Mobile marketing cuts printing cost for Pizza Hut

With over 70 restaurants in the city, half of Pizza Hut’s business in Hong Kong is dine-in. This gives the diner a great incentive, but at the same time, huge pressure to improve its customer experience.

In 2014, Pizza Hut started its mobile marketing campaign project. The primary objective was to better serve its customers. Additionally, it wanted to cut out a huge portion of its printing costs on direct marketing materials.

Pizza Hut has been a customer of Salesforce. “When we started the [mobile marketing campaign] project in 2014, however, we didn’t know that Salesforce Marketing Cloud could help us to manage marketing campaigns,” said Ravel Lai, group IT director at Jardine Restaurant Group Hong Kong and Macau, in an interview with Computerworld Hong Kong. Jardine Restaurant Group operates Pizza Hut and the KFC restaurants throughout the city.

Lai’s team studied different marketing solutions and decided to adopt Salesforce Marketing Cloud. “We considered other marketing tools such as those from Oracle and Adobe. We had even approached IBM, but they didn’t have a marketing solution,” he recalled.

Evaluating a marketing solution was different from that of an IT solution. “This was not a traditional ERP solution, but something new [to the IT team]. We invited the marketing people and bosses at Pizza Hut and KFC to view the solution demo, and then we let everybody vote,” Lai said.

“We were not trying to solve a particular technology problem, but to improve on our marketing campaign management,” said Lai.

In the past, Pizza Hut used to mail cash coupons to its customers. This involved different stages of production, which were all time-consuming, such as graphic design and printing, before it can finally distribute and mail out the coupons.

With the new solution, conducting mobile marketing campaigns has become much easier. Now, Pizza Hut would only need to involve an in-house graphic designer to design the digital marketing material, which could be ready for distribution in just two hours.

“Last year on one rainy morning, I asked my team to send a mobile message along with a coupon to our customers. After preparing the customer segmentation, we decided to send the message to 15,000 housewives and office workers at around 11:00 am to catch up with lunchtime at noon,” said Lai. “The results were good, as we generated an extra 7-10% in revenue for the day.”

In the past, Pizza Hut used to distribute paper coupons to customers. The printing and mailing costs involved had been 10 times higher than if the marketing campaigns were conducted on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

“This is a very good tool for us to do the job. Instead of sending physical leaflets, we now use the mobile marketing platform, which incurs just 10% of the original printing cost,” said Lai.

“Besides, the replacement of physical leaflets with mobile marketing messages makes Pizza Hut more environmentally friendly, too.”

According to Lai, many restaurant groups have developed their own mobile applications, but their primary function is largely limited to remote ticketing. “When everybody does the same thing, we ask ourselves, ‘How should we do it differently?'”

To distinguish its restaurant mobile app from the competition, Lai borrowed the idea of “Fast Pass” from Disneyland theme park. A Disneyland Fast Pass allows a visitor to shorten his or her waiting time by getting a pass in advance for selected attractions, and return within specific timeframes.

Using Pizza Hut HK’s mobile app, a user can obtain a queue number before they even reach the restaurant. This cut down the time and money required for us to issue queue numbers.

By doing proper customer segmentation on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pizza Hut can send messages to customers whose last visit was over one month. The typical message would read: “Dear customer, you visited us one month ago and purchased a meal in our restaurant. We are so sorry that you had to wait for 15 mins. Here is an express ticket for you so you can jump queue upon your next visit. The express ticket is good for two weeks,” Lai suggested.

Pizza Hut HK’s mobile app also provides a points rewarding system. With every HK$5 of purchase at the restaurant, a customer gets one point. “With 50 points, our customers can redeem four pieces of chicken wings,” Lai said.

Pizza Hut’s loyalty points are transferrable. “When you come to the restaurant with your friends, you and your friends can combine the points together to redeem the reward, for example, 50 points for a pizza,” said Lai.

With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pizza Hut’s mobile marketing campaign platform has enabled the restaurant group to tap on social CRM. “When I sold the idea of social CRM to the management, I emphasized not just on the benefits, but the improvement on the customer journey,” Lai said.

Regarding Pizza Hut’s implementation of mobile marketing campaign project, Lai summed up, “If I do it now, I am the pioneer. If I do it later, I would just be a follower.”

By: Carol Ko