Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
#388: Blaze Pizza: Personalizing the Guest Experience through Perseverance and a Passion for Customer Engagement
Elevating customer loyalty while driving personalized content, experiences, and incentives that truly resonate with the customer is critically important in today’s marketplace. Loyalty360’s brand members report the need to drive personalization at scale—necessitating a deeper understanding of disparate technologies that require seamless integration to allow for coordinated orchestration leveraging first- and zero-party data.
Often, in challenging economic environments, budgets are constrained. Understanding new technologies and their actual functionalities can be a hurdle for many brands. Securing placement in the organization’s implementation queue and earning priority designation can be an uphill battle.
Loyalty360’s research consistently indicates that brands do not feel they have the ability to understand the rapidly evolving martech environment, yet that did not stop Blaze Pizza from leveraging their legacy technologies into a series of manual processes to drive award-winning personalization.
Blaze Pizza was a finalist at Loyalty360’s 2024 Loyalty Expo in the Customer Analytics, Insights, and Metrics category, taking home the Bronze Award. In this in-depth exclusive, the brand’s Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Lindsay Smith, discusses the company’s unique approach to customer loyalty, how it’s leveraging geo-fencing and gamification, and how—even in a cautionary economic environment—Blaze Pizza is creatively driving sales.
Watch the full interview here.
Read the feature on Loyalty360 here.
Customer loyalty and the need to drive personalized content, experiences and incentives that actually resonate with the customer is more important now than ever before. We continue to hear from the members of Loyalty360 that the need to drive personalization at scale, which requires a deeper understanding of disparate technologies that need to be integrated in a manner that allows coordinated orchestration that leverages first and zero party data, is more daunting than ever before. Oftentimes, in challenging economic environments like the one we're going through now, budgets are constrained, so understanding new and disparate technologies and their actual functionality can be quite a challenge for many brands, not to mention even getting into the queue and being prioritized within that queue to be developed. Consistent in the research that we've seen within Loyalty360 is brands do not feel they have the ability to understand the rapidly evolving MarTech environment. Yet that did not stop Blaze Pizza from leveraging their legacy technologies into a series of manual processes to drive award-winning personalization.
Speaker 1:In this episode of the Leaders of Customer Loyalty, we're going to talk with Lindsay Smith she's a Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Blaze Pizza about their unique approach to customer loyalty. We're going to talk about how they love to play games with their guests, how they are leveraging geofencing and gamification, and even in a cautionary economic environment, they are getting creative to drive sales. Lindsay, thank you very much for taking the time to join us today. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great, Mark. It's so nice to see you after the conference.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. Nice seeing you as well again. First off, we like to start these on a more personal level. Get to know the individual we're speaking with as well as the brand. Can you tell us a little bit more about your current role at Blaze Pizza, how you got into customer loyalty, and then also maybe a fun fact or passion you have outside of work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Currently at Blaze Pizza, I oversee digital marketing and e-commerce. So that includes growth marketing and includes CRM and loyalty, web and app development, UX UI, digital enablement and our technology roadmap. Previous to that, I was at Qdoba and I was senior manager of e-commerce and I really worked on the intersection between loyalty and e-commerce. So I led their new web app project from the marketing side and really helped design the UX UI and create that customer journey that would ultimately increase a guest's loyalty to the brand, Also constantly optimize that experience. I also worked cross-functionally on the launch of the new Qdobo rewards and really worked on optimizing the guest experience again, the rewards that are offered to guests, the messaging about the program's benefits. So that's my experience in loyalty. Prior to that, I've been a digital marketer for over 12 years and also worked heavily in e-commerce and digital enablement.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Big fan of Qdoba, my go-to Awesome but Qdoba big fan. So good to hear that. When you look at the Blaze Rewards program, can you tell us a bit more about how it was developed, some of the benefits of the program and how you see customers interacting with the program?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Blaze has a great loyalty program that they've had for some time. It's like Qdoba kind of one of the earlier restaurant brand loyalty programs. It is a program that really gives guests access to the best of what we have. So it's the best offers, the best content. We do challenges. You get access to products and that information earlier than other guests. Also, it has a really great earn to redeem ratio so you can sign up for the program on our website, on our app, in restaurant and on social media and find out more information about those benefits. But essentially you earn on every order and you get to cash it in for free pizza and more. We have a great signup reward. It's one of the more valuable rewards among competitors where you get $5 off your first order of 15 or more. So you definitely want to take advantage of that and, yeah, we just have lots of fun with our loyalty guests. That's one of our main objectives is to be kind of a bright spot in people's day.
