PROMOTIONAL RESEARCH
Think Domino’s is just pizza? Think again. Nick Bamber, the digital marketing expert whose career spans roles at Asda and Missguided, is evolving the brand to become an ecommerce power player. Having already made inroads, Bamber gives a sneak peek into what’s working ahead of his special guest appearance at Retail Week’s breakfast briefing on January 24
Domino’s is on a transformative journey from being a pizza business to an ecommerce business. This is important because almost 90% of all our sales are now made online and the market is shifting.
We have seen the epic rise of the aggregators over the past few years – such as Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats – which aren’t typical quick service restaurant (QSR) businesses but are sophisticated data-driven ecommerce businesses.
As the landscape shifts so do customer expectations and, therefore, at Domino’s we know we must be ruthlessly focused on exceeding customer expectations.
Specifically, we have a vision to become the Netflix of food. This means we must be smart with our data and provide a highly relevant customer journey that makes it simpler for our customers to love us, shop with us and, importantly, come back to us time and time again.
At the heart of this vision are our key objectives:
- Optimise marketing efficiency to enable customers to find the Domino’s brand.
- Drive growth through a highly relevant and simple food-ordering experience, highlighting our incredible value for money.
- Ensure our customers love the Domino’s brand.
- Build a world-class team.
Rethinking loyalty
There is more to driving customer loyalty than simply rewards and incentives. Getting the basics right from a customer proposition is crucial.
Digitally, we are focusing on making it simpler, faster and more enjoyable to shop with us, through investment in personalisation.
On top of this, we are making substantial investments into our digital capability with a new front end and back end, which will mean a whole new promotion and deals engine will be integrated in 2023.
A critical element to driving repeat business is leveraging our app – customers who use our app are significantly more valuable to us and order more frequently. Therefore, a constant drive to get people into our app is a key enabler for loyalty.
Betting big on personalisation
We have just started our adventure into personalisation recently, following some technical enhancements. We have several live tests across both our app and web designed to help customers.
We have launched ‘Previously purchased’ recommendation algorithms for customers who we know already, plus a similar initiative for recommending deals.
For new or unidentifiable customers, we have launched Netflix-style algorithms such as ‘Most popular pizzas’ to help customers find and buy items.
Meanwhile, across our CRM team, we have been using our vast customer data and data science to test extensively initiatives such as targeting customers on their preferred order day (with some strong success so far), personalised segmentation based on dietary preference (such as vegan/veggie customers) and propensity to purchase (such as new product launches).
As we move into 2023, these tests will continue and we will further progress our personalisation strategy.
Golden quarter performance
We grew market share in Q3 and have made a strong start to our important final quarter of the year [Domino’s like-for-like sales were up 10.4% in the first six weeks of this quarter].
Our performance has been driven largely by strong national value campaigns, operational service excellence, growth in collections and the initial incremental benefit of being on the Just Eat platform.
The World Cup [has also impacted positively on performance]. Big tournaments are always busy for us, and this being the first-ever winter World Cup, we knew to expect higher demand than usual as people gathered together at home to watch the games.
During the England versus France quarter-finals on a Saturday evening, for instance, we sold an incredible 39 pizzas per second at our peak hour (before kick-off between 6pm and 7pm).
