What you need to know:

• Domino's Pizza Enterprises is navigating three inter-related challenges: managing huge scale, improving personalisation and increasing engagement.
• Taming data sits at the heart its plans to simplify marketing operations and it's already delivering wins in unexpected areas says the company's APAC head of CRM Adrian Westwood.
• He claims multimedia messaging service (MMS) – which has fallen out of favour with many marketers – is delivering 5X better outcomes than traditional SMS in specific use cases, and out performing EDMs by even more. 
• But execution remains the key: "You still need the platform and the deliverability to be able to get those messages out at scale,"
• Oh and a hot insider tip – BBQ Meat Lovers is the most popular pizza choice in Australia, but add some chilli and go for the thin crust, says Westwood.

Global pizza market leader Domino's ASX listed master franchisor, Domino's Pizza Enterprises, has a $4.8bn market capital and trades at multiples that would make a dotcom entrepreneur blush (currently 70 times earnings). The firm has spent years getting its data house in order and now that is paying dividends – sometimes in unexpected ways.

According to Adrian Westwood Head of CRM, APAC at Domino's Pizza Enterprises Limited – the ASX-listed Australian operation and the global firm's largest franchisee – the company has identified MMS, which has fallen out of favour for many marketers in recent years, is massively out-performing traditional SMS and EDMs in some specific campaign areas like reactivation.

“We’ve acquired a lot of businesses and they have come with a lot of baggage. And that baggage involves people trying to solve the same thing in different ways," Westwood yesterday told delegates at the Twilio Signal conference in Singapore.

“One of the big challenges that we've had is how do we bring simplicity into our marketing operations and can we still keep the quality of our communications at the highest level, by leveraging all of our data for personalisation.”

Domino's Pizza Enterprises Limited, along with the global Domino's business, needs to manage at a massive scale while at the same time driving personalisation and increasing engagement all at the same time.

The secret to pulling off that trifecta is the quality of its data said Westwood – and the firm has invested massively in its analytics and AI team over the last eight years.

“Data is the key to everything. When you're building your dataset, you need to have an exclusive capture point for your data. And with that, we can build out data sets to learn more about our customers and get a lot more precision with our personalisations.”

However, it also still comes down to execution.

“You still need the platform and the deliverability to be able to get those messages out at scale. And because we operate in the quick service retail market, where timing is everything, we need to hit that one-time window, we need to hit that dinner window – and we only have a few hours to do that.”

In a hat tip to Twilio, he noted, “We really appreciate partners who give us the confidence to be able to do that. In Australia just a couple of months ago we sent 26 million SMS messages. And we can do that because we know that we're getting the ROI and the deliverability.”

Slice and dice

Domino's can also confidently experiment with that data to study different channels and different ways of communicating – and that experimentation has yielded some arguably counterintuitive responses.

“Does anyone remember MMS? Is it dead? No, I don’t think it is, and I say that because we have really started to get into the relationship between EDMs, SMS, and MMS," said Westwood.

“What we have found is that MMS is able to deliver 5X the type of engagement that we get from normal SMS and even more so compared to an EDM.”

He conceded that initially created ROI challenges, because MMS is a more expensive medium than text-only messaging. But over time, Domino's is banking some big wins.

For instance, when it comes to customer reactivations for high-value groups of customers, Domino's found that MMS drives a lot more value, not just on the offer of a specific campaign, but also over a 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day timeframe.

The lesson, per Westwood, is that there are a lot of different channels that you can look at, and when you look at them you need to compare them equally. “Think about what the customer wants to receive. And what are they going to be engaging, most likely mostly likely engage with.”

Hot tip

Finally, asked to tell delegates his favourite pizza, Westwood didn't hesitate – like the rest of Australia he is partial to a BBQ Meat Lovers Pizza but he offers an insiders tip, go for the thin crust (watch those carbs) and add chilli flakes and mushrooms. Data you can take to the dinner table...

*The author travelled to Signal23 in Singapore as a guest of Twilio.