Summer is a schedule, not a season
School is out, the pools are open and the ball fields are full every evening. Shops that plan around the local calendar instead of the weather have a much better summer.
Ask a pizza owner how summer goes and you will often hear the same thing. It depends. Hot weeks are slow, rainy weeks are busy, holidays are strange. As if the whole season is a coin toss.
Some of it is. Most of it is not. Summer follows a schedule set by schools, sports leagues, pools and holidays, and almost all of that schedule is published months in advance.
Get the local calendar
Before summer starts, sit down and write out the dates that matter around each store. The last day of school. Summer camps. Little league and softball schedules. Swim meets. Town fireworks. County fairs. The week most local families go away. The week college students come home.
Each of these changes who is ordering and when. A week with three home games at the field down the road is not the same as a week with none.
Follow the teams
Youth sports are one of the most reliable sources of large orders in summer. A team that just finished a game wants to eat, the coach wants it to be easy, and the parents want to be home by eight.
Talk to the leagues. Offer a team deal that can be ordered ahead and picked up or delivered to the field. Put your name on a banner or the back of a schedule if it is cheap. Make it easy for a coach to place one order for fifteen kids.
Families eat differently in summer
With kids home, lunch becomes a meal you can sell. Evenings get later. Some families travel and disappear for two weeks. Others are home and bored and looking for something easy.
Adjust the messages. A lunch deal sent to families with children in your file. A later push on long, light evenings. Fewer messages to the customers who have gone quiet because they are at the beach, not because they have left.
Plan the weather, too
Weather still matters, and you can plan for it. Have a short rainy day message ready to go, written in advance, for the afternoon when a storm rolls in. Heat waves tend to push people indoors and toward delivery. A message ready for both means you are not writing copy at four in the afternoon on the day.
When summer ends, look back at the dates you wrote down and see which ones moved the needle. Next year's calendar will be better for it.