Speaker 1:Excellent so today customer loyalty programs. There's a great focus on analytics, insight and measurement of the program to make sure that it's driving efficacy and efficiency. During the 2024 Loyalty Expo, blaze Pizza was a bronze winner in the customer analytics, insights and metrics category. Can you tell us a little bit about your award-winning presentation and your focus on insights and analytics?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. We were thrilled to be included and present at the conference. The kind of overall story is that last August we executed a five-week campaign that we called Blaze Rewards Summer Send-Off. That was really a big celebration, summer blowout that was incentivizing our guests to engage with us and visit more often within that month than they typically would, above their average frequency.
Speaker 2:Our goal was to drive an 8% to 10% lift in incremental net sales and we ended up driving a 22% lift in incremental digital sales and a 15% lift in loyalty sales. So it was great and what we saw after that was that this really high engagement campaign, five weeks long, had a lasting effect that at the end of the year, many months later, we were up 7% in frequency for the year and our retention rate went up 20%. So that essentially created this playbook for us that we have applied since then right and done other campaigns and it really works for our loyalty guests. But the story was really about doing what you can with what you have. So I wanted to come to Loyalty360 and tell a relatable story. There's so much amazing technology at these conferences and we love talking to the vendors and many we'll probably work with in the future.
Speaker 2:But the reality that many of us face is that we have legacy tech stacks that have some modernization right, but they often have legacy platforms in the mix there which can make it difficult to segment, personalize and create attribution for your efforts. But then we also don't always have the budgets we want right, especially when you come from a franchise organization. Our job first and foremost is to drive sales for the franchisees profitably with our marketing efforts and we try to keep our marketing costs as low as possible for our franchisees so that they have more money in their pockets. So you have to get creative sometimes and essentially what happened is we'd had a really great first quarter of the year and then we start to see the performance of our CRM and loyalty marketing decline because you know, the world was changing.
Speaker 2:Segmentation is the name of the game, personalization is the name of the game, and I was kind of new in my role at that time, as was the rest of the team, and we said let's dive in, let's do this manually. And it was a little scary at first, right, because you know what work is coming of downloading guests, creating segments, uploading them again, all of the manual orchestration, all of the different versions of creative for these 13 segments we created. But we tested and we learned what spoke to these guests within these segments. We applied it to our five week campaign and we got the best results that we've ever seen from our loyalty program. So what I wanted to say is it can be worth it right. You can go through that pain of that manual work and come out ahead and you can kind of fake it till you make it in the sense that you can create an experience for a guest that looks very automated and personalized but has manual hands behind it right.
Speaker 1:No, absolutely, and, as we talked kind of leading up to this interview, understanding technology, what's working, what other brands are using but the integration is a big challenge. You know one of the things that you know we meet with our brands pretty consistently at Logitech 360, and that legacy tech, as you mentioned, is a pretty significant challenge and brands are being asked to do more with less right now. So API integration or integration in general, either is very difficult.
Speaker 1:You have to get in the queue, and that's something we heard a lot about at the Logitech getting in the queue right and being able to substantiate it, but then driving that integration can be quite onerous. Then having an API that works, a REST API that really doesn't necessarily work in the manner that it's meant to most times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and not all APIs are created equal, right? Sometimes it's one direction you don't get. The bi is just to figure out what's most important in the tech stack. Really focus there on what's going to drive the biggest bang for your buck. And sometimes you have to live with some of the legacy pieces until the time comes where you've got a better budget for it.
