Pizza Hut Adds Key New Channels and Drives a 21% Increase in Revenue With Machine Learning

Braze is a customer engagement platform that provides cross-channel communication tools including email, SMS, push notifications, in-app messaging, and Liquid personalization. Its Canvas customer journey builder and flexible data integration capabilities enable brands to build and optimize highly targeted, personalized campaigns at scale.

Pizza Hut is a global quick-service restaurant (QSR) chain with over 18,000 restaurants worldwide, owned by Yum! Brands. Known for delivering pizza to customers everywhere from the White House to the International Space Station, Pizza Hut is committed to bringing the joy of pizza to everything they do.

Before switching to Braze in Spring 2019, Pizza Hut had a decent email and SMS program but knew they could do better. Their existing platform lacked native mobile channels and a single view of cross-channel customer communications. Getting relevant data into the system was clunky and slow, and the platform was too inflexible to support hyper-personalization or expansion into additional mobile channels.

Braze provided Pizza Hut with a flexible customer engagement platform featuring the Canvas customer journey builder, Liquid personalization, and native support for email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging. The platform's ease of data loading and dynamic logic capabilities enabled Pizza Hut to build and launch highly targeted emails with hundreds of variants.

Within months of migrating to Braze, Pizza Hut launched a proprietary multi-armed bandit (MAB) machine learning multivariate test — something that would not have been possible on their prior platform. The MAB algorithms reviewed results every couple of days and fed back updated execution information so email strategies could be optimized in real time. The team also launched push notifications and in-app messaging, rounding out their portfolio of personalized, strategic channels.

Pizza Hut's proprietary MAB executions outperformed all control variants, driving a 30% lift in transactions, a 21% lift in revenue, and a 10% lift in profit compared to the standard email program. The results were achieved within months of migrating to Braze, driving ROI almost immediately.