How the Dodo Pizza Franchise Tailors and Scales its Personalized Marketing Strategy

Dodo Pizza — In the past 8 years, the number of Dodo Pizza restaurant locations has grown to 560. Direct communications generate 19% of revenue from all deliveries and takeouts.

Keep reading to learn how Dodo Pizza scaled their direct marketing and created cascading SMS and Viber campaigns for segmented audiences, as well as a commentary on franchise marketing aspects from Vladislav Buriy, the Digital Marketing Manager for Dodo Pizza.

A year ago, franchisees had to set up campaigns on lots of different platforms. They would send messages to clients without any kind of segmentation and any kind of reports or analytics tools. The quantity and quality of all brand newsletters were impossible to evaluate. Meanwhile, some customers would occasionally receive several text messages: different franchisees could send messages to the same customer without even knowing it.

The Dodo marketing department didn’t like this approach, which is why they decided to experiment and include a marketing service in franchisee packages. Now, 91 franchisees work via a unified platform, and each franchisee has its own profile. Each franchisee can send multichannel campaigns to their customers, with personalized content based on behaviour and unified reporting.

Division of access guarantees that franchisees will send newsletters only to customers of their pizzeria. Personalization allows to select customers who have not made a purchase in a while in order to reactivate them. Unified reporting guarantees transparency of results and improvements based on accumulated experience.

When a franchisee launches a new pizzeria he receives support from the managing company, which includes access to information systems and marketing technologies in use.

Dodo direct marketing can essentially be split into two parts:

• The managing company part: marketing strategy selection, brand-wide omnichannel newsletters, and franchisee communication training about direct communications for working within the bounds of their own pizzerias.
• The franchisee part, location-based direct marketing: newsletters and special offers for individual pizzerias.

Managing company role in Dodo franchisee direct communications

The Dodo Pizza managing company trains franchisees on marketing principles, translates the commonly accepted concept to all pizzerias, shares experience, but at the same time does not limit partners in individual idea generation for communicating with clients. To lay out such a work process, Dodo Pizza provides franchisees with a marketing platform for creating and managing communications with clients. Franchisees gain access to technological solutions without taking on expenses for integrating IT.

Maestra is used to solve these tasks. There are over one-hundred franchisees working with the platform. New partners gain standard access for omnichannel direct communications with clients of their region. Franchisees can create personalized newsletters, upload clients and view reports.

How communications for franchisees was launched in Maestra

Franchisees have limited access to the system: they can only send newsletters and download reports. To control this we have set up a system-level security monitor. All franchisee accounts are selected and transferred to a separate security group. The franchisee security group has a limited selection of permissions. They can be turned on or off at any time. Limited permissions protect franchisees from problems in selecting a segment during newsletter preparation, and prevent them from accidentally breaking something in Maestra 🙂

Example of a permission selection for a Dodo franchisee in Maestra — access can be set up easily depending on the franchisee’s tasks

A franchisee can send newsletters only to his pizzerias audience. It’s impossible to make a mistake — the system will not allow sending a newsletter to visitors of another franchisees pizzeria. The campaigns are presented on the screenshot below.

Campaigns, a folder that stores newsletters of each franchisee. Franchisees can see only their own folder actually, but the main Dodo marketing division sees everything as is presented on the screenshot.

How campaigns look for various Dodo franchisees. Campaigns are folders that store newsletters of each franchisee. Franchisees can only see their own folder, but the main Dodo marketing division sees everything

How Dodo franchisees use direct communications

Franchisees use the Maestra marketing platform for sending marketing campaigns through SMS and Viber. For example, they send coupons that are available only in franchisee restaurants. Below are examples of franchisee newsletters sent through Viber and SMS from Tchaikovsky and Astrahan locations.

Viber-newsletter with a promotion for Tchaikovskiy

SMS-newsletter for visitors of the Astrakhan pizzeria

Dodo Pizza franchise newsletter results

Results of local franchisee newsletters are measured through Maestra reports, while best practices are recorded in a general table so that they may be used later on. Conversions to orders from newsletters were calculated based on the quantity of used promo codes.

Conclusion

With the help of Maestra, Dodo Pizza provides partners with an infrastructure for direct omnichannel communications with the help of a unified marketing platform as part of their franchise package.

Franchise marketers have access only to clients and marketing campaigns that relate to their zones of responsibility, create personalized newsletters based on data and plan cross channel newsletters through Viber and SMS.

Clients receive personalized newsletters based on purchase histories through convenient communication channels.