Online Marketing Strategies from MarketerInsight

Founded 24 years ago by John Schnatter, Papa John’s with 3,270 restaurants world-wide in 28 countries surpassed $1 billion in online sales through its online ordering site, papajohns.com.  Nigel Travis shared his story with us at the ExactTarget Connections conference.

They are currently addressing these business challenges:

• Commodity inflation
• Labor costs
• Rising fuel costs
• Credit crunch
• Consumer woes
• Wall street bailout

Here’s what they’re doing to address using technology and software:

• Driving top-line revenue
• Subsidize franchisees
• In store productivity improvements
• Unit growth to achieve more scale
• Food service productivity opportunities
• Corporate cost containment

Role of Online:

• Attracts different and new segments
• Drives great convenience to customers - 55% of customers store their credit card online
• Higher ticket average & frequency - industry average frequency is 4 times per year, Nigel wouldn’t share their current frequency
• Self selected price increase
• Stickability

Here’s what they’ve found:

• iPhone is by far and away the most used mobile device used to order pizza.
• Online is more than 20% of total sales and they did $400M in online sales in ‘07.
• Online orders have increased 50% each year since 2001 and have processed more than 60K orders in 1 day!
• 50% of customers have ordered online at least once.

Online tools used today include:

• Local Search and Banner Advertising
• Email marketing

Key to their success: Helping the “uninitiated”

• Simplicity and reduce the steps
• Pressure testing -
• Check the obvious - miles from home, instead of miles from store
• Email frequency is key - their rule is no more than 2 emails a week.

The future of eCommerce for Papa John’s include:

• Interactive TV
• Gaming consoles
• Andy device with connectivity, because if you can communicate with it you’ll be able to order with it

Nigel offered a free Papa John’s offer:  ”Just text pizza to 47272 and you’ll get a promo code from Papa John’s” for a free 1 topping medium pizza.  ENJOY!  If you take just text the promo, please comment below.