The Circus Group’s Pazza Pasta Leverages WhatsApp to Drive Revenue Growth

Since its inception, Circus Group has been on a mission to shake up food delivery by blending technology with the foods customers love. Based in Germany, they are all about using advanced AI solutions, cutting-edge robotics, and proprietary software solutions to disrupt the trillion-dollar food industry and serve consumers what they want: Fresh, affordable meals.

Recognizing the value of connecting with customers on a more personal level, they embarked on a journey to refine their communication to make every interaction meaningful and valuable. One of the first measures was launching a new brand, Pazza Pasta. Based on market insights about customer’s demands for quality, variety, and affordability, Pazza Pasta is all about fostering closer relationships with customers.

A strategic shift towards deeper personalization and increased efficiency

With Braze, Pazza Pasta is supporting customers throughout their user lifecycle, from app install, to initial order, to maintaining regular orders and establishing a habit, to re-engaging them or predicting potential churn. As a small team of just two people, their primary objective is to automate as much communication as possible using a variety of technical solutions and integrations. They are also always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to to build a deeper connection with their customers. Pazza Pasta turned to Braze for our versatile and advanced feature set (including Braze Catalogs for dynamic content personalization), our partner ecosystem that includes Snowflake, and—crucially—our seamless, direct WhatsApp integration.

Identifying WhatsApp as a vital channel, the Pazza Pasta team was one of the first in their market to make use of this powerful mobile channel. The Pazza Pasta team hypothesized that WhatsApp would drive higher engagement and conversion rates compared to traditional channels like email. WhatApp is a sensitive channel (especially in Germany, where there are many regulations), so Pazza Pasta considers customers who have opted-in as some of their most engaged customers. They wanted to test if the more personal and direct channel could better address those customers’ needs.

To test this theory, they created a campaign delivering weekly menus to customers via WhatsApp rather than their normal channels. Key components of their strategy included:

• Increasing customer retention through more relevant messaging.
• Maximizing revenue by leveraging WhatsApp for higher conversion rates.
• Improving operational efficiency by using automation and dynamic content tools to personalize content

Step-by-Step: How Circus SE created personalized 1:1 campaigns at massive scale

First, Circus was able to get started quickly with the Braze platform's intuitive set up—overall, it took 2 days to get up and running. They can also easily manage the channel with no intermediaries, which saves their small team time and resources so they can focus on strategy.

Next, Pazza Pasta set out to make every interaction a valuable opportunity to build loyalty and drive more orders by making messages feel more personal and ensuring that they arrive just when needed. Here’s a breakdown of how they rolled out this large-scale, personalized campaign.

Every week, Pazza Pasta sends out a campaign featuring six new menu choices for customers as well as a €3 voucher code. The entire campaign is set up in Braze Canvas, where they leverage Braze Catalogs, a tool that allows them to harness their brand's own non-user catalog of data related to the goods, products, or services their company offers to personalize their customer experiences and campaigns. Items are saved via a Google Sheet in Snowflake, which automatically updates their Braze Catalog via Braze Cloud Data Ingestion (CDI). CDI allows brands to sync data from their cloud to Braze according to a schedule they choose.

From there, product names and descriptions are pulled into messages from their Braze Catalog, and they use the Open AI API to generate copy in their tone and voice. Using Liquid, they further customize the message with the current calendar week, and use Connected Content to get the week and dish IDs from the Google Sheet. A Liquid loop and function goes through the response from the Google Sheets API call and compares it to the calendar week. If it matches, it takes the IDs of the dishes they want to promote. Lastly, using the Catalog, they are able to display the images, titles, and labels (e.g. vegetarian) in the message.

Using the tools, they are able to completely automate the campaign, and can launch weekly just by updated the Google Sheet.

Originally just for email, Pazza Pasta decided to test the already successful campaign on WhatsApp. Using what they’d already built, they created a WhatsApp flow in Canvas, and targeted customers who were opted-in to WhatsApp and removed them from the email communication. Customers also received the same €3 voucher code. Pazza Pasta ensured the messages were both compliant and impactful, in order to meet the German audience’s expectations around the channel. Because Braze is cross-channel, they were able to continue engaging their broader audiences who weren’t subscribed to WhatsApp with email, ensuring that every customer they wanted to reach received a communication on the best channel.

Since they are running the campaign each Monday, they only had to set it up once. It’s now generated automatically, saving them 12 hours of work every week. Regular tweaks and updates kept the content fresh and aligned with Circus Groups’s overall mission to surprise and delight customers.

Due to the success of the weekly menu campaign, the Pazza Pasta team has launched several more WhatsApp campaigns. They use the channel for product updates and high-value promotions, such as their 50% off Black Friday promotion. With WhatsApp’s rich capabilities, they’re able to create attention-grabbing content with high-resolution images and dynamic calls-to-action.

Furthermore, they were early adopters of new Sage AI by Braze™ features, and have helped Beta test AI Item Recommendations and Personalized Paths. AI Item Recommendations uses AI to recommend items personalized to the customers who are most likely to convert, while Personalized Paths helps scale personalization by matching each customer with the message, copy, creative, channel and offer they are most likely to engage with, at any step in a journey. Both help automate 1:1 customized experiences that build better brand loyalty and drive stronger business results. With AI Item Recommendations, they sent push notifications and WhatsApp messages with recommended dishes from their Catalog, in order to help prevent churn and reactivate users. For Personalized Paths, they tested two approaches: Using the purchase event as a training source and using the custom event “Product Added” as a training source.

Furthermore, they had been exploring building an in-house recommendation solution, but with the launch of AI Item Recommendations, they were able to quickly unlock desire capabilities without expending time and money resources.

Pazza Pasta’s Results: Higher purchase rates and reduced time spent building campaigns

By utilizing advanced AI tools and a strategic approach to WhatsApp, Pazza Pasta was able to drive large increases in downstream metrics with WhatsApp. For their weekly menu campaign, they drive impressive purchase rates amongst their WhatsApp subscribed audience, with an average 6X higher on WhatsApp, compared to sending the same campaign on email. For their new product announcements, they see products added 4.5X more often than on email. Plus, their WhatsApp Black Friday campaign saw 50% of customers opening the app after seeing the message. Additionally, Pazza Pasta seized opportunities to create and automate campaigns, saving countless hours in manual labor.

Due to the promising results, Pazza Pasta is expanding the use of WhatsApp to its B2B segments.

Key Takeaways

1. The right channel for the right customer. By expanding to WhatsApp, Pazza Pasta were able to deliver more value experiences to their highly engaged WhatsApp audience, which ultimately helps drive more revenue.

2. Work smarter with AI. With Sage AI by Braze™, Pazza Pasta created scalable campaigns that help them save time every week while achieving business goals. Even with a small team of two people, they can use Braze to create big automations and campaigns based on data-driven decisions. This has not only allowed them to save time, but helped them scale more personalized experiences for customers.

FEATURED TOPICS