Pizza Express boosts UAE Wi-Fi offering

Purple and CDW (international IT solutions provider) have announced a partnership with Pizza Express UAE in a bid to step up the restaurant chain’s WiFi offering.

Purple is a cloud-based marketing and analytics Wi-Fi software company. It provides public Wi-Fi and takes the lead in real-time analytics and marketing for venues and businesses that want to engage with visitors and understand the use of physical spaces. The company serves industries such as stadiums, healthcare, retail, smart cities, hospitality and shopping malls.

Purple currently has 20 million users across 73 countries and works with a variety of brands and venues. The Wi-Fi company currently employs over 90 full time staff and currently has offices in the UK, US, Chile, Madrid, Singapore and Melbourne with more offices planned.

Established in 1965 in London, UK, Pizza Express is one of the world’s leading casual dining and consumer brands. It has more than 450 managed restaurants in the UK and over 65 franchised restaurants internationally, in 9 different countries.

Pizza Express UAE chose Purple and CDW to offer fast, free and secure guest Wi-Fi to its customers while gathering valuable analytics. CDW has delivered a fully integrated solution which comprises of hardware, software and services in partnership with Cisco Meraki, Purple and Microsoft Office 365. The new Wi-Fi solution is currently live at every Pizza Express restaurant in the United Arab Emirates.  

Purple was selected to replace Pizza Express UAE’s existing guest Wi-Fi, which had delivered patchy coverage resulting in customer complaints. Customer experience is very important to the business and therefore the key objective was to provide accessible Wi-Fi that was quick and easy.

The team at Pizza Express UAE also realised that they were missing a valuable opportunity to collect data and gain real-time insights into customer behaviour with an analytics platform. Before using Purple, the marketing team didn’t have much visibility over how often people visited, what their favourite choices were from the menu, when they were due special loyalty offers and how they interact socially with the Pizza Express brand.

The restaurant now has the ability to export data into a separate database via the API, and then use this data to keep CRM and email marketing records up to date.

Before, the database was described as stale and the printed vouchers were not driving sales. The existing database that Pizza Express had contained roughly 30,000 email addresses and by using Purple, more than 10,000 active customers were collected within just a few weeks of installation.

“Our partnership with Pizza Express UAE shows the benefits of having a fast, free and secure guest Wi-Fi offering, combined with easy to use detailed customer analytics. Purple has changed customer Wi-Fi from a customer pain point to a valuable asset, introducing a measurable sales channel for the business as a whole in the process,” said Gavin Wheeldon, CEO at Purple.

Gavin Wheeldon - CEO, Purple

The first Pizza Express UAE offer published using the Purple platform was a free pizza voucher with a very short end date. This resulted in more than 100 redemptions which drove sales of other items (such as drinks, starters and desserts).

Pizza Express UAE has now replicated this campaign with other offers, including two for one on main courses and two for one on Iftar meals. The objective of these deals is to increase customer spend. So far, results have been very strong with over 300 additional covers generated from the email campaign. Pizza Express UAE revealed that just one batch of outbound emails can increase a single day’s sales by up to 4000 Dirham.

“Compared to the other platforms we looked at, Purple is more robust, the reports are impressive and the portal is far more visually appealing and easy to understand. The automated emails are good for saving time, allowing us to focus on planning new marketing campaigns,” commented Nick Freeman, Head of Marketing at Pizza Express UAE.

The choice to log in through social media platforms has proved very popular with the restaurants customers. Almost 2000 people logged into the Wi-Fi through Facebook alone in the first few weeks.