Methodworx Enables Pizza Express to Lead the way in Event-Driven Marketing

2nd November 2021

Methodworx Enables Pizza Express to Lead the way in Event-Driven Marketing

Methodworx’s Event-Stream solution enables Pizza Express to understand its customers and deliver highly-targeted marketing campaigns.

  • 20+ complex and highly targeted campaigns are delivered every month across 470 restaurants and multiple digital channels.
  • 100+ campaigns are delivered automatically using real-time data from multiple digital channels.
  • Thousands of interactions with 8 million customers are captured every hour providing the business intelligence to drive strategic marketing decisions.

In this case study we’re going to look at how Event-Stream solution took Pizza Express’s marketing capability to a whole new level:

Life Before Event-Stream – Perpetual Missed Opportunity

Matt Broom, Head of Customer Technology at Pizza Express, summarises the frustrations that led to Event-Stream’s deployment:

“We had many datasets across the business which led to customer information existing in many different silos – it was hard to analyse and use this customer data effectively. Every time we wanted to evaluate customer behaviour or build a marketing campaign everything would have to be done manually – with so many customers this was a daily nightmare.”

This significantly hindered Pizza Express’s marketing capability, Matt explains:

 “Turning ideas into reality was an incredibly slow process. For example, making critical changes to promotional offers or upgrading user experience by introducing a single sign-on across all channels was unrealistic. Our hands were tied and we were incredibly frustrated at not being able to effectively use all the meaningful data we collected.” 

Capturing Data Was Inefficient

  • Because data was being stored in silos there were multiple records for every customer which made coherent analysis of customer behaviour virtually impossible.
  • The digital team were constantly cleaning and pulling together data to build out manual automations – a slow and inefficient process.
  • As the technology infrastructure didn’t support what marketing wanted to achieve this led to friction between the marketing and digital teams.

Meaningful Analysis of Data was Unrealistic 

  • Pizza Express works with mammoth datasets – this data is capable of providing incredible insights into how customers behave, but only if it can be filtered quickly and easily.
  • With customer touchpoints spread widely across the business (from Wi-Fi logons to the booking system and many more), the process of identifying trends and typical behaviours across the whole business was inefficient.
  • Even one small insight multiplied across 8 million customers and 470 restaurants can add millions in revenue to the bottom line. There was a palpable sense of missed opportunity.

Executing Campaigns was Manual and Slow

  • Even though Pizza Express was unable to decipher the best insights, when it did try and execute campaigns the process was painfully slow.
  • Manually collating data every single time and then building campaigns was time consuming and inefficient.
  • Because so much of the campaign execution was manual it meant the team had less time to track the success of every campaign, losing out on the opportunity to iterate and improve.

Matt summed up the problems facing Pizza Express: “We weren’t able to move at pace or turn ideas into reality. We had an incredible amount of rich information coming into the business but we weren’t able to take advantage of it.

How Event-Stream Changed Everything

Pizza Express was impressed with Methodworx’s proposal to address the problem and with the team’s obvious technical capability. Being such a large business Pizza Express had a specific set of problems and needed a solution that was robust and tailored to its needs.

None of the out-of-the box SaaS solutions in the marketplace were suitable, all requiring too much compromise for a business of Pizza Express’s size and complexity.

Event-Stream by Methodworx was technically robust but crucially had the flexibility Pizza Express needed to deliver its digital vision.

Matt says of his decision to start working with Methodworx: “We were all very relieved that a company existed that was willing to work with us to provide the specific solution – we didn’t want to compromise, and working with Methodworx gave us everything we needed in terms of functionality and service delivery.”

Event –Stream Captures Everything

Every time a customer touches the business via a digital channel that information is captured in one place, ready to be analysed and deployed in campaigns.

Matt says: “Before Event-Steam we couldn’t merge different datasets, our data was spread out and very hard to actually use. Now our data is in one place and we have a single view of the customer.

A single customer view allows Pizza Express to look at how each customer interacts with the business across different digital channels: mobile, Wi-Fi, bookings, website and more. Multiplied 8 million times this gives Pizza Express valuable insight on how its customers behave.

Event-Stream Enables Sophisticated Analysis of Customer Behaviour

With detailed customer insights now at its fingertips Pizza Express can evaluate customer behaviour through a new lens. It can finally understand how its huge customer base behaves and start to build targeted campaigns that speak directly to different subsets of customers.

Matt explains: “Customers can be grouped into very specific segments based on how they’ve interacted with us through different channels – this allows our marketing team to really zero in on delivering targeted customer campaigns.”

Event-Stream Enables Quick Campaign Execution

 Event-Stream not only allows seamless data analysis, it also powers campaign execution using its API. This enables Pizza Express to not only conceive highly-specific campaigns but also put them into action.

Matt explains: “The Event-Stream middleware allows us to take the rich data we’ve captured and then push campaigns out through various digital channels. This process is now 50 times quicker than the old manual process.”

An Example – Birthday Campaigns

After Event-Stream’s deployment, Pizza Express was able to greatly improve the campaign that gifted Pizza Express vouchers to customers on their birthday. This is how Event-Stream helped make this campaign 200% more effective:

  • A single customer view allows the business to assign one birth date to every customer record.
  • Detailed market segmentation allows for tailored birthday gifts to be sent to different customer types.
  • Automation can easily be set-up to push out birthday gifts consistently, removing the need for constant manual intervention and data cleansing.
  • Because customer behaviour can be tracked easily with Event-Stream, A/B testing on the effectiveness of different campaigns is simple.

The Results 

  • 1 customer profile created across all digital marketing channels.
  • 8 million customer interactions captured allowing business and marketing teams to develop data-driven strategic plans.
  • 50x increase in the number of marketing campaigns can be deployed in any given time period.
  • 100s of development team hours saved every month because there is no need to spend time setting up laborious manual campaigns.
  • 1000s of brand new customer segments can now be developed using the Event-Stream datasets.

Matt Broom has personally felt the benefits of deploying Event-Stream and working with Methodworx. He says:

We can now confidently commit to a digital roadmap – knowing that we have Event-Stream powering us. Before Event-Stream we had no agility and spent our resources on manually creating patches and campaigns that always had problems. Now we can plan for the future and have really productive discussions with our partners in marketing – all of a sudden everything seems possible!”

He also had this to say about Methodworx’s approach:

The team at Methodworx are hands down the best development partner any of us have every worked with in our careers. The work they have done rolling out Event-Stream has given us an incredible competitive advantage.

 

 

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