The theme for this promotion is fairly easy… it is the holiday season.

The more difficult question is…

  1. Do we go the Santa Clause Christmas direction or,
  2. Do we choose a non-denominational Holiday theme to appeal to a broader audience?

In our case, we want the promotion to run from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day… that’s more the Holiday Season than specifically Christmas. So the timing for a Holiday/Winter theme will work out perfectly.

I’ve got a great idea. We’ll sample our onion rings with nearly every order – give people a chance to try them.

We’ll serve Five Golden Rings – like they sing in the lyrics of the “Twelve Days of Christmas.” When someone orders french fries or receives an order that comes with french fries, we’ll also give them a mini-order of our onion rings. Five golden rings.

This is seasonally relevant, a twist on the “rings” being sung about. It gives customers a surprise and delight – something for free they didn’t order. AND, most importantly a sampling opportunity.

We realize it sounds illogical to give onion rings away when our goal is to increase average ticket by getting people to buy them.

Yes, we’ll spend a little bit of money in product costs, but we should see that return on investment when customers make their NEXT visit and get onion rings instead of fries.

Not all promotions have instant, immediate results. Actually, very few do. You’ve got to give the promotion time to do its work.

We know our average customer visits our location around every 5 weeks. So we should see some results within the next 6 weeks if not sooner.