@NAKEDPizza: Twitter becoming mission critical to the business

Founded in late 2006 as one small store in New Orleans in an area that flooded during hurricane Katrina, NAKEDPizza (originally named World's Healthiest Pizza) was launched as an ambitious business model that seeks to change the nutritional profile of fast food in America.

By way of example, NAKEDPizza is demonstrating that pizza does not have to be part of the problem in our national epidemic of obesity and chronic disease, but in fact can be part of the solution

How and when did you get started?

Jeff Leach and Randy Crochet, co-founders of Naked Pizza, started using Twitter in March 2009. Mark Cuban, an early investor in the company, advised Jeff to sign up for a Twitter account to help create a community around healthy eating, save on marketing costs, and ultimately drive sales. There is a heavy focus on direct mail within the pizza industry, which proves to be particularly costly for owners. Opt-in newsletters cost $2000 to $3000 per year for even small database of names. Open rates are dropping to single digits and for small business owners, this can be prohibitively expensive.

“Direct mail is sent to a single address but there are multiple people in those houses. We want to maximize and extend our marketing reach and Twitter helps us do this in leaps and bounds.” Jeff now takes that newsletter content and feeds it to Twitter.

Today, Jeff claims that Twitter is mission critical to his business, so much so that he has created a kiosk within his store, where customers can sign up for a Twitter account if they hadn’t already been users. In addition, right next to Naked’s online ordering page, there will be the Naked Pizza Twitter stream in case customers have questions about the company’s product offering.

How have you used Twitter in interesting ways?

A custom Twitter button in the point of sale system.

Naked Pizza relies heavily on tracking promotions that are fed into the company’s Twitter stream. In a test run April 23, an exclusive-to-Twitter promotion brought in 15% of the day’s business.

Jeff continued to experiment, and iterate and recently (May 29th) set an in-store sales record, the bulk of which came directly from Twitter. A whopping 68.60% of total dollar sales came from customers who said "I'm calling from Twitter".

A custom Twitter button in the point of sale system.