Pizza Hut preps personalisation drive to grow online sales

Pizza Hut is bringing its analytics and mobile platforms closer together to hone its CRM strategy and drive online sales through personalised offers.

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Pizza delivery business ramps up efforts to create a single customer view of shoppers.

The company, which was spun off from its restaurant arm last year, is planning to beef up its CRM offering at the start of 2014 with updates to its analytics packages and ecommerce site. It has been working towards the aim since its mobile site, developed in partnership with SDL, launched last year and plans to use the union to create a single customer view of online shoppers.

The company will use the insights to deliver targeted promotions alongside bespoke branded content to both desktops and smartphones in the hope of driving repeat purchases. Where rivals such as Domino’s are focused on app development to grow sales, Pizza Hut claims its focus on delivering a site that is “tailored to the tastes of individual users” is a more cost-effective approach.

Data captured from the platform will also be used to inform the brand’s wider marketing mix.

Steve Ash, director of information technology at Pizza Hut, says the move is about “tuning” the customer journey to ward off the digital advances of smaller take-away services in the online space. More than 50 per cent of orders are now online, and of that 30 per cent is from a mobile device, he adds.

Ash says: “As a company we’re regularly changing our menu and developing a suite of apps would not have been effective as a result. By focusing on building a more tailored online experience spanning different devices we’re able to use a more feasible model to expand the brand.

“Better use of marketing is one of the key things we’re trying to achieve through our upcoming plans. The tools we’re putting in place will allow us to be far more relevant to people as oppose to just sending out blanket promotions that have no real business value.”

To compliment the strategy, the brand is using a mobile platform that allows it to automatically repurpose content to any mobile device.  

The personalisation push echoes a similar move by the brand’s restaurant counterpart earlier this year. The restaurant chain is working on a series of Facebook and mobile initiatives that it says will put “localised content” at the heart of its brand building activity on social networks, in-store and online.

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