Family Express Boosts Orders With National Pizza Day Campaign

VALPARAISO, Ind. — Family Express Corp. is seeing a "whole" lot of success from its recent National Pizza Day campaign, even past the national holiday.

Heading into National Pizza Day on Feb. 9, the Valparaiso-based convenience store chain ran a hyper-personalized digital marketing campaign powered by Paytronix Loyalty to introduce guests to Family Express' pizza program.

Family Express, operator of 81 c-stores, offers fresh, made-to-order food such as pizza, boneless wings and breakfast items from its Cravin's restaurants, which is available at 30 locations. Using Paytronix Loyalty, the Family Express marketing team segmented its audiences into who visited one of the locations with a Cravin's menu, or a nearby store, within the last 60 days to offer a special deal on National Pizza Day: buy two extra-large pizzas for $12.

On the holiday, the c-store chain broadcasted the offer as an app notification and opted to not run any in-store signage about the offer as a test of how well the digital marketing program could drive on its own, according to Chuck Tanowtiz, who directs marketing communications for Paytronix.

A few hundred open orders flowed through within the first 90 minutes of a 2 p.m. email campaign, resulting in:

• Nearly 10 times the number of typical daily orders — an all-time high;
• Add-on purchases raising the average ticket price to $18; and
• Mobile ordering accounted for the most traffic, with 70 percent of online orders coming in through the channel.

"It was the best kind of mayhem, and our people did an amazing job in the kitchens keeping up with the demand," said Thierry Lyles, head of digital marketing for Family Express. 

The success of Family Express' National Pizza Day deal extends past the holiday debut. Today, the c-store retailer is benefiting from a 10 percent sustained lift from the previous month's digital sales, according to Paytronix.

Newton, Mass.-based Paytronix, previously Paytronix Systems, is a leader in digital guest engagement, combining loyalty, customer relationship management and messaging, online ordering and artificial intelligence. With more than 1,800 branded clients, the Paytronix platform has handled more than 40 billion transactions.

Family Express operates convenience stores throughout northwest and central Indiana. The chain was named the 2021 Foodservice Innovator to Watch by Convenience Store News.