To Get Into Mobile Marketing, You Just Have To Do It: Lessons From Domino’s

Enterprise companies can have the reputation of being slow to adapt, behind the times, or generally too cautious of new technologies or trends for their own good. Yet Domino’s® is a big brand—over 12,000 locations in 80 international markets and 55 years of business—that prides itself on being adaptable and very digitally driven.

Remember the 2008 announcement of the Domino’s tracker? That was a Domino’s first.

Did you order pizza last year by tweeting an emoji? Domino’s again.

And recently, they made headlines for integrating ordering capabilities with the Amazon Echo.

The Domino’s app, the single major purpose of which is allowing customers to place pizza orders on a mobile device, has been around since mid 2011 for iOS and early 2012 for Android. And in 2015, Domino’s started sending mobile push notifications using lifecycle engagement platform Appboy (that’s us!).

Step into their Ann Arbor, Michigan headquarters and you can see for yourself that the company cultivates an open-office, startup culture. Large, open meeting and working spaces lend themselves to collaboration. You’ll see the first-ever Domino’s delivery car and other memorabilia when entering, and as you go farther you’ll see large displays mapping out US orders as they come in—in real time. But of course, office layout is only one slice of the pie.

Staying flexible, fast, and smart is a challenge for any company—doing it with many cooks in the kitchen is an art. But it’s an essential art for this customer-focused company.

We sat down with Melissa Cummings, Digital Marketing Specialist, to talk about how this food service brand has approached their mobile marketing strategy, how they track their successes, and what’s next on their roadmap.

Why is Domino’s so invested in mobile?

“At Domino’s stores in the US, half of the sales are now digital,” says Melissa Cummings. “Within those digital sales, like many other companies, mobile is the fastest growing channel for Domino’s.”

The Domino’s mobile app, then, is a huge opportunity.

“The mobile customer is becoming the Domino’s customer,” Cummings says. “Today’s app users are going to be the customers of the future. They’re Domino’s most cutting edge, engaged users.”

That means these users get lots of attention from teams throughout the company, and marketing ideas can come from any of these teams. “This is the one area that I think sets us the most apart,” Cummings says. Ideas for campaigns “come from any part of the organization,” Cummings explains.

Domino’s hasn’t stopped the mobile marketing adoption at the app, either. Cummings says it’s been a priority making sure that Domino’s ordering is available with “the Ford SYNC, your Pebble Watch, Android wear, your Apple Watch, Samsung TV… all of those channels that you can access Domino’s on.” The Amazon Echo is in that mix now, too.

Why this multichannel approach? “We don’t want to tell customers where they have to order Domino’s or how they have to order it. We want Domino’s to fit into their lives, not the reverse.”

Domino’s is always “trying to stay ahead of the latest and greatest technology,” says Cummings, and that means making mobile marketing a priority.