Toppers featured in QSR Magazine

Toppers Pizza was recently featured in an article titled "The Art of the LTO" in QSR Magazine. The article features Toppers' focus on social media as a driving force in promoting limited-time offers. Scott Iversen shares the secrets of timing and volume that help with their success in these types of promotions. Click here to read the full article, or read the Toppers excerpt below.

The Art of the LTO
Limited-time offers are a fundamental part of the quick-serve industry. Here’s how to do them right.

Toppers Pizza, with 41 locations in the Midwest and South, is another operation that focuses heavily on social media, primarily Facebook, to promote its LTOs. With more than 50,000 fans following it, the company will regularly put out aggressively priced, short-term deals, such as a large one-topping pizza for $5, good for three days only.

“You’ve got to be ‘in the know’ to get these kinds of deals,” says Scott Iversen, vice president of marketing for Toppers. “It’s a matter of building up exclusivity. But it’s crazy when it happens; we do them generally at the end of a quarter, and our Facebook page goes wild, the stores are filled, people are telling their friends to get down here.”

With all those people buying $5 pizzas, it would be understandable to think the company wouldn’t make a profit on that particular LTO. But Iversen says it all works out in the end if the offer is good enough. “We end up doing double the amount of transaction counts during an LTO compared to a normal week, and the volume we do makes up for the lower margin,” he says. “And of course you’ve got ancillary sales in drinks and sides.”

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