

By shifting volume direct, Square Pie Guys was able to save significantly on commissions in addition to vendor costs they're saving for text marketing and other packages that Open offers. Additionally, they're saving on labor by leveraging Open's AI employees for marketing and support. This has all lead to more than $190,000 saved annually.

40+ hours saved per month

Leverage Open's marketing and customer support AI employees allows Square Pie Guys employees to work more efficiently on the most important tasks while offloading some tedious tasks to Open (like filling out promotion requirements, segmenting customers, monitoring text message marketing performance, handling customer support cases, and more).

10x return on text message marketing

Now that Square Pie Guys is able to fully measure text message marketing and leverage Open's marketing AI to optimize campaigns, they're seeing a 10x return on their text marketing spend. In other words, for every $1 they allocate to text marketing, they're generating $10 in new sales, making this one of the most effective marketing solutions and a higher return than their third-party marketplace promotions.

98% push notification opt-in rate

After launching their native mobile app, 98% of customers have opted in to push notifications, allowing Square Pie Guys to effectively communicate with their customers in a highly effective and low cost way.

The Open app has completely transformed the way we interact with our customers. It allows us to market effectively and affordably while giving our customers a true alternative to ordering from third-party marketplaces. We're able to now compete with these much larger players and own our customer data. And our customers are happy with the ease of use and accessibility of the app and we love offering it to them! 
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- Marc Schechter