Papa John's Call Centre Audio Case Study

Client:

 

Papa John's Pizza

 

Attributes:

 

• Increase Sales
• Increase Order Value
• Individual Caller Treatment

 

Services:

 

• Call Centre Audio
• Audio Marketing

 

Background:

 

To many, Pizza marketing may bring up images of weekly door drops of gaudy leaflets promoting a haphazard combination of enticing offers - but behind the scenes highly sophisticated data mining techniques are used by more advanced franchisors to ensure the optimum response rates.

 

Revenue drivers are simple - new customer recruitment, more regular ordering from existing customer, and high value average sale.

 

Premier worked with Papa John's, one of the top 10 global pizza franchises, to evaluate whether targeting telephone audio advertisements to callers would increase average telephone order values.  The project was independently audited by RM Connect, the UK direct marketing arm of the J Walter Thomson group, and was found to produce astonishing effects.

 

 

The Project:

 

The Project was split into two phases.

 

During phase 1 callers were played on of four promotions, selected randomly. Callers heard a 3 second advertisement prior to connection to Papa John's, for example "Buy two pizzas and get the cheaper one half price."

 

During the second phase, to evaluate the effect of targeting advertisements at specific caller groups, RM Connect segmented customers into four groups to whom each of the promotions was most likely to appeal, based on previous buying habits collected by the Papa John's CRM system. Customers were identified by their telephone number.

 

During both phases, a fifth group as played no advertisement to act as a benchmark or 'control sample.' The resulting purchases for aach call were recorded so that the effect on purchasing habits of hearing both an untargeted and targeted promotion could be evaluated.

 

The Results:

During phase 1, callers who heard a promotion were 15.8% more likely to take up the promotion than a caller in the control group. This in itself was a powerful endorsement of the ability of audio marketing to affect purchasing habits.

 

Furthermore, the phase 2 data showed that callers were 44.6% more likely to take up a promotion than a caller in the control group. This revealed that targeting of promotions was approximately three times more effective than untargeted promotions.

 

So what was the effect on average order value?  During phase 2 the playing of promotions resulted in a 5% increase in average order value compared to the control group.  Ed Beard, project manager for RM Connect said, "This has been a ground-breaking project, and is the first I have come across to quantify the effect of telephone audio marketing. We have measured statistically significant increased in the promotions. I have no doubt that targeted audio marketing will be the way ahead for organisations that take orders over the phone."

 

Anthony Buxton, MD of Premier Business Audio provides some insight into the result "In this project audio marketing was a 'point of sale' marketing medium - influencing the customer's behaviour just before they place an order. It was the telephone equivalent of the special offer bin at the supermarket checkout. It both proves that audio marketing has a significant impact on purchasing decisions, and furthermore that targeted adverts were 300% more effective than untargeted adverts."

 

Kim Kenley, IT Director of Papa John's UK was excited to be involved with such an innovative project. "The technical solution we implemented to profile and segment callers, play them a targeted promotion, and then track the resulting purchase was very sophisticated. However, the results proved that the effort was worthwhile.

 

For any business a 5% increase in average order value would be significant. In the same was the e-mail and web marketing campaigns are becoming increasingly targeted, Premier have demonstrated that the same concept is just as powerful in audio marketing, and quantified the benefit within our industry."