How Papa Johns UK Serves Up Tasty Customer Experiences

Papa Johns UK drove 32% uplift in transactions and 20% increase in revenue year-over-year with a strategy powered by Braze. Coco Janze Lucas, Principal Customer Success Manager, Enterprise at Braze, sat down with Kanchan Lad, Papa Johns UK’s Senior Product Manager of Martech and Loyalty—and winner of the 2024 Marketing Leader of the Year Torchie award—to discuss the company’s successful cross-channel strategies and how they made those strategies simple for everyone to implement.

Papa Johns has over 400 stores in the UK, each of them offering pizza delivery and pickup. After the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the brand adopted a customer retention strategy to maximize loyalty from pizzaholics they’d already acquired.

But like many businesses, they were limited by a fragmented tech stack made up of unfit-for-purpose legacy systems. Those challenges included:

• Cohesive customer journeys were impossible with every channel managed separately
• Data lag prevented contextual communication and real-time conversions
• Complex multi-platform management bogged the team down
• Franchisees were unable to access or act on customer data

Knowing cross-channel customer engagement could create better experiences that boost return customers and revenue, Papa Johns UK implemented Braze to manage five marketing channels on a single platform.

Braze allowed them to migrate three existing systems (email, SMS, and push notifications) and introduce two more (Content Cards and in-app messaging), with the latter two significantly expanding the company’s ability to reach users with messages, as they don’t require opt-in to use. The result? During the 80-day migration period, Papa Johns UK saw a 30% uplift in transactions YoY and higher return customers, an encouraging sign of success to come.

Here are three ways Braze enabled Papa Johns UK to both simplify and amplify their customer engagement strategies.

3 ways Braze simplifies and amplifies engagement

1. Faster campaign deployment

Papa Johns can mobilize campaigns much faster since implementing Braze. In fact, they can now “launch marketing campaigns within minutes.”

The first and most obvious time-savings is the ability to manage every channel from a single platform. No more sinking time and energy into de-siloing data or creating and coordinating campaigns across multiple systems.

However, Braze is also packed with automation tools to make marketers’ lives simpler. Kanchan highlights how BrazeAI™ boosts team productivity and quickly overcomes blank-page-itis.

According to Kanchan, “There are lots of interesting things that we’re using with Braze. We don’t have a copywriter or creative team in-house, so we are completely relying on Braze to do that fab job. It saves time on routine copywriting, freeing up time for creative brainstorming and strategy development.”

When it comes to testing and marketing experimentation, Braze simplifies things further with AI-powered personalization and optimization. Kanchan says BrazeAI™ tools “rapidly generate variants to test.” Then you can automatically shift customers to the journey, path, or message that drives the highest engagement and conversions.

2. Localized communication made easy

A major success for the team? Enabling Papa Johns UK franchisees to manage their own marketing campaigns. Braze allows franchisees to access centrally-held point-of-sale data to power personalized communication with their local audiences—and to do this simply and easily.

In order to create an accessible user interface for their franchisees, Papa Johns UK turned to Braze Alloys solutions partner ConsultMyApp to build a custom interface on top of Braze. The Braze platform’s flexible architecture allows Papa Johns UK to have a fully-customized UI for their franchisees to access, making it possible to use Braze to send self-serve SMS campaigns to their own locations in just four steps. They can select custom attributes (such as past purchases, favorite pizza, or customer satisfaction score) to target local customers with messages designed to engage and convert.

In the launch month of this easy-to-use feature, Papa Johns UK has seen a 400% uplift in revenue from this channel alone, which proves the benefit to QSR brands of providing simple systems that let franchisees drive their business forward.

Kanchan states, “It’s incredibly powerful and works in lots of different ways. Better efficiencies, no wasted spend, and higher transactions for stores.”

3. Simpler customer journeys

One element of a successful marketing strategy that often gets overlooked is the importance of simplifying the customer’s journey to completing a purchase. Too often, businesses put barriers in the way such as muddled messaging or unclear calls to action—and that costs sales.

This is another way Braze has helped Papa Johns UK amplify its marketing impact. Better personalization based on past purchases makes offers irresistible, presenting customers with great deals on their favorite meals.
“We’re cutting down barriers to purchase for customers. Any kind of segmentation or targeting that makes our customer journey experience better… We’re on it!” says Kanchan.

For example, when the brand launched their new tandoori pizza range, they could easily access historical data on customers who had previously bought tandoori sides or toppings. This allowed them to focus their budget on those most likely to spice up their lives with the new range, and drive a tastier return on investment.

Meanwhile, easy A/B testing lets the marketing team quickly determine the most successful messaging and amplify the strategies that work for their audience while reducing those that do not.

5 Braze best practices from Papa Johns UK

1. Avoid “lifting and shifting” data

Your legacy solutions will contain a lot of data. This makes it key to prioritize quality over quantity; don’t be tempted to migrate it all. Kanchan advises investing time in data planning, such as thinking about the types of campaigns you want to run and the data you’ll need to support them, and then only migrating the data you need.

“The first 4 to 5 weeks of our implementation project were just data planning. How do we plan data in such a way that future campaigns and activations are possible?” states Kanchan.

2. Align your resources in advance

To avoid delays to your implementation, reserve resources in advance. Know who you’ll need in your team and ensure their availability. Kanchans’s team included marketing, CRM, IT, and data specialists.

3. Plan beyond implementation

Don’t just plan for implementation and initial transition, says Kanchan. Papa Johns thought about the longer term future to ensure the company retained the tech and data team support they needed to activate campaigns quickly and effectively as they embedded the system.

4. Think data and security from the start

In customer engagement, data protection and privacy are paramount. Involve your IT and security specialists from the start to create a culture of cybersecurity and respect for customer data that builds trust and confidence with your audience.

5. Choose a car that’s easy to drive

“There’s no point buying the best car if you can’t drive it,” says Kanchan, highlighting the importance of training your team in the system.

Kanchan says, “You’ll realize time-to-value faster when you know what Braze is capable of. There are amazing learning paths for different roles on Braze—marketer, developer, and product manager, so make sure you take those up from the beginning.”

Be a better marketer with Braze

According to Kanchan, Braze makes the Papa Johns UK marketing team better. They test faster, get to market quicker, and see clearer returns on investment.

The Braze platform’s workflow automation, powerful analytics, and time-saving AI functionality mean the central marketing team can launch individually personalized marketing campaigns, at scale, in minutes.

Plus, creating a customized franchisee interface has empowered local teams to create their own campaigns and drive sales. This has further freed the central team to spend more time on creative differentiation and strategic development.

Want to check out the whole conversation? Watch the Papa Johns UK webinar