Papa Johns UK empowers franchisees with data-driven marketing that increases revenue

Papa Johns UK has established itself as one of the world's leading pizza delivery brands, operating over 400 franchised locations across the United Kingdom. As part of Papa Johns International, the UK division is committed to delivering "Better Ingredients, Better Pizza" while empowering local franchisees to build strong customer relationships within their communities.

The brand's success depends heavily on effective customer engagement strategies that drive loyalty and repeat business. However, the challenge of enabling individual franchisees—who are primarily business operators rather than marketing professionals—to leverage customer data has been a barrier to maximizing local marketing potential.

Supercharging franchisee marketing capabilities with a custom-built local marketing Hub

Papa Johns UK recognized that while the brand collected rich customer data over the course of many years—including transactions, preferences, and behaviors—valuable customer information remained largely inaccessible to the people who needed it most: Local franchisee owners and their teams. This was because the technology in place consisted of three separate, siloed CRM systems that were difficult to navigate and lacked a unified customer view.

Kanchan Lad, Senior Product Manager - MarTech & Loyalty at Papa Johns UK, who would later receive the prestigious Towering Achievement Award from the Papa Johns International Technology team and the 2024 Torchie Award for Marketing Leader of the Year from Braze, recognized this challenge as a ripe business opportunity. Instead of simply migrating technology, she and her team reimagined the way that franchisees might access and utilize customer data.

The “local marketing hub” project was conceptualized and executed both quickly and efficiently, with limited budget and resources. The migration from three legacy CRM systems to Braze was completed in just five months, followed by the development and launch of the custom interface.

The new platform was built around these three pillars:

• Ease of use: Non-marketers should be able to harness the power of data effectively. The local marketing hub operates through four simple steps, featuring pre-built templates, scheduling options, advanced audience targeting capabilities, and detailed reporting.
• Customer experience: The platform improves the customer’s experience with the brand by addressing top customer complaints from 2023. This includes “Quiet Hours” (to prevent late-night or early-morning messaging) with Do Not Disturb auto-enabled, easier opt-out features, faster sync of user communication preferences, and more relevant and personalized messaging.
• Data security and governance: No customer data is stored on the platform; instead, data is stored in Snowflake and streams into Braze for usage.. Advanced analytics provide robust insights without compromising data security. Additionally, the platform offers safeguards and centralized controls over SMS message consumption to prevent overuse by individual franchises.

How franchisees put the local marketing hub to use

Implementing Braze and providing training on the new local marketing hub—which included webinars, a user guide, and best practices—has led to strong franchisee adoption. More than 120 users were onboarded across the 400+ stores, and the platform facilitated 6,000+ campaigns and delivered 13 million SMS messages in 2024, allowing Papa Johns to be more strategic in their messaging and reduce their reliance on paid media. Here’s what franchisees can do now:

1. Simple data access

Franchisees can easily access valuable customer insights through an intuitive interface that displays customer data like favorite pizzas, last purchased products, customer satisfaction scores, order frequency, delivery preferences, purchase dates, postcodes, transaction values, and more. The platform refreshes customer data on a regular basis, supporting more current and relevant targeting.

2. Pre-built templates and campaign creation

The platform features ready-to-use message templates, some designed for key trending moments including sports events (like Euro football), new menu launches, limited-time offers, and weather-based messaging. This enables franchisees to quickly launch professional campaigns without requiring marketing expertise or creative development time.

3. Advanced audience targeting

Through an easy-to-use interface, franchisees can create sophisticated audience segments based on customer behavior, preferences, and demographics. The platform automatically handles complex queries—allowing marketers to more easily reach specific audiences—while presenting options in plain language that non-marketers can understand and utilize effectively.

4. Automated compliance and safeguards around the customer experience

The platform automatically enables Quiet hours and built-in subscription management and compliance tooling to help each franchise maintain SMS compliance.

Comprehensive reporting drives continuous optimization

The local marketing hub provides franchisees with detailed campaign analytics including messages sent, confirmed deliveries, conversion rates, and total revenue generated. This reporting gives clear visibility into return on marketing spend, enabling franchisees to continuously test, learn, and optimize their local marketing efforts.

The platform also includes safeguards and centralized controls to prevent overuse of SMS volumes by franchisees and ensure budget management. Importantly, no customer data is stored on the local marketing hub itself, which helps Papa Johns UK maintain strict data security and governance standards.

"Braze has been a fantastic tool for us to be able to communicate our best deals to our customers. The interface is very easy to use and campaigns can be set up within minutes. It also allows us to segment different customers so we can target them according to their favourite products and order frequency. And we can easily analyse each campaign to see how it performed."

Pav Bal

Marketing Director, BB Group (Papa Johns UK Franchisee), Papa Johns UK

Results: The local marketing hub exceeded expectations across conversions, purchases, revenue, and more

The platform's success has established new benchmarks for franchise marketing effectiveness, supporting a better experience for everyone from the franchises to the customers. Customers now receive more relevant and well-timed campaigns, and Papa Johns UK has collectively realized these gains in revenue and conversion:

• a 180% year-over-year uplift in SMS revenue
• a 18% year-over-year increase in conversion rate
• a 170% year-over-year increase in purchases driven by SMS

While their previous SMS strategy, executed across three different CRM systems, resulted in irrelevant and disjointed campaigns that led to customer frustration, the new centralized approach to customer data supported more relevant messaging. That, in turn, reduced the number of related customer complaints by a massive 72%. In the end, the local marketing hub also became a self-funded platform, effectively reducing overall marketing costs.

Key takeaways

1. Design for the user (and their needs): By creating a user-friendly interface that made previously unwieldy customer data accessible to non-marketers, Papa Johns UK tapped into massive marketing potential across hundreds of franchise locations.
2. Incorporate customer feedback: Including features like quiet hours, easy opt-outs, and relevance-driven targeting and personalization drove business results and customer satisfaction.
3. Consolidate technology: Migrating from three disparate CRM systems to Braze platform created operational efficiencies and enabled new capabilities. Consolidation provided the foundation for innovation, while reducing complexity for end users.

FEATURED TOPICS