Speaker 1:Another topic we heard a great deal about at the 2024 Loyalty Expo was emotional loyalty. It's definitely front and center for brand. They know that if they have an emotionally loyal guest there's going to be several measurable attributes from a performance and or measurement perspective. They're going to be more likely to engage, they're going to refer. So when you look at emotional loyalty, it can be quite challenging to get customers to that state of emotional loyalty. It can be quite challenging to get you know customers to that state of emotional loyalty. You know how does Blaze Pizza spark and cultivate emotional loyalty with its customers?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. You know, one of my favorite things about Blaze is our brand promise of free to be you. We really celebrate what's unique about our guests and we invite them to celebrate that, invite them to, you know, be individuals, even within families, right, and you see that coming through in the amount of options that we have. So we're a fast, casual, build your own pizza concept, as I said earlier, and there's so much optionality in how you can build your perfect pizza for yourself. We say that everybody is a pizza artist at Blaze and so even if you're coming in with your four kids, you know each kid can get the pizza that they really want. The adults get the pizza that they really want. So it's really elevating that uniqueness of the individual and we try to reflect that within our messaging and encourage people to be proud of that, be proud of their uniqueness.
Speaker 2:We also love to have fun with our guests, and this is the very best part of my job is that we play lots of games with our guests.
Speaker 2:We do trivia, surveys, polls, and our guests love it, and we also try to give them a sense of belonging by sharing the community results from those polls, quizzes, surveys, et cetera, and so if we ask them which of these new products excites you the most, we wanna share that information with the community. It's not just for keeping with ourselves, or, mark. You may remember, in 2023, we won a Loyalty 360 Award for best creative campaign for our March Madness series. It's really popular. We pit ingredients against ingredients and matchups and then we create a championship pizza at the end with the ingredients that the guests vote as the best, and all of that is really fun and high engagement. So we want to be the fun part of your day, even if it's like 10, 15 seconds through an SMS that's a little bit funny. Or you know a silly poll that we send you that is relevant to our product or time of year culture. We just want to be a light, fun part of your day.
Speaker 1:Excellent. You talked a little bit about this earlier in the interview. Should I say personalization. Sometimes based on technology. It may be a manual process when you're doing some of that segmentation looking at personas, but personalization is very important for those who run customer loyalty programs. You don't get the right message, the right channel, the right time. How do you leverage the customer insights and data that you have to strengthen your personalization efforts within Blaze?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we ask a lot of questions to get zero party data. That really helps us to fill in the gaps with the first party data, which can feel a little bit, you know, transactional and dry at times.
Speaker 2:But when we get that zero party data even if we don't always have perfect attribution to put it all together in a 360 customer profile, it's really informative to marketers. You know, regarding tone right, and so we use that information to then, you know, better understand how our segments might react to different types of content designed to it and then see if we're correct or not. You know, a-b testing, a-b-c-d and on is the name of the game. So there's certain kind of assumptions I can make about personalization. But if our guests tell us that we're wrong, then we're wrong and we we switch gears and we go a different direction. So we really look to the guests to tell us how do they want to be contacted.
Speaker 2:Do you prefer SMS? I'm an SMS and push notification person. If you send me an email I'll probably never read it, so I would say hey. Yeah, if Blaze asked me contact me through SMS or other people are like no, SMS is far too personal. Send me an email.
Speaker 2:So even just understanding messaging channel, understanding where a guest purchases are, they are they really omni-channel, where they do online and in restaurant? If so, can you give them an incentive for perhaps going outside of what they normally do and trying something new. There are a lot of different ways down to putting you know very simple stuff, but putting the guest points balance in their email, pulling in what they last ordered through receipt tags and punch and saying, hey, you ordered this, you might also like this complimentary product. I steal a lot from my e-commerce background as well, because I think e-commerce has done an amazing job of recovering carts, for example. We have in our SMS program a cart recovery automation that goes out asking questions and then responding with your messaging, your creative, your incentives, but really it's guest led at the end of the day. You tell me how you want to be personalized. I have to ask the right questions about personalization, but once I get those questions down, what you tell me is what I need to give to you.
Speaker 1:You talked about the number of efforts you have around personalization. One of the big challenges right now is data privacy, data regulations Growing in states. We actually had a discussion at the conference kind of a breakfast, around privacy based on some research we did last year. Big challenge with brands right Keeping up with data, data privacy and even if the customers understand it potentially, how do you communicate to your customers in a way that you're a steward of the data and being transparent to foster trust with the customers?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know that's an evolving area for us. So, of course, through our loyalty program, we give guests the ability to opt out of marketing communications. We have opt out forms on our website and there are other ways for them to do that, through email, of course. However, you know it's an evolving it's an evolving area. California, you know, where we do a lot of business a third of our system is in California has some different regulations than you know majority of the rest of the country that we have to observe. So we try to just do our very best to be on the, you know, have the latest and greatest information regarding privacy in different regions and also listening to guests again about how do they want to be contacted, when, what for, and a lot of that comes through our surveys that we send out, where we collect that zero party data and then we do our very best to implement that in our communications with guests.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. When you look at the success of your program, you've done a number of great things, award winning for sure. When you look at a couple of things you may be proud of, what are two things that you're proud of when it comes to how you develop the program?
