Blaze Pizza, with the help of Response Labs, undertook a data-fueled experiment to supercharge its loyalty program.
Objective
Blaze Pizza faced several challenges in the summer of 2023:
August was a historically slow month, providing an opportunity to capitalize on the impact of a loyalty-based campaign.
Blaze Pizza wanted to significantly increase the complexity of its email, SMS, and push campaigns to demonstrate a compelling business case for advanced marketing automation technology.
The brand tasked Response Labs with using email and push marketing exclusively to generate 8 to 10 percent of incremental sales from existing loyalty members within one month. Response Labs needed to accomplish this through email, SMS, and push. There would be no in-restaurant advertising or paid media.
Context
2023 was the first year of the "Summer Send-Off" campaign. Response Labs began its partnership with Blaze with a 75-day sprint to execute this campaign. The strategy was built from the existing customer data Blaze Pizza had in its Punchh platform, a loyalty management platform that executes email and push campaigns.
Target Audience
Response Labs targeted two audiences:
Response Labs utilized exclusive offers instead of a flashy, one-day promotion. A survey conducted by the Blaze Pizza team revealed that its loyalty members wanted a choice of offers. Having a full month to reach the goal, Response Labs revealed multiple offers that expired after a week before a new collection of offers were revealed. Combined with the desire to keep customers engaged, Response Labs wrapped the entire campaign under the banner of a "Summer Send-Off'' celebration.
For the offers, Response Labs began with segmenting the audience through Punchh Smart Segments. The thirteen segments ranged from "Super Fans" and "Fans" to "Hibernating" and "Inactive," with other variants in between. The segments were generated by an algorithm that leveraged recency, frequency, and total spend.
Once the segments were created, Response Labs performed preliminary offer testing on eight offers against a 10 percent control from each segment in June and July of 2023. The control did not receive offers. This data, combined with offer testing completed earlier in the year, provided the information needed to create an offer strategy. Each segment received a schedule of offers based on how likely that offer was to drive lift versus the control.
The loyalty platform was integral to the overall marketing strategy. It was leveraged for all email and push marketing. With this platform, Response Labs could create and identify segments, hold out control groups to measure lift, distribute offers to segments, and deploy both email and push together. Other marketing technologies lack the reward-management component and that made a campaign like this much more difficult to measure results for.
The Response Labs creative team designed all assets with support from the internal Blaze Pizza creative leads and built and scheduled most email and push deployments. Lastly, the strategy and data team at Response Labs was responsible for extracting raw receipt items and redemption data from Punchh for analysis and reporting. This analysis helped finalize, and sometimes changed, the types of offers per segment. The entire cycle of production repeated each week, and by the end of the campaign, Response Labs had a finely tuned process that could be replicated for future initiatives.
When the campaign was completed on August 31, 2023, Response Labs had surpassed its goal by generating over 15 percent in incremental net sales. The results were also 14 percent higher than the previous month, July 2023, and 12 percent higher than the previous year, August 2022. Loyalty check-ins also increased 21 percent month-over-month and 1 percent year-over-year netting out at a 22 percent incremental lift from the Summer Send-Off campaign.
Additionally, Response Labs provided a framework for how to plan and leverage an offer strategy to drive lift of loyalty members, new methods of reporting and analysis, and a case for the benefit of a marketing automation platform.
Personalized offers paired with targeted messaging through a loyalty platform are often manual and labor-intensive campaigns to deploy. Through its campaign's rigorous testing and execution approach, Response Labs proved the value of segment-based offers and the efficiency and scalability an automated platform for messaging and offer deployment could bring to the business.
