Hungry for Solutions
Just Eat is the UK’s leading food delivery platform, connecting customers with thousands of local restaurants and takeaways across the country. Following their acquisition of Hungry House in 2018, they faced the strategic challenge of migrating high-value customers from the Hungry House platform to Just Eat whilst maintaining engagement and order frequency. Despite pushing 25% and 15% discounts via email and social media channels, they were seeing response rates of only 0.5% to 2%, far below what was needed to successfully transition customers and maintain their ordering habits during this critical migration period when customers could easily switch to competitors.
Menu Planning
Just Eat partnered with Paperplanes to launch multiple programmatic direct mail campaigns starting with the May 2018 Hungry House migration, sending 76,000 personalised letters with £10 discount vouchers to high-value customers. This was followed by an August 2018 Manchester trade-driver campaign offering free delivery to 50,000 households during a key sales period, and a January 2019 discount level testing campaign across 50,000 Manchester households targeting different demographic segments (families on a budget, affluent families, young professionals). The campaigns featured personalised creative with unique voucher codes, integrated tracking technology, and real-time analytics through the Paperplanes dashboard to enable continuous optimisation.
Five-Star Service
The campaigns delivered exceptional results that far exceeded expectations, with the Hungry House migration achieving a phenomenal 31% redemption rate for recent customers and 12% for the London cohort—dramatically outperforming the 0.5-2% email benchmarks and even exceeding Just Eat’s optimistic 2% expectations for highly active customers. The Manchester trade-driver generated a 15.2% uplift in orders in central Manchester during a typically challenging trading period, whilst the January 2019 testing campaign revealed that families on a budget converted at 10.6% compared to 8.3% for affluent demographics. Most significantly, the March 2019 birthday campaign scaled to 600,000 mailings following these successes, demonstrating how Paperplanes’ programmatic approach with rigorous data cleansing, multiple creative formats, real-time insight tracking, and continuous optimisation transformed direct mail into an effective performance marketing channel for Just Eat.
