Pizza Hut Restaurants UK achieves a ~100% inbox placement rate and a 15x ROI from Validity’s Sender Certification program.
The challenge:
Winning subscriber attention in an increasingly crowded restaurant industry.
Pizza Hut Restaurants is one of the United Kingdom’s most recognizable casual dining options.
However, the market has changed significantly since the organization first set up shop in 1973.
Consumers now have virtually unlimited restaurant options, and new competitors enter the scene constantly. Furthermore, current economic conditions mean fierce competition for consumer wallet share.
In this difficult economic environment, Pizza Hut Restaurants uses the email channel to stay top of mind with consumers and (most importantly) to drive foot traffic to their restaurants.
“Our leadership absolutely recognizes the value of email for driving footfall to our restaurants,” said Holly Chilvers, Digital Marketing Manager at Pizza Hut Restaurants UK. “Email is one of several important channels we run for achieving this.”
To circumvent deliverability challenges and ensure their messages made it to subscribers’ inboxes, Chilvers and the Pizza Hut Restaurants team partner with Validity, the leading provider of email deliverability and CRM data management solutions.
“Speaking from experience, a great sender reputation is very easy to lose, and very hard to build back up”
Holly Chilvers, Digital Marketing Manager at Pizza Hut Restaurants UK
The solution:
Validity’s Sender Certification program and Everest email deliverability platform.
To protect their program from deliverability threats, the Pizza Hut Restaurants team completed Validity’s Sender Certification program—an email “insurance policy” that helps senders reduce how often their emails are filtered to spam or throttled by mailbox providers. This unique program touches 2.5 billion mailboxes and is referenced by a broad range of filtering and antispam vendors.
“Certification is really critical for helping us prevent unforeseen deliverability problems down the road,” explained Chilvers.
“Speaking from experience, a great sender reputation is very easy to lose, and very hard to build back up,” she continued. “As a member of a small team, I just don’t have time to spend on deliverability troubleshooting—I need to be proactive about avoiding issues.”
To gain an even more comprehensive look at their email performance, Pizza Hut Restaurants implemented Validity Everest.
This next-generation email deliverability platform gave the team inbox placement insights by mailbox provider, and advanced sender reputation and infrastructure monitoring to keep them on top of critical reputation signals.
Armed with data from Everest, Chilvers has been able to revamp the program by reducing spam complaints and tightening engaged targeting.
Chilvers and her team now use Everest’s Design and Content module to ensure their image-heavy email templates appear exactly as expected across a variety of different mail clients and don’t exceed recommended size limits.
Pizza Hut Restaurants also recently implemented Everest’s tracking engagement pixel, which gives them rich subscriber data to use as part of their audience segmentation strategies. Among other insights, the team discovered that 60 percent of their pixel fires came from Apple mailboxes.
She has also built a strong relationship with her Validity customer success manager. “I trust that they have my back and will provide good guidance,” said Chilvers.
“We saw major benefits recently when we ran re-engagement campaigns to a disengaged audience segment. We saw near-perfect deliverability despite this being a high-risk audience.”
Holly Chilvers, Digital Marketing Manager at Pizza Hut Restaurants UK
The results:
Sustained, top-of-the-line email performance—even as senders face mounting deliverability challenges.
After onboarding Validity’s solutions, the Pizza Hut Restaurants team quickly saw performance uplifts.
Their Certified status means they get an additional three million emails per year into subscribers’ inboxes—giving them three million extra opportunities to drive sales.
Based on an estimation of their average revenue per email, Chilvers and her team achieved a 15x ROI from their investment in Certification.
The team also maintains an impressive ~99.9 percent inbox placement rate—which is 22 percent higher than the benchmark of non-Certified senders. (Interestingly, the benchmark for non-Certified senders has decreased by 12 percent over the past three months, illustrating the mounting challenges senders today—and the protective barrier Certification provides.)
“We saw major benefits recently when we ran re-engagement campaigns to a disengaged audience segment,” said Chilvers. “We saw near-perfect deliverability despite this being a high-risk audience.”
With confidence that her email deliverability is in good standing, Chilvers can focus on developing her longer-term strategies.
“We are opportunistic as marketers, and we’ll often create campaigns at short notice in response to key events—summer heatwaves, sporting events, and more,” said Chilvers. “Certification gives us the confidence to run these kinds of campaigns.”
These performance boosts make it easy for Chilvers to justify the costs of Validity’s solutions to her company’s leadership team—even in tough economic conditions.
Pizza Hut Restaurants arrived in the United Kingdom in 1973. What began as a single location in Islington, London quickly grew to over 700 restaurants and delivery outlets across the UK. After introducing new products like Stuffed Crust and Cheesy Bites to the market, Pizza Hut Restaurants continues to lead the way with innovative products and experiences.
