In the current economic climate, retailers in particular, are looking to their online presence as a way of growing their business. Having an online presence that performs and meets the expectations of your customers is now more important than ever. It is not anymore about how big you are as an organization, or even how you offer your goods and services, but the way you deliver them that counts. Further still, every second of downtime of your online presence could cost you revenue and could mean that your customers find an alternative supplier.
One such high street brand that seems to placing heavy importance on investing in their IT infrastructure for future online growth even despite these tough times is that of Domino's Pizza Group. In a recent article, Domino’s Pizza IT director Jane Kimberlin was quoted as saying "The web site is, without a doubt, the most important thing we do – if something is taking up such a significant part of your delivered sales, you cannot afford for it to be down or not running properly". Online purchases at Domino's Pizza now account for around a quarter of all home delivery sales.
Kimberlin goes on to say "Much of the online success of Domino’s is down to ease of use, reliability and a robust infrastructure. The company has a dedicated infrastructure team that monitors the site, especially during critical ordering times on Friday and Saturday night".
Part of this robust infrastructure is in the form of load balancing and global load balancing solutions. The load balancing ensures hardware resilience at their primary location while the global load balancing was introduced to enable site resilience. Domino's Pizza Group undertakes huge online marketing campaigns designed to increase the levels of traffic to their online offering to help drive revenue and growth, and these solutions help to deal with the increased levels.
Having the right IT infrastructure in place has enabled Domino’s to improve the end user experience for their customers, along with providing great value for money, as stated by Phil Thomson, IT infrastructure Manager, "The success of our franchises hinge on offering customers the very best level of service whether that be in-store, over the telephone or online. Many of our customers prefer ordering online and will spend on average 20 per cent more than they would in-store, so having the technology in place to deliver a consistent level of service is hugely important.”
The right IT infrastructure in place does seem to play a pivotal role in the success of any businesses online offering and growth. Whether you are running an e-retail offering like Domino's, offering corporate online services or an internal intranet, there is always a need to squeeze more performance out of your limited resources and provide your users/customers with the service that they deserve and will help your online presence become a trusted resource.
Is the success of Domino's online presence down to the right IT infrastructure alone, or is there a combination of factors at play, including compelling marketing campaigns? One of the factors at play seems to be that departments within Domino’s including marketing are having coordinated discussions about their future plans and how the IT infrastructure has a part to play in it. Involving the IT infrastructure team and vice versa seems to be a critical process in the business understanding what impact their actions could have on the Domino’s online offering. This could have been part of the overall business discussion. Unfortunately in some organizations, internal department discussion for the launch and growth of online presences is not always case. In a recent survey undertaken by us here at Zeus, almost two thirds of UK marketing executives polled did not regularly meet with their IT departments to discuss online promotions, 46% polled did not know if they had a system in place to cope with or manage peaks in traffic to their online offering once a campaign had been sent live. These results are further compounded by the fact that 86% of marketers polled felt that if they were problems with their online offering that this fell squarely within the remit of the IT department.
Well, I am pleased to say here at Zeus, that we in the marketing team constantly liaise with the IT department to ensure that launching of campaigns does not have an adverse impact the company online presence. In-fact, I regularly log-in to the ZXTM’s that sit in-front of www.zeus.com and use some of the scripting capabilities when we look to launch marketing campaigns that are designed in part to drive web traffic to certain landing pages. As a channel focused business we often launch campaigns in conjunction with our channel partners who may wish to direct recipients through to a landing page on our website presence that is specific to them and allows for tracking. I could of course go into our CMS system and create a new page in the usual manner. If I was from a technical background I could go into the webserver and undertake the work there. Both of these would take time to achieve. Instead, with the power of ZXTM I am able to use some of the scripting capabilities of to achieve my goal within a matter of minutes - job done, campaign launched, happy channel partner.
So, while it does seem important that the IT infrastructure chosen is given considerable thought when looking to grow a businesses online presence, internal consultation should also be undertaken to consider the requirements of all other business functions. This could become especially critical when other key business functions may call upon your company's IT infrastructure at anytime to drive business activity and revenues. Can you risk your online presence being down at any time just because internal consultation was not had? Of course, this is a two-way process and one would hope that prior to any launch of online activity, business stakeholders would also give IT infrastructure teams a heads up. After all, downtime of an online presence may not only impact your revenues but also the company's reputation to deliver online and to do business.
For those of you who are interested, you can expect to see more uses of ZXTM by the marketing team to follow….stay tuned.
Mark Gyles
