How Pizza Hut Taiwan and Appier used AI to optimise online ordering

Background and objective

The pizza delivery market in Taiwan has always been competitive, and has only become more so in
recent years with the rise of more food delivery operators and changing consumer behaviours. More than 60% of Pizza Hut Taiwan’s orders are placed online. The brand is strict about ensuring that customers can place an order through no more than five steps, and it works continually to adjust its digital marketing strategies and improve conversion rates. 

Pizza Hut Taiwan often provides instant coupons, which pop up during the order process, to encourage orders. But the brand realised that giving coupons to undifferentiated customers was leading to reduced profits.

Execution

The brand engaged Appier to find a solution that would directly target indecisive customers to
encourage them to complete transactions and improve overall online conversion rates. Appier’s solution, AiDeal, uses AI to identify hesitant shoppers and offer them targeted, limited-time deals to drive purchases.

The target audience was hesitant shoppers with the highest potential to buy and the highest transaction amount per customer: between NT500 and NT999 (about US$16.50 to US$33). The offer was a discount of NT50 if an order was completed within 30 minutes of receiving the coupon. Pizza
Hut engaged in A/B testing during the promotion period to review the volume of online transactions before and after introducing AiDeal.

Results

With the addition of AiDeal, Pizza Hut Taiwan saw the following results:

• Website conversion rate increased 15%
• Website pageviews grew by 9%
• Transaction time was shortened by 20%
• 26% of online customers added items to their shopping carts
• When compared with customers who did not receive a coupon, transactions grew by 17%.
• Shoppers who received a coupon completed more online orders than those who did not, especially within the target audience.
• Shoppers who received a coupon completed their orders faster.
• Pizza Hut Taiwan saw the most significant growth (20%) among hesitant shoppers who completed orders between 10 and 20 minutes from receiving the coupon.

Furthermore, because AiDeal uses machine learning to rapidly segment customers based on real-time intent, the system delivered a higher conversion rate for the second week of the promotion period than the first, by between 6% and 8%. The data also showed that coupons prove less effective with people who have visited the same web page more than seven times, so coupons were targeted at visitors who viewed the page fewer than three times. 

Howard Li, digital operations director, Jardine Food Services (Taiwan):

During our collaboration, AiDeal’s product features perfectly addressed Pizza Hut Taiwan’s challenges and pain points. The Appier team demonstrated strong performance from the initial stages of our work together, and helped us to continually refine and optimise the solution.