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of my things I'm most proud of is just how we make it work. You know, we don't let anything stop us. We really want to give our guests the best experience. It's so important to me and it's so important to everyone at Blaze. It's something we talk about constantly. I consider myself the customer's advocate that's my job, you know as well as being the franchisee's advocate and the corporate entity's advocate. First and foremost, I serve the guest, and so I'm really proud of the way we've come together and sort of stopped at nothing to give the guests what they want, and it's a continuous process. Is it all there today? Absolutely not. You know, we never stopped trying, but we've been able to accomplish some things by listening to our guests. That you know. I'm proud that we made it work for them.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. When you look at emerging technologies, there's tons of them, right from AI to community to CDPs, you know. Are there some technologies that you would like to use if there was kind of a perfect world and budgets weren't a concern? Are there some technologies or processes that could be relevant to you or even you may be looking to implement?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I'm very interested in gamification right now. I saw that you had Engage on yesterday and I listened to that presentation. So very interested in that, especially because our guests love games, which we have found out by kind of doing them manually.
Speaker 2:I'm also interested in technologies that take a more expansive view of loyalty. So, for example, your best guest may not be part of your loyalty program. They just might not sign up and then you don't have a way to market to them and talk to them and have that conversation between guest and brand. And so are there ways that we can view loyalty outside of the traditional earn and burn structure right? One of the ways is, for example, wi-fi technology. There are some companies that offer the ability to opt guests in to receive marketing communications right when they use the Wi-Fi at your restaurant. They then geofence that guest in and are able to tell you when they're near one of your locations or a competitor's location, which then gives you the opportunity to message them at that moment, that relevant time. And so using those type of technologies that view loyalty more expansively but then also give you better opportunities for right message, right time, I'm very interested in.
Speaker 2:This isn't necessarily like a technology that you're putting in your tech stack. But fetch rewards as well is a very interesting concept to me, and also these sort of lookalikes that are third-party marketplaces, because from the guest perspective, it makes sense to me wanting all of your loyalty to be in one place. It's like the marketplace effect right? Amazon trained us on marketplaces, got us to love them. Doordash further expanded upon that idea and I'm seeing more of that desire for a marketplace like experience. So we want to meet guests where they are. We just want them to be happy. We want them to love Blaze, and then we want them to engage with us If they want to do that through a different vertical. I'm open to that idea, so I'm exploring that right now. I don't think you're ever going to get rid of your traditional loyalty program, but I think that there are other ways to encourage loyalty with guests through other platforms and verticals.
Speaker 1:Excellent. And the last question we have somewhat self-serving what can Loyalty360 do to help you and your team with your customer loyalty efforts?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, as I was saying before we started, Mark, I love Loyalty360. I get so much from the organization. The conference was incredible. I was just nerding out the entire time because I love talking to other marketers and brands about what we do. So that was wonderful and I will continue to engage there. But I just want to let everyone know that I love to network. I love to talk to other brands. I have very friendly relationships with other brands and we get to pick each other's brains sometimes about hey, what do you think about this technology? Have you tried this? What are some of your best practices? So I would love to network with anybody who wants to reach out to me. I'm also open for opportunities in certain regards, so let me know if you want to connect and we can set something up.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thank you very much again for taking the time to speak with us. Lindsay, it was great getting to know you and getting to know more about the customer loyalty approach at Blaze Pizza. It was great listening, so thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, mark, I loved speaking with you today.
Speaker 1:Excellent, and thank you very much. Thank you, mark, I love speaking with you today. Excellent, and thank you, everyone else, for taking the time to listen today. Make sure you join us back for another edition of our leaders in custom loyalty series soon. Until then, have a wonderful